lewis, randolph. prankster ethics

7/27/2019 Lewis, Randolph. Prankster Ethics

1/19

76 Randolph Lewis

Prankster Ethics: Borat and LevinasRandolph LewisUniversity of Texas at Austin

This article explores the ethical implications of one of the most celebrated andcontroversial films of th e pa st decade, Borai: Cultural Learnings of America forMake Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) . The p roduct of a comic pro-vocateur named Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat was hailed as brilliant satire design edto expose the grotesque nature of American racism and antisemit isman in-terpretation that the filmmaker took pains to encourage. However, I ai-gue thatBorat is a deeply problematic form of cultural intervention, one based on deceit,cruelty, and indiscriminate mockery. By re-framing the film in an intellectualcontex t suggested by the philoso phe r Em m anu el Le vinas, one of the key figuresin modern ethics, I highlight the ways in which Borat is not the progressive textthat i ts maker intended.

Almost a century aftet Cha tlie Chaplin headed w est to H ollywood, film audi-ences once again witnessed a sttangely m ustachioed English actor w ho hid hissocial conscience undet a clown's baggy pants. As he wandeted the streets ofAmetica in a foul-smelling suit, offeting love and ptovocation, slapstick anddismay, this Iattet-day tta m p was sold to audiences as something o the t thana standatd issue comedian. Rathet than Will Fetrell in a basketball uniformor stat-crossed lovers chasing a sunken tteasure, the film was ftamed as ananti-racist project that happened to involve naked male wresding matches,Pamela Anderson, and a bag of feces. The smiling rube with the fixation onthe Baywatch babe was, in fact, the leadet of a bold expetiment in situationalethics. O f coutse, I am desctibing the bigoted character that Sacha B aton Co-hen performs in his quasi-docum entaty sensation, Borat: Cultural Learnings of


2/19

Prankster Ethics: Sror and Levinas 77of the most revealing questionsregarding the ethics of the projecthavehardly been raised.

For those unfamiliar with Baron Cohen's controversial schtick, the charac-ter of Borat is an ironic embodiment of Othernesshe is alterity played foryuks as well as sociological insight. In War without Mercy, his seminal studyof W orld W ar II propaganda, historian John Dower describes how Am ericannewspapers painted the Japanese as animalistic, violent, autho ritarian , sexuallyperverse, and religiously irrational. In the implausible guise of a Kazahkstanidocumentary producer in afilthy, ll-fitting suit, Borat updates these tenden-cies with a smiling face. In the film as well as in earlier television appearances,we learn that Borat practices bestiality and incest, threatens violence ("I willcrush you!"); embraces auth oritaria n politics ("Vote for him or you be sorry!");..and worships an en tity know n only as "the Hawk." The last bit seems designedto keep h im from being read as explicitly anti-M uslim , a logical conclusion giv-en the predominantly Sunni population of Kazahkstan. In any event. BaronCohen gives us Otherization as social satirethe harmless ineptitude of "theforeigner" makes him unthreatening enough that his targets let down theirguard and reveal their true selves.

These ugly moments of revelation are what drive Baron Cohen: he is afilmm aker who relies upon comic entrapm ent of a high order. H e is no mereprankster making obscene calls for our titillation. Instead, he presents himselfas a moralist, a liberal idealist whose film exists so he can bring his fictionalcreation, the backwards Borat, onto the streets of America and expose thehatefiil views that are espoused, or at least tolerated, in the land of freedomfi-ies and liberty ale. Darting into the Ne w York subway with a clucking chick-en in one hand and a microphone in the other, Borat confronts the unsus-pecting objects of his satire wherever he can find them: roly-poly frat boys,mystified driving instruc tors, frightened hotel clerks, and leering gun-nu ts, allof whom are invited to share his absurd prejudices about women, Jews, andhomosexuals. In a sense. Baron Cohen has reconfigured Candid Camera asa moral l i tmus tes t : Do you agree with B orat o r confront his noxious views? Doyou smile nervously when he asks for the best SUV for "killing Gypsies" or do youdenounce him? Those interviewees w ho seem to endorse his poin t of view, likethose who remain silent for whatever reason, are lumped into the seeminglycoterminous categories of bigot and dupe. Not surprisingly, almost no one in


3/19

78 Randolph Lewisfilmmakets. I tealize that such comic dissection is spoilsport to the core. Itis a gtuesome task akin to peeling back the skin of a famous face to see whatconstitutes beautyot, to pay homage to one of Botat's notorious assaults onthe Southe rn gentry, it is like defecating into a plastic bag at an elegant dinnetpatty. At best, it's an awful necessity; at worst, the tu inatio n of a good time. Inmy defense, let me poin t ou t th at I did not launch the fitst ethical sttike . I amonly responding to Baton Cohen's high ptofile claims abou t the ethical otiginsof his wotk.""Boraf essentially wotks as a tool," Baron Cohen told Rolling Stonein a cover story abo ut his film. "By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets peoplelower theit guard and expose theit own ptejudice, whethet it's anti-Semitismor an acceptance of anti-Semitism." Because Baton Cohen claims that hisptoject is designed as social ctiticism rooted in his undetstanding of Jewishhistoty and theology, and because he even ftames Borat as a response to theHolocaust, I am taking him on his own ethical tetms, which fot me, at least,should be guided by ethical considerations that have occupied philosopherssuch as Emmanuel Levinas.

