The Short and Sweet Problem of Borat

Borat came out my sophomore year in college. I hated it a lot. I still do. While he's making fun of some intensely terrible sentient piles of cat vomit (lookin' at you, Rudy), the studio behind the first Borat movie did extremely shitty things, and I'm hesitant to think this behavior has since changed significantly since Amazon is in on it now.

In the first movie, scenes set in Kazakhstan were filmed in a Romanian village called Glod, an impoverished town full of poor, racially targeted, and ethnically oppressed Romani. These people were, of course, happy to do whatever the 20th Century Fox producers onsite asked them to do because they desperately needed money. You can read about the producers' impact here and here, but the gist of it is that extras in the movie were paid the equivalent of $3.50 for appearing on camera even though the film made $262 million worldwide. Glod is a town that had no running water, no sewage, and is the very definition of impoverished at the time of filming. But fuck, it was funny, right? Especially the part where they gave an amputee a rubber dildo and told him it's a real prosthetic. Yuk yuk. Residents of Glod tried to sue the studio, but the lawsuit has been thrown out twice. The first movie garnered seven lawsuits, some from obnoxious racist pissbabies who didn't want to get caught being racist pissbabies, others from artists who didn't get paid for the use of their work. The second movie comes out today, and it's already garnering lawsuits. You can read that bullshit here.

So while yes, he makes powerful assholes look like the assholes they are, he's no better than the racist fistulas he tricks into appearing on camera. He's taking advantage of people in poverty for your financial gains and notoriety, and that shit is as American as an immigrant getting their ass kicked at a rodeo.

I don't see the point of this movie or even the need for it. Are there still some people who don't know this president, and the people he surrounds himself with are egregious, amoral fucktoilets who belong in a prison cell? Like, who doesn't know that yet?

Please pardon me if I'm not going to revel in whatever sad catharsis we get from laughing at a guy making fun of foreigners by pretending to be one (if we canceled Macklemore over this instead of how shitty his music was, why is what Baron Cohen does okay?) under the pretext of "bringing down the man." At the same time, he subsequently abuses, takes advantage of, and mocks a bunch of non-white, non-Christian ethnic groups to fill his pockets.

Fuck that guy.