Borat the blank slate

It’s fascinating to read the many viewpoints people are imposing on the film.

Joe Queenan thinks Sacha Baron Cohen is a typical British twit seething with anti-Americanism, that the film is “contemptible,” and that the feminist brigade will soon go gunning for him:

Most of the critics who salivated all over Borat were male, as film criticism is dominated by middle-aged men whose darkest fear is to no longer be perceived as cutting-edge by equally lonely men who write blogs. Similarly, most of the people who have made Borat such a monstrous hit were young men. But eventually the women will be heard from, and a lot of them will not be fawning Baron Cohen groupies. To the women I know, when you ridicule redneck racists, you are a hero. [hmm. really? and that's okay?--ed.] But when you go out of your way to humiliate middle-aged feminists and harmless socialites and hapless hotel employees and office workers on their lunch breaks, and use plump black women as a running sight gag, you expose yourself not as an iconoclastic wit, but as a pig.

Meanwhile, Down Under, Christopher Scanlon zeroes in on the (supposedly) anti-Kazakh angle. He even cites Slovenian Lacanian sociologist/cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek!

the Kazakh Government misses the point of the Borat film, insofar as most of the jokes are not targeted at Kazakhs at all. Kazakhstan is simply a convenient stick with which to poke fun at a culture that is so ignorant of the rest of the world that it swallows the idea that there exists a whole country populated by boorish fools who have only incompletely made it to modernity.

Keep those guesses coming! (As long as it keeps you thinking.)