The leap to Levinas may not be not obvious: he is no t a funny philosophet,nor a philosop her o fth e fiinny, bu t he is at the centet of con tem pota ty ethicaldiscussions, and like Cohen, his work arose in response to the Holocaust andits impact upon his family.'Just as Baton Cohen is undetstandably fixated onthe treatment of the ""stranger" as a measure of a society"s decency, Levinas wasfocused on the tteatment of "'the Othet" as the foundation of ethical behav-iot. Theit vety different tesponses to the same social ptoblem ate the subjectof this atticle, in which I will suggest that Borat is not quite the progressivetext that its maket intended (ot claims to have intended). Borat may be anexpos of Am etican tacism in the satitical ttadition of Lenny Btuce ot R ichatdPtyor, but it is also a reckless and cynical project whose ""ethical framing" seemsmisguided if not self-serving. From an ethical point of view, I would arguethat Levinas isn't laughing, nor would anyone who thinks seriously about the""ptankstet ethics" of Borai.

'Scholars have begun to see the relevance of Levinas's work to studies of various


4/19

Prankster Ethics: Borat ana Levinas 79

Let me begin with an exercise in taxonomy that should establish why theethical stakes are higher than in a typical Hollywood film. In its 2006 coverstory. Rolling Stone gushed that Borat represents "one of the greatest comediesof the last decade and perh aps even a whole new genre of film." But it is no t a"whole new genre of film": it is a documentary with some fictional elements,one of many hybrids now do tdng the docum entary landscape, from the self-abusive stunt-m eisters oJackass to the brilliant and-corporate provocateursknown as The Yes Men. Borat is not even unique in the Baron Cohen oeuvre:for years the comedian has worked in the hybrid space between fiction andreality, beginning on the BBC in 1998 with the fake hip hop iriterviews of hispopular "Ali G" character, and con tinuing to the sum mer of 2009, when BaronCohen was undercover as "Bruno," a fake German fashion commentator whostars in the follow-up to Borat.

Somehow the docum entary qu alides of Baron Cohen's work have receivedlittle attention, but what else could it be? Like Bruno, Borat features only ahandful of actors in the midst of dozens of non -actors who have no idea abo utwh at is really happ ening. If Borat were predom inantly or exclusively ficdonal,then it would be a mockumentary, as some reviewers erroneously concluded(The Washington Post fell into this camp).^ I canno t account for th is gross mis-characterizadon except to suggest that it stems from the fictional natu re of theprotagonist and the "mocking" implications of the film. However, these quali-des do not make Borat's "truth claims" (tha t most of what we see is authenticand unscripted ) any less real. O n the contrary, the film depends on the aud i-ence's accepdng its scenarios as genuine; we are not supposed to believe thatthe participants are simply actors of the sort used in mockum entades such asMeet the Rutles or Best in Show, two films in which the audience is expected torecognize the artificial, scdp ted na ture of events rendered in a nonfiction style.Indeed, Borat's particular/rissoM comes from the assumption that the objectsof the sadre are genuinely unaware and no t "part of the act"w hich makes itpartially, if no t predominandy, a docum entary. Tellingly, the producers seemedto Agree: they described Borat as a "docum entary-style film" in th e legal docu-ment that interviewees signed so that their footage could be u sed .'


5/19

80 Randolph LewisRecognizing the documentary aspect of Borat is relevant to assessing its

ethical stand ing. After all, abusing an actor in a scripted scene is very differentthan inflicting the same punishment on an unwitting member of the public.To interact with the public on camera, documentary filmmakers have gener-ally relied on the principle of informed consent, the notion that producersmust divulge the full nature of the project to the people being interviewed.Instead of telling the truth about Borat, however. Baron Cohen and his pro-ducers treated their interviewees like "'marks' in a con game (to use the phraseNewsweek employed). Borat's producers used bogus names and cell numberswhen they called potential interviewees, to whom they described a no nexistentrelationship with "a Belarus T V station.""* It was the logic of a scam artist, no ta principled satirist, and it was concealed behind a mountain of legal jargon ona convoluted release form whose purpose was to fend off potential litigation,not to provide a semblance of "informed consent." If anything, the producerssecured ""deformed consent" through outright deception and a turgid legalese.By signing the document, the interviewee "agrees not to bring at any time inthe future" any lawsuits or claims against the producer "or anyone associatedwith thefilm."It also states tha t the interviewee "is not relying upon any pro m -ises or statements made by anyone about the na ture of the Film o r the identityof any other Participants or persons involved in the Film."' In other words,interviewees were signing away their right to legal recourse everi if the pro-ducers misrepresented the real na ture of the film. "I never felt like we trickedanyone in a cruel way," director Larry Charles says, before adding a note ofethical self-scrutiny:

