“Bush-Era Culture” (Shudder)

I liked the inclusion and discussion of Franzen’s “The Corrections,” but would probably have gone with Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” instead. Franzen spurned Oprah; McCarthy (to great surprise given his shunning of the spotlight) happily sits with her on the comfy couch for a long, somewhat painful interview.

TruckNutz.

ZachB: it’s honestly hard to separate them. The Wire is the definitive artistic reaction to the Clinton/Bush-era domestic policy; BSG is its counterweight on the foreign policy side. Both shows dipped a cautious toe into the opposite pond from time to time, but largely stayed with their strengths… until both foundered in a disastrously uninteresting final season.

Borat is hilarious–if you like laughing at people who are poorer or less educated than you are, especially if they happen to hail from Muslim countries. It should be included as a record of the way in which racist hatred is still quite acceptable in mainstream culture in the US, Britain and elsewhere, and of the expensively educated bigots, like Baren-Cohen, who promulgate and profit from it.

How about 24, an entire series built around the ticking time-bomb myth?

More seriously, Get Your War On has a pretty good claim, too.

I can’t open the Newsweek link for some reason, so maybe they covered this, but I thought Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was the best film about the Bush administration made during the Bush administration. It just sorta brought it all together.

Maybe it’s too overt, but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows does pretty well.

I wonder if you could tag the entire revival of the superhero genre to the Bush era? The Batman movies are obviously quite beholden to him for inspiration, but there have been an absolute barrage of examples in the last few years.

more Donnie Darko than Napoleon Dynamite

Burn After Reading.

I’d disagree with “The Wire” as quintessentially Bushian. The roots of Baltimore’s collapse as depicted derive from systemic institutional flaws introduced by Reagan. Most notably: the “War on Drugs”; the destruction of domestic manufacturing concurrent with an assault on the unions; and a reliance on “hard” metrics (the ‘stats’ which need to be ‘juked’). The last is covered in Adam Curtis’ documentary “The Trap”. The Wire would still be apposite even if Gore had won.

As far as sci-fi comparisons go, I think season 3 of Enterprise is a better fit. After a catastrophic attack on Earth, the Enterprise goes in search of the attackers with a two-fold mission: find out “why they hate us” and kick their asses. Interestingly, the motive for the attacks turns out to be an imperialist attempt by time travelling extra-dimensional aliens to pre-empt federation interference, utterly unrelated to anything the humanity has actually done. This mirrors the Bush narrative that 9/11 was the first shot in a war caused solely by political muslims, bent on creating a new Caliphate while completely ignoring the Cold War foreign policy which led up to it.

*Idiocracy, which was an eerily accurate portrayal of the level of political discourse in America during the Bush years.

*Team America. Need I say more?

*Although it’s from the 70s, I would have to nominate Full Metal Jacket. I mean, I’m just waiting for somebody from the Bush Administration to say “inside every Iraqi, there’s an American trying to get out.”

My own experience of the Bush years found some resonance in John From Cincinnati.
For the Zeitgeist though, yeah the Wire, though it was made, written, and especially acted with more integrity than was visible anywhere in the culture it mirrored, except where that integrity was held, blocked and frustrated, in potential.

engels@8:
Thanks for saying that so clearly and evenly.

300. In every way.

Definitely BSG. The second and third seasons will go down in history as one of TV’s greatest achievements.

Engels @8,

Borat is hilarious—if you like laughing at people who are poorer or less educated than you are, especially if they happen to hail from Muslim countries

Wait. You actually saw Borat? And still thought the poorer, less-educated guy from the Muslim country was the butt of the joke?

And still thought the poorer, less-educated guy from the Muslim country was the butt of the joke?

IIRC, the Romanian village that he filmed the introductory section in were pretty pissed off at the way they were portrayed.

Yes, I have seen Borat (though I can’t claim have given it my full attention for two hours) and I am pretty confident that for many of the other people watching the room the poor, less educated guy from a Muslim/ex-Soviet country appeared to be the butt of the joke. The fact that I have seen central Asian immigrants in London finding themselves (unwillingly) as the butt of the same joke in real life has tended to confirm this. Not to deny that film also ridicules mostly poor and uneducated Americans.

I know the correct view for sophisticated liberals is that it is all anti-racist post-modern irony, but that seems to me to be on the same level as the post-modernism ‘feminist’ arguments about how lap-dancing clubs ’empower’ women.

engels @36,

to be really certain about this, I’d have to watch the film again, a notepad to hand, and that’s not going to happen. But my recollection is that few of the Americans singled out for Baron Cohen’s mockery were poor, and I have no reason to suppose they were poorly educated. Some in fact were quite affluent, and had presumably enjoyed the benefits of expensive education. The Americans in the film who I’d think were likeliest to be poor and poorly-educated weren’t mocked and indeed come off as rather sympathetic. They’d also be the ones any racist bigots in the audience would be most likely to hate.