When we were making the fi lm, we had this almost Talmudic quest ioning ofourselves.""Who are wei' W h a t d o we really believe? Ho w far are w e willing togo? W h a t is the line in the sand tha t we re n ot willing to cross?'" W e were co n-stan tly as king o urselves, ""Are we be ing fair? D o the e nd s justify the means?""'

The residents of Glod, the small town in Romania where several scenes wereshot, would probably answer ""No." The production team paid small sums ofmoney to villagers willing to appear in the film, but never explained the truenatu re of the project, which ended u p ridiculing the Eastern Europeans as gro-


6/19

Prankster Ethics; oraf and Levinas 81tesquely primitive. "We enduted it because we ate poor and badly needed themoney," said one resident."But now we realize we were cheated and taken ad-vantage of in the worst way."' O ne Rom anian Gypsy was tticked into weatinga fist-shaped d ildo as a pros thetic limb, and he offered one of the many com-plaints about the ethics of Borat: "They conned us into doing all these thingsand never told us anything about what was going on."' Similar complaintswere heard from Am erican participants in the film, sevetal of wh om filed law-suits. "Lives have been ruined by this comedy," said one unwitting participantin the infamous "feces in a bag" dinner scene shot in Alabama. "I realize thatsome people will watch the movie and find it funny, but for the people whowere duped into appearing what happened was anything but humorous."'

Such deceptions are far from the standard of ethical docuihentary. In-deed, responsible do cum entarians do no t accept the n otion of "anything goes"that guided image making almost a century ago. In 1907, in response to theGe tman government's attempts to proh ibit'th e photographing of any personor his property without h is express permission," an American editorialist wr it-ing in The Independent filmed that such restrictions were ill-conceived andprobably un-American: "As regards photography ih public it may be laid asa fundamental principle that one has a right to photograph anything that he

. has a right to look at."'" Some trace of this older line of thought still appearsunder the mantel of artistic freedom, and one might defend Borat with the no-tion that an artist can put aside ethical considerations when working to fiilfillsome personal vision that, as visual anthropologist Jay R uby has written dis-approvingly, the artist has "license to transform people into aesthetic objectswithout theit knowledge and sometimes against their will."" However, schol-ars have increasingly rejected this cavalier attitu de toward the ethics of repre-senta tion. In the past twenty years scholars have even begun to fotmulate a setof ethical principles th at can be applied to docum entarian s.'^ For instance . Jay

'Q uo ted in Kathleen Tracy, Sacha Baron Co hen, p. 2 5 5 .'Q uo ted in Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen, p. 2 5 6 .'Sally Speaker quoted in Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen, p. 2 5 2 .'"Excerpt from a n editorial,''The Ethics and E tiquet [sic] of Photography," in TJje Indepen-

dent from July 11,1907,107f, quoted in Larry Gros s, Image Ethics: T he M oral Rijts of Subjects


7/19

82 Randolph LewisRuby has proposed an "ethics of image making" that would require filmmakersto wrestle with a series of qu esti on s: Have I been true to the principle of informedconsent? Does my desire to make this film outweigh the desire ofthe subject to main-tain his or her privacy? Am I depicting the subject in a balanced way? Asking thequestions is the essential part of the process, because solid answers are oftenelusive. "The best one can hope for," Ruby claims, "is that image m akers shoulddemonstrate that they are wrestling with the issues," and he praises severalfilms for achieving this level of ethical self-consciousness: K. Braum's passinggirl/riverside an essay on camera work (1998), Jill Godmilow's Far from Poland(1984), and Susan Meiseles's Pictures from a Revolution (1991) ."

Although Borat's director Larry Charles seems to have"wresded with theissues" in some fashion, it probab ly wouldn't satisfy those w ho take seriously theethics of image m aking. Indeed, Borat is a far cry from the quiet and thought-fiil works of nonfiction that Ruby noted above: it is a mass-market productwith an audacious agenda that combines humiliation and illumination. BaronCohen may position his film as a principled expos of America intolerance,but his methods are crude and sometimes cruel to the unwitting participantsin his project. Althou gh some individuals in the film come across as reprehen -sible enough to warrant their publicflogging(if we can judge from the limitedfootage tha t appears on-screen), many interviewees seem to have been victim-ized more for sadistic laughter than sociological insight. I am thinking of theconfused young hotel clerk who shrinks from a raving Borat; a straight-sh oot-ing driving instructor who parries Borat's strange commentary without givingoffense; a gracious Southern hostess who tries to show Borat how to use thebathro om while he pushes the bo undaries of good taste; a seemingly benigncomedy teacher who is made to seem humorless and dull. N o d oub t, some in-dividuals appear to deserve the wrath of Baron Cohen (the hom ophobic rodeocowboy comes to mind), but it is difficult to defend his comic assault on allof them. I suspect that very few of them would have agreed to appear on film

of free speech." See Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), p .148. On the "peripheral" nature of ethical concerns in documentary studies, see page 176of the same volume. In Selfless Cinema?: Ethics And French Docum entary (Oxford: Leg-enda, 2006), her excellent book on Ftench documentary, Sarah Cooper asserts that the


8/19

Prankster Ethics: orf li and Levinas 83if an honest ptocess of infotmed consent had been followed. Imagine a ftankexchange between Baton Cohen and his prospective interviewees: "Hello, Iam a prom inent media figure hoping tp reveal the dem ons lurking within yourfat-bellied Southern culture. Would you be willing to express your foul senti-ments on camera? You may experience social humiliation and a powerfiil de-sire to litigate, bu t o ur ingenious release form will render you legally im pote nt.May I tu m on the camera?" Obviously, the film could not exist in its presentform witho ut deception. '

Sutprisingly, most teviewets seemed to know litde about the problematicrelationship between Baron Cohen and h is interviewees (and few reviews of hismost recent film, Bruno, seem concerned about it). After the film's extraordi-narily successful release, it seem ed to receive an ethical free pass, with reviewersseemingly b linded by Baron Cohen's claims of good intentio ns. Because the filmwas "built on firmly Jewish ethical foundadons," The Christian Science Moni-tor suggested that the filmmaker's noble aspiradons outweighed any problemsin execudon.'"* Other reviewers were laughing too hard to think about ethics.Wridng in Time magazine, Richard Corliss noted h is general discomfort with"ambush comedy," bu t then confessed, "W ith Borat... my ethical reservations ;wilt beneath the giddy pleasure this film gave and gives me."' '

On ly a few small publications were willing to raise an ethicalVedflag.Forexample, Canadian Jewish News compared Borat unfavorably to ""the highlyethical behaviour of an earlier Jewish comedie im presario, Allan Fun t, innova-tor ofthe Candid Camera series." Their article cast Funt as a thoughtfiil prank-ster whose po pular television program w as a reflecdon of a more innocent era.Much to his credit, Funt let his targets in on the gags, which wete fat moteinnocuou s in natu te than being exposed as a knuckle-dtagging bigot.'* W hileFunt's camera regarded its subjects with compassionate bemusement as theystumble through surprising situadon s (for instance, a car whose gas tank cannever be filled). Baron Cohen has a colder outlook on human foibles and fal-libility. Perh aps w ith this in m ind, a professional ethics consuldng firm posteda comment on its website, cridcizing Cohen for turning "his targets' innate


9/19

84 Randolph Lewiskindness and tolerance against them" in order to make them look like"'fan[s]ofthe Third Reich."''

A similar sort of populism was at the core of high profile conservativeattacks on the film. W hile thefilm'sapparent rejection of political correctnessmight have appealed to some conservatives, pundits with an investment inpopulist rhetoric took umbrage at Borat's implied hostility toward heardandAm ericans. W riting in The New York Times, David Brooks fulminated thatBorat provided a "supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humilia-tion of the hoaxed hillbilly." Even fiirther to the right, Charles Krauthammeroffered the same sort of critique, though with greaterfinesse han his ideologi-cal cousins at Fox. Perhaps forgetful that their corporate colleagues at 20thCen tury Fox had financed thefilm,reporters at Foxnews.com complained th at""America haters will love how Cohen uses Michael Moore-type scenarios toget his point across," adding without irony that "[i]f you want to enjoy goodclean laughs this weekend, go see Flushed Away [a cartoon about English ratsliving in a sewer]."'* But ethics were not at the heart of the matter for mostconservative co mmentators, who seemed primarily irritated by the film's ap-parent anti-Americanism. In fact, critics who really focused on ethics per sewere sometimes scolded for their short sightedness or lack of humor. WhenThe New York Times's resident "Ethicist" weighed in with a negative assess-ment of the film, an angry reader posted a response that suggested the realethical lapses were in the objects of the satire, not the satirist: ""How ethicalis it that people hold the views that Borat exposes in the films? Animal rights

"T he se com me nts appear on the "Ethics Scoreboard"' at ht tp: / /ww w.e thicssco re-boa rd.c om /list /bo rat .h tm i. Th e Scoreboard is a project of ProE thics, a professional ethicstraining and consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia.