But I take your point, and shall do my best to ensure that the lesser orders do not have access to Animal Farm and A Modest Proposal. Possibly the authors had some other point they wanted to make, but as you know and I know, for most people, these works are nothing more than a crude appeal to pig-hatred and anti-Irish cannibalism.

Show people a film with a funny foreigner in it, and they’ll generally see it as being about how funny the foreigner is. I suppose you’d call it confirmation bias.

A Million Little Pieces.

A tale about a man’s terrible habits and all around self-destructive behavior.

Most fitting: it’s all lies.

37: But that’s all so much nit-picking. The substantive point here is that anyone who thinks Borat is all about giving racist American bigots a good laugh at the wogs—indeed, anyone who thinks the Americans in the film come off better than the caricature foreigners—has colossally misunderstood the film.

Nobody thinks that. You are missing the criticism.

The problem with Borat is that it combines reveling in racist tropes (as noted well by Kaveh Hemmat at 40) with the primary humor of laughing at the rubes who go along without seeing the con. You are supposed to laugh knowingly at most these tropes, “Ha, ha, that is so racist, and look at the fool who is so bigoted he thinks Borat is serious!”, even while a few others just slip right by and you don’t even notice.

SB-C is essentially doing muslim blackface, and it is every bit as problematic and racist as the blackface or “hood” parties cooked up by university “liberals” every year around february and for many of the same reasons.

Basically when we watch something like Borat, we get to have our racist cake and eat it too. We aren’t racists, of course, because we are in on the joke, and we certainly aren’t like those people SB-C has gotten to spout real bigoted nonsense to go along.

But there’s no real counterpoint. There are no Robert Townsend scenes where the veil falls off and we see a faithful and honest depiction of a mystified actual person dealing with the racist bullshit coming his way. Instead we get an eastern european village scene that is universally despised by the people who were filmed in it. We get Robert Townsend as filmed by 70s blaxploitation purveyors, and never see his personal reaction.

Which is not to completely endorse Hollywood Shuffle as a paragon of all things anti-racist in making fun of racism: one can raise issues with it’s depiction of jews, for instance. But it’s doing something similar what people claim Borat is doing, and the differences are both stark and instructive.

Thanks Michael, you put it better than I could.
We aren’t racists, of course, because we are in on the joke, and we certainly aren’t like those people SB-C has gotten to spout real bigoted nonsense to go along.
In fact, when SB-C was a guest on SNL, he just did the Borat character on stage, there were no rubes to laugh at, Borat was the whole joke. The laugh lines were stuff like Kazakhstan exporting female (ahem) body hair for use as pot scrubbers. I think it’s safe to say not only that this isn’t about laughing *at* racists, but that the character is producing its own, novel racism.

#41-
“there seems to be practically an obsession with sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners”
There were some of us out here on the loopier edge of current-event-watching that thought at the time that maybe the release of the graphic imagery from Abu Ghraib, its being splattered across every possible global news screen, was itself a continuation of the acts of sexual humiliation depicted. A widening, an expansion of the degradation, a trumpeting publication of it, a gloating extension of the acts themselves.
Still are some of us who think that.
As much as I’d like to engage Mrs. Tilton on the subject of Borat I’m, sadly for me, unable to so do, having never willingly watched anything Baron-Cohen’s done.
Though what little I do know about him professionally would seem pertinent, in that it illustrates somewhat the larger less visible dynamic of the Bush years.
A Jew making a stand-up career pretending to be a bling-draped Arab hip-hop wannabe Muslim asshole, then achieving international fame and fortune pretending to be a naive hick barbarian Muslim asshole.
The pejorative noun and its most immediate adjective being the take-away point in both cases.

Most of those people are indeed self-described university “liberals,” in the Australian sense, where liberals are hood-wearing racists and they celebrate Halloween in February because the water flows upward and everything. It’s like when Laura Bush inscribed sexual perversity into Muslim males by praising Reading Lolita in Tehran, too.

Hey Scott! Always good to see you around these parts. I nominate this very thread as the popular culture text that exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.

Re 29

The abs aren’t fake.

I also feel uncomfortable about the way in which SBC’s audience reacted to the movie (many people did seem to delight in the racist caricatures) but I am not convinced that SBC is racist or intends for the film to promote racism.

It does seem possible that he is a very shrewd comedian without any particular scruples. Maybe he’s comfortable exploiting latent racist attitudes in the audience without himself being actively racist. I dunno.

He certainly isn’t the only popular comedian to try and walk the line between being racist and “parodying racism.” I think of the whole Sarah Silverman, “I hate chinks/jury duty” dust-up. Silverman’s defense was that she is clearly not racist, and therefore the joke isn’t racist but rather “makes fun of racist people” or something to that extent.