"A.S this quotation suggests, Moore is often evoked in discussions of Baron Cohen,even thou gh the ir meth od s are quite different. W h a t distinguishe s the two is transparen cy.De spite a repu tation for w hat his critics describe as careless chronology and slipshod analy-sis, M oore a pproaches his interviews with out dissembling: he is simply "Michael M oore,mu ckra king filmmaker." Th is pers ona may be an artful blend of med ia performanc e andactual personality, bu t it does no t misrep resen t the na ture of what he is doing . Un like BaronCohen, Moore is not a filmmaker working in disguise, nor is he a stealth satirist whose real


10/19

Prankster Ethics: orf lt and Levinas 85protesters use covert cameras to expose cruelty to animals, so I see little di-lemma with using decepdon to expose prejudiced views. The ends justify the(extremely fianny) nieans."" '

Some reviewers skated past the ethical quesdons by situating Borat ina larger tradidon of hard-edged social satire, although usually without mak-ing any qualitadve distincdons between Baron Cohen and the great stand-upcomedians of the sixdes and sevendes. For example. Baron C ohen was some-times compared to Andy Kaufman, even though the surreal Am erican corhicusually confined his pranks to less problematic locations such as nightclubs,wrestling rings, and talk shows, where the nature of the pran k was m ore ob-vious than it would be in the private homes or offices where Baron Cohenbrought his crew. For comics like Kaufman, participadon did not hinge on afundamental decepdon: everyone was aware that it was an act of some sort,even if no one knew how real the performance was to Kaufman. Moreover,his targets were often other media figures or people willing to join his publicperformance, such as the women willing to wrestle him onstage.

Baron Cohen has also been compared to comics who skewer their ownaudience, although I would put most of them in a different ethical categoryas well. Lenny Bruce or Don Rickles certainly offended audience memberswith rude comments, but presumably everyone in the room was aware that aworking comic was onstage. Everyone had purchased a ticket and knew thatthey were sitting in a nightclub observing a performance. Even when LennyBruce launched into a string of racial epithets, he eventually made his pointclear: he was offering a socio-linguistic lesson iri the nialleability o words, no tliterally attacking people on the basis of race or religion. He never left townwithout explaining the fiill nature of his schtick, something that Baron Cohenwas eager to do .

Moving from stand-up to cinema, we might also compare Cohen to anolder generation of Jewish comic filmmakers, most notably Woody Allen andMel Brooks, each of whom took a different approach to exposing andsemi-tism and other bigotries. Although the antisemitism of the American heart-land was richly imagined in the family diriner scene in Annie Hall, Allen hasnever made films as crypto-sociological treatises. As David Desser and LesterD. Friedman have argued, Allen's ""cinema participates little in the search forsocial jusdce, a point for which he has been criticized, m ost often by Jew-


11/19

86 Randolph Lewisish critics."^" Generally, Allen seems to have other concerns, and uses cinemato work out personal issues related to sex, death, and the Eutopean att filmtradition. Mel Brooks might seem to offer a better comparison among Jew-ish comedie filmmakers, but again Baron Cohen does not compare favorably.Like Cohen, Brooks "delights in attacking phonies and bigots" and fuels his artwith "a sense of anget gtowing out of his Jewish heritage and battles with anti-Semitism."^' Howevet, Btook's attacks ate much more abstract than Cohen'sone-on-one confrontations with unsuspecting subjects. Fot instance, Btooks'sThe Producers (1967) depicted a fictional Broadway audience delighting in aNazi musical that was intended to repulse, whereas Cohen makes the samepoint about American callousness (or indifference) using real people. I suspectthat Baron Cohen has avoided ethical sctudny in part by being so wickedlyfunny, and in patt by employing a progressive rhetotic of social good and nobleintentions. When asked about the film, Larry Rubin, a former director of theJewish Council for Public Affairs, said, "I can see that it's supposed to skeweranti-Semitism." Even if "some people don't get it," Rubin atgued that BaronCohen's "heart is in the right place."^^ Once again, Borat seems to have escapedethical sctutiny.

Perhaps the best point of compatison fot Borat is not in Mel Btooks'scomedie filmmaking not Andy Kaufman's stand-up comedy, but in the morerecent television ptankstets who appeat on MTV's Punk'd and Comedy Cen-ttal's The Daily Show, both of which ate engaged in sttaight-face tuses withunsuspecting people. Yet even these ptogtams cteate fewet ethical hazardsthan Borat. On Punk'd, duplicity is aimed at the host's celebrity ftiends andis then tevealed on-cameta (and unlike Borat, legal teleases ate signed afiertaping). The Daily Show and its offspting such as The Colbert Report also fatebettet than Borat in tetms of "prankster ethics." Although some sketches onThe Daily Show share Baron Cohen's willingness to keep the joke running wellaftet the cameras have stopped, the point of theit satire is not usually as razorsharp as Baron Cohen'susually, it involves dimness, eccentticity, ot miscom-munication that, at least so fat, has not ptompted a defamation lawsuit froman injured party. And unlike Borat, The Daily Show's correspondents do notlie about theit identity ot the name of theit ptogram: at wotst, they might


12/19

Prankster Ethics: oraf and Levinas 87encourage their interviewees to overlook the program's ironic intent (i.e., thenotion tha t spoofing, not information, is the goal of the interview). Com paredto the flurry of lawsuits surrounding Borat's exposure of racist/homophobictirades, Tbe Daily Show's pench ant for comedie m isrepresentation has ap - peared relatively ha rmless.

To put the ethics of Borat into a broader intellectual context, I wouldlike to turn to Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher whose major works. To-tality and Infinity (1 9 6 1 ) a n d Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence ( 1 9 7 4 ) ,have become increasingly im po rtan t in the years since his dea th in 19 95 . LikeBaron C ohen, Levinas rooted his work in Judaism (he wrote Talmudic com -mentaries) and saw it as a response to the horrors ofthe Holocaust that toreapart his family (Baron Cohen's comedie provocations were partially inspiredby historian Ian K ershaw's notion tha t "the path to Auschw itz was paved w ithindifference").^' Levinas's Otherwise than Being was dedicated to the millions"who were victims of the same h atred of the other, the same anti-Semitism."Yet his response to antisemitism was very different from Cohen's. Where theyoung satirist chose to represent "the other" with a cheeky sadism, the es-teemed philosopher believed in what he called the "irreducibility" ofthe other,the sense that we cannot understand other people well enough to representthem without great care, and that how we relate to them is our most crucialethical dilemm a.

Perhaps the re is nothing fiannyab ou t Levinas, who generally offers a dourtonic to the postm odern soul. Again and again, we see the same mom ent in hiswritings: "I find myself facing the O th e r .. . ." " This image appears througho uthis work with considerable drama and force. Indeed, he puts the encounterbetween self and stranger at the core of his ethical project, one that proposesradical humility and profound responsibility toward the O ther.. W here previ-ous philosophers had made metaphysics into our "first philosophy," Levinassaw a basic self-centeredness in the constant questioning of being. To tran-scend the self, Levinas proposed that ethics should be our "first philosophy,"even if the rewards are unknowable. Our responsibility to others is not basedon the expectation of reciprocal treatm ent; instead, we mu st expect nothing inreturn. In The Hum anism ofthe Other, he po ints to the "insatiable compassion"


13/19

88 Randolph Lewisthat Dostoyevski asctibes to a chatacter in Crime and Punishment. Th at is themodel to which we must aspire in Levinas's ethical universe. Coming face-to-face with the Other, we must allow ourselves to feel ""the gravity of the love ofone's fellowman." Although Levinas once complained that love is a "worn-outword," I think tha t is what he is talking about.^'

Th e relevance of his ethics to docum enta ty has only begun to be exploted.The most sustained analysis of the connections appeats in the recent work ofSarah Cooper . In her book Selfless Cinema? E thics and French Docum entary,Cooper observes that much of Levinas's project tevolves atound an anecdoteftom Plato's Republicthe story of Gyges, the shepherd who discovers a magi-cal ring that makes him invisible. Using his newfound powers for personal gain,Gyges tricks his way onto the throne of the kingdom. For Levinas, his acdonsare reprehensible. Selfish, stealthy, and deceitfiil, Gyges embodies all tha t e thi-cal behaviot m ust resist. Although Levinas wrote almost nothing about cinema,I believe tha t he would find litde to admire in Cohen's comedie project. Afterall, Cohen puts on the persona of Borat as if he has found a ring of invisibilitytha t exempts him from social justiee. W ith his elaborate persona eoneealing hisown faee, Cohen disappears from view without seeming concerned about theimpact of his deceit on his interviewees. If the deception has wounded themon-camera (or later), Cohen offers no solace other than to point to the ethicalmotivations behind his wotk. Rath et than ttusd ng the othet, he skewets ftombehind his comic mask, convinced th at he is going out ""into a crowd of peoplewho hate you," as he told Rolling Stone. In a manner that tutns Levinas on hishead, Cohen substitutes hilatious sadism for selfless humility.