I wouldn’t call any of this “having your racist cake and eating it too,” at least not on the part of the performers. Rather, this just seems like comedians doing whatever new, outrageous thing they can think of to get laughs, without regard for exactly who or what their audience is laughing at.

Who are these betrayers of verisimilitude that have invented these enfabulousnating new techniques of lighting and make-up?

@53 I should point out that I haven’t actually read Reading Lolita, I’ve heard it’s very good, though it’s been criticized as (perhaps unintentionally) neocon-enabling. My concern with Laura Bush’s interest in it has to do with the title more than the contents, and, thin as that sauce is, I do think there’s something to it. To be clear, I don’t think Laura Bush sat down one day and said to herself “what can I do to inscribe perversity into Muslim male bodies?” but I do suspect she could have been subtly influenced by her environment to zero in on that book; at the very least she is (surprise! gasp!) guilty of being careless of the implications of promoting it.

King Darius with eye makeup in 300 was a better “sample of standard homophobic “the enemy-is-effeminate””, imo, than Saddam Hussein in South Park. The latter wasn’t actually effeminate, iirc, at least not in any other ways, not in the way that, say, Prince Edward in Braveheart was. It’s more like his hyper-masculinity is rolled over to a negative value, and his “submitting” to the devil is funny because it’s ironic. I think he and Borat are of a type, which different from the effeminate tyrant motif, though there is some overlap.

The whole “it’s a joke on unsuspecting racists” is just thrown in to make all the straight up racism palatable and guilt free.

I disagree, but it’s a tough line to walk and if the SNL episode mentioned above is as described that seems like a failure. It may be that the film is also a failure but I haven’t seen it. SBC’s error may have been to choose an actual country. Personally I don’t think Borat is in any way different from these two guys except for the Candid Camera element:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latka_Gravas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_from_Ork

Well, he made me feel sympathetic towards Posh and Becks – no mean feat. Don’t know if this can be applied to the Borat case, but nobody I know actually thinks the Kazakhs throw Jews down the well. Also, Wikipedia quotes a Kazakh newspaper, novelist and the national football team as being highly supportive of the movie and adds that the DVD is a top seller in Kazakhstan.

P.S.: I’m so geeky that when I first came across Sacha Baron-Cohen’s oeuvre, I wondered if there was any relation to Simon Baron-Cohen – turns out they’re cousins.

notsneaky @59,

I hadn’t realised that our opinions overlap 99.99% of the time, so it saddens me that we must part ways over Borat.

Seriously, to address your point (and that of several others, starting with engels), I should make clear that I agree that much of Baron Cohen’s work is coarse, and that a Kazakh (or generic eastern European or central Asian — only the latter really applies to K’stan, but Baron Cohen is, I think deliberately, pretty vague about what sort of place Borat’s “Kazakhstan” is) could well take offence. I’d think them a bit thinskinned myself, but certainly well within their rights. [FN 1] Baron Cohen’s American targets have more serious grounds to be offended, but then they are for the most part people who deserve offence. I don’t want to come over as an impassioned defender of Baron Cohen. I simply think one’s offence-o-metre has to be calibrated very loosely to dismiss the film as mere racist bigotry. (Kaveh @46, I know Borat only from the film. What you describe from SNL is less defensible though still, I think, not quite equivalent to Der Stürmer.)

Roy @48,

A Jew making a stand-up career pretending to be a bling-draped Arab hip-hop wannabe Muslim asshole

It’s an uncommon Arab, I’d say, who rejoices in the name “Alistair Leslie Graham”. It might be the “Ali” part that has you thinking Baron Cohen’s first famous character is an Arab. It is, instead, just part of his wannabeicity. I don’t find Ali G the funniest thing in the world, I’m sorry to say, but I will always have a place in my heart for him after his Sammy Wilson interview.

[FN 1] Apparently, though, few Kazakhs are offended. On the whole they seem to think the film a scream, as Novakant notes @62; but to be fair one should also note that, whatever about your man in the Almalinskiy omnibus, at the time the Kazakh government was very definitely not amused (until, if I what I heard is correct, their president’s daughter told them to lighten up).

49: It was overstretch to describe such parties as “cooked up” by self-described liberals. There may be some, but that is probably not the case for most, if any. I do know people who have attended such things, or defended them, who are self-described liberals. I would not describe them as liberals, hence the quotes.

I certainly did not mean to suggest that this was the typical behavior of self-described liberals.

60: No, Borat isn’t really different at all from Latka Gravas. Andy Kaufman was a pig. His later antics make that much more obvious. But Latka is plenty offensive enough, even if I didn’t quite understand why as a teenager. Mork? I don’t remember it well enough to judge. He wasn’t indicated as any particular race or ethnicity explicitly and I don’t recall if there were obvious enough tropes that it qualifies, but assuming there were, I’d say it’s essentially the same schtick.

No one suggested There Will Be Blood?!

I’m shocked!