Baton Cohen cteates a ftum fot engaging the othet, but it is ptobably notin a fotm tha t Levinas would have appteciated. As Jefftey M utray has pointedou t, Levinas dem ands a "dialogic engagement"" tha t allows us to gtasp the otherin ways that transcend the superfieial level of appearanees. If we are uneertainabout what we are seeing or hearing, then we must seek clarificadon ratherthan accepting what we sense at first glance. For Murray, this is as simple asasking, "Did you mean to say . . . ?" * Baron C ohen could have invited suchclarifications when the objects of his sadte expressed dubious opinions, but Idoubt he was listening beyond whatever he heatd on the surface. Instead, he


14/19

Prankster Ethics: Borat and Levinas 89moved in the opposite direction, toward comic disconnection (in the form of"discovering" racist at titu des). By poking at the prejudices Baron Co hen mighthave provided an opportunity for his targets to acquit themselves, but morelikely he was ""milking" the joke to the very last drop , or w hat might be seen asthe revelatory ""gotcha" moment in which racism is exposed. Indeed, the Boratproject w as dependent on'"documenting" repulsive a ttitudes the $17 milliondollar project could n ot exist w ithout them . Given this dependence on expres-sions of ill will as comic fodder. Baron Cohen and his producers might havebeen tempted to entrap and exaggerate (through editing) whatever darknessthey could tease out.

I am not claiming innocence for the subjects of Borat. Instead, I am sug-gesting that Baron Cohen failed to document their guilt ih a reliable manner:he did not clearly justify the public shaming he meted out. Even the: Arizonacowboys who seem to sing along with Borat's nasty song, "Throw the JewDow n the Well," may not be the antisemidc troglodytes tha t they seem on firstglance. Some may be unsure of what is being said; some may be indulging astrange foreign visitor with a camera crew; some may not be paying attendon.Yet the ed idng of the scene casts them all in the same unflattering light. W itha hint of defensiveness. Baron Cohn admits that the scene fails to clearly es-tablish his point that these people are antisemitic rednecks: "Did it reveal thatthey were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they wereindifferent to anti-Semidsm."^' Again, Baron Cohen may mean well, but hisfilm actually performs an ethical disservice in Lvinasian term s: by giving us acarica ture, he makes it more difficult to see the face of the other.^*

Baron Cohen has talked about feeling persecuted in public: perhaps amore ethical response would offer conciliation rather than comic aggression.

"http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/sacha_baton_cohen_the_real_bo-rat_finally_speaks/page/3^'Levinas often wrote with Martin Buber in mind. His writings are filledwith a re-spectful, but careful, distancing between philosophies that might seem quite similar onfirst glance. Buber made a distinction between the "I-Thou" relation (which is based on

the sort of dialog that Levinas celebrated) and the "I-It" relation. The "I-Thou" stance isbased on what one writer summ arizes as ""mutuality, open-heartedness, directness, honesty,


15/19

90 Randolph LewisAs Levinas has w ritten, "The more I return to myself, the more I divest my-self, under the traumadc effect of persecution, of my freedom as a consdtut-ed, willfiil, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible.. . . I am "in myself through the others."^' But Baron Cohen wanted it bothways, to unleash his aggression while at the same time claiming the ethicalhigh grou nd tha t we might associate with a careful stud ent of Levinas. As I'vetried to suggest throughout this article, these positions are incompatible, andbecause Baron Cohen seems unlikely to give up the aggressive element of hiswork, he should not be allowed to elevate his project into something that itis not, at least not without inviting careful scrutiny from skeptical observers.O f course, his disingenuous frame is no t the only problem with Borat. Even ifhe stopped framing it as a noble effort to unmask the ugly face of the heart-land bigot, it would hardly erase Borat's ethical shortcom ings, which are woveninto the fabric of the film fi'om the moment of its conception as somethingcloser to cynical ""gotcha" jou rnalism than thoughtfu l ethical intervention . Yetacknowledging the real nature of the film, wh ether in the prod uction stage asunsu specd ng peop le are confronted with cam era, or later when the film is be-ing marketed in a way that w ill make it ethically pa latable to sensitive viewers,would at least have the virtue of honesty.

To explore a more transparent approach to the film in which its aggres-sion and deceit could be acknowledged as core elemen ts, rather than obscuredbehind inappropriate references to the Holocaust and higher purposes, wemight retu rn to the time of Levinas's birth, when French philosophy was dom -inated by ano ther figure, also Jewish, but far m ore secular Henri Bergson.For Bergson, laughter must be cruel because it serves a cruel function: it is asocial disciplinarian. W riting in 1900 , Bergson argued th at h um or arises fromour observation of inflexible behavior "where one would expect to find thewide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being" (i.e., aslapstick scene in which a minister tumbles into a pothole because he is read-ing a Bible as he walks). Of particu lar relevance to Borat is the passage in Berg-son's famous treatise on laughter in which he writes that society is "suspiciousof all I N E L A S T I C I T Y of character, of mind and even of body, because it isthe possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity w ith separat-


16/19

Prankster Ethics: o rflf and Levinas 91ist tendencies, tha t inclines to swervefi'om he common centre roun d which so-ciety gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity." In o the r words,Bergson believed that the comic must be the policeman of "unsociability," bywhich he meant socially divisive attitudes or practices. The prejudice that Boratexposes seems to f it the b ill: it breeds division, suspicion, and even violence th atunderm ine the ""utilitarian aim of general improvement" that Bergson prized sohighly. If we laugh at the inelasticity of mind that bigotry represents, perhapswe are howling at Borat's victims because of their rigid adherence to an oldercode of racial and gender hierarchy, not to m ention their lack of "wide-awakeadaptability" of the so rt that w ould allow them to get the joke.

If we entertain the Bergsonian perspective fot a moment, we might atguethat Borat makes a significant ethical contribution with its sharp correctiveof deviant behaviors, even if it violates every dictum of interpersonal ethicstha t Levinas ptoposed. If we were to accept the Bergsonian approach to Borat,we might even empathize with the burden it places on Baron Cohen as film-makeraccording to Betgson, the comic must have a hard heart in order tofulfill his or her social fiinction. H ad natu re no t"implan ted in the best of men,a spark of spitefialness" necessary to engage in satire, then society would havelost an important tool for converting ""rigidity into plasticity, to readapt theindividual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners wherever they aremet with."

Bergson even recognized the pitfalls of writing abou t laugh ter: the scholar"who gathers a han dfiJ to taste may find tha t the substance is scanty, and theafter-taste bitter."'" No ma tter how well intended , the un kind hum or of Boraimay leave a bitter after-taste, o ne th at is unavoidable in wotld in which the ex-ceptionally flinny and the exceptionally cruel are intertwined as Bergson sug-gests. Although Levinas suggests a gentler path that would replace Borat's dis-tortions of the Other with an honest dialogue about difference, one that I findmuch more ethical in its implication, Bergson suggests that the satirist mustwear ""the cruel shoes" that Steve Martin once wrote about in his own comicprose. Or perhaps the satirist must accept that, as Mai-tin entitled his 1979stan d-u p a lbum , "Comedy Isn't Pretty." But this Bergsonian line of thou ghthas its own limitations: aft:er all, it is a form of functionalism that merely ex-plains""what is?" w ithou t asking "what should be?" Borat might serve a valuable


17/19

92 Randolph Lewiscorrective function in exposing prob lematic behaviors, bu t tha t doesn't exem ptit from ethical scrutiny, especially when it is dealing with ordinary people whohave been conned into participating. If the filmmaker was willing to trick hissubjects into appearing on camera, how can we trust the editing and marketingof the film? W hat sort of satire is rooted in abject deceit?In the fiiture, Cohen may find that it is easier not to make documentary,where the ethical stakes of dealing with ordinary people are quite high. "I dohave other characters, actually, that I want to start developing in the next sixmonths," Baron Cohen told Rolling Stone in 2006. "But I think it's going tobe harder to do stuff in a reality setting. I'm just really looking forward tostartin g to do movies on set." Reality is not w orth the headache (ethical, legal,logistical) for a comic who can create almost everything he needs in a stu-dio except, perhap s, the/r5so that made his quasi-docu mentary som ethingunusual on the postmodern mediascape: an outrageously sadistic satire withself-described good inten tions. A paradox of ostensibly progressive ideals andabusive technique, Borat suggests that what is right is not fiinny, and what isfunny is not right, bu t this dicho tomy is an illusion: from Duck Soup to Rich-ard Pryor, there has always been a middle ground of ethical humor in whichthe hypocrisy of the powerful is exposed and the ensuing laugher is rooted ina sense of justice and delight. W he re Baron Cohen erred was in aiming at thepowerless, deceiving them into participation, presenting their apparent preju-dices as indisputable fact, and then congratulating himself for providing aninnovative response to social pathologies.Earlier I described the Bergonsian approach to humor, which at leastwould have the virtue of candor. In pointing this out, I do not mean to glossover Baron Cohen's ethical shortcom ings, which I find serious and disturbing,but rather to argue for greater transparency and less self-deception in howsuch projects are presented and understood. Instead of framing his comicbarbs in a self-interested rhetoric of social uplift, thereby hiding the deepercontours of his project behind an ethical smokescreen. Baron Cohen mighthave been satisfied with the considerable laughter and public attention thathis work provokes. In this more transp arent mode, he might have flaunted thehilarious cruelty of his bold project, avoided ethical justifications altogether,and allowed his audience to make up their own minds abou t the decency of hisendeavor. As ofth e summer of 2009 when he released Bruno, the controversial


18/19

Prankster Ethics: o rat and Levinas 93wtitet noted in Esquire magazine in response to the reeerit film, ""the laughteris a little too easy in its eruelty and too p ernieious in its influence. W e live in agreat era for p ranks, bu t it's also a great era for' fraud, and the two are inextri-cably linked. W hy do we love to wateh the public hum iliadon and betrayal ofperfeet strangers?"" Echoing as it does the great ethieal inquiries of Levinas,this simple quesdon is one tha t wemight well pose to filmmaker and audieneealike.


19/19

Copyright of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies is the property of Purdue University Press

and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright

holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

lewis, randolph. prankster ethics

Documents