76

Randolph Lewis

Prankster Ethics: Borat and Levinas

Randolph Lewis University of Texas at Austin

This article explores the ethical implications of one of the most celebrated and controversial films of the past decade, Borai: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). The product of a comic provocateur named Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat was hailed as brilliant satire designed to expose the grotesque nature of American racism and antisemitisman interpretation that the filmmaker took pains to encourage. However, I ai-gue that Borat is a deeply problematic form of cultural intervention, one based on deceit, cruelty, and indiscriminate mockery. By re-framing the film in an intellectual context suggested by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, one of the key figures in modern ethics, I highlight the ways in which Borat is not the progressive text that its maker intended.

Almost a century aftet Chatlie Chaplin headed west to Hollywood, film audiences once again witnessed a sttangely mustachioed English actor who hid his social conscience undet a clown's baggy pants. As he wandeted the streets of Ametica in a foul-smelling suit, offeting love and ptovocation, slapstick and dismay, this Iattet-day ttamp was sold to audiences as something othet than a standatd issue comedian. Rathet than Will Fetrell in a basketball uniform or stat-crossed lovers chasing a sunken tteasure, the film was ftamed as an anti-racist project that happened to involve naked male wresding matches, Pamela Anderson, and a bag of feces. The smiling rube with the fixation on the Baywatch babe was, in fact, the leadet of a bold expetiment in situational ethics. Of coutse, I am desctibing the bigoted character that Sacha Baton Cohen performs in his quasi-documentaty sensation, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). What began as a sketch fot English television soon became one of the most intetesting media phenomena of tecent years, one that has teceived an astonishing amount of covetage in the ptess and statted more water cooler conversations than any movie since Mel Gibson beat the New Testament into submission. Yet some Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: Sror and Levinas

77

of the most revealing questionsregarding the ethics of the projecthave hardly been raised. For those unfamiliar with Baron Cohen's controversial schtick, the character of Borat is an ironic embodiment of Othernesshe is alterity played for yuks as well as sociological insight. In War without Mercy, his seminal study of World War II propaganda, historian John Dower describes how American newspapers painted the Japanese as animalistic, violent, authoritarian, sexually perverse, and religiously irrational. In the implausible guise of a Kazahkstani documentary producer in afilthy,ill-fitting suit, Borat updates these tendencies 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 will crush you!"); embraces authoritarian politics ("Vote for him or you be sorry!");.. and worships an entity known only as "the Hawk." The last bit seems designed to keep him from being read as explicitly anti-Muslim, a logical conclusion given the predominantly Sunni population of Kazahkstan. In any event. Baron Cohen gives us Otherization as social satirethe harmless ineptitude of "the foreigner" makes him unthreatening enough that his targets let down their guard and reveal their true selves. These ugly moments of revelation are what drive Baron Cohen: he is a filmmaker who relies upon comic entrapment of a high order. He is no mere prankster making obscene calls for our titillation. Instead, he presents himself as a moralist, a liberal idealist whose film exists so he can bring his fictional creation, the backwards Borat, onto the streets of America and expose the hatefiil views that are espoused, or at least tolerated, in the land of freedom fi-ies and liberty ale. Darting into the New York subway with a clucking chicken in one hand and a microphone in the other, Borat confronts the unsuspecting objects of his satire wherever he can find them: roly-poly frat boys, mystified driving instructors, frightened hotel clerks, and leering gun-nuts, all of whom are invited to share his absurd prejudices about women, Jews, and homosexuals. In a sense. Baron Cohen has reconfigured Candid Camera as
a moral litmus test: Do you agree with Borat or confront his noxious views? Do you smile nervously when he asks for the best SUV for "killing Gypsies" or do you

denounce him? Those interviewees who seem to endorse his point of view, like those who remain silent for whatever reason, are lumped into the seemingly coterminous categories of bigot and dupe. Not surprisingly, almost no one in the film passes the test (in part, one suspects, because principled opposition makes for dismal comedy). Yet does the film pass its own ethical test? Aft:er all. Baron Cohen is dealing (harshly) with real people for most of the film. To the extent that Borat is a documentary, we can hold it to the ethical standards that guide nonfiction
Vol. 30, No. 1

2011

78

Randolph Lewis

filmmakets. I tealize that such comic dissection is spoilsport to the core. It is a gtuesome task akin to peeling back the skin of a famous face to see what constitutes beautyot, to pay homage to one of Botat's notorious assaults on the Southern gentry, it is like defecating into a plastic bag at an elegant dinnet patty. At best, it's an awful necessity; at worst, the tuination of a good time. In my defense, let me point out that I did not launch the fitst ethical sttike. I am only responding to Baton Cohen's high ptofile claims about the ethical otigins of his wotk.""Boraf essentially wotks as a tool," Baron Cohen told Rolling Stone in a cover story about his film. "By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower theit guard and expose theit own ptejudice, whethet it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism." Because Baton Cohen claims that his ptoject is designed as social ctiticism rooted in his undetstanding of Jewish histoty and theology, and because he even ftames Borat as a response to the Holocaust, I am taking him on his own ethical tetms, which fot me, at least, should be guided by ethical considerations that have occupied philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas. The leap to Levinas may not be not obvious: he is not a funny philosophet, nor a philosopher ofthe fiinny, but he is at the centet of contempotaty ethical discussions, and like Cohen, his work arose in response to the Holocaust and its impact upon his family.'Just as Baton Cohen is undetstandably fixated on the treatment of the ""stranger" as a measure of a society"s decency, Levinas was focused on the tteatment of "'the Othet" as the foundation of ethical behaviot. Theit vety different tesponses to the same social ptoblem ate the subject of this atticle, in which I will suggest that Borat is not quite the progressive text that its maket intended (ot claims to have intended). Borat may be an expos of Ametican tacism in the satitical ttadition of Lenny Btuce ot Richatd Ptyor, but it is also a reckless and cynical project whose ""ethical framing" seems misguided if not self-serving. From an ethical point of view, I would argue that 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 kinds of humor. One of the best examples is Menachem Feuer and Andrew Schmidtz, "'Hup! Hup! We Must Tumble': Toward an Ethical Reading of the Schlemiel," Moder Fiction Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Spring 2008): 91-114. Levinas's ideas are central to their discussion ofthe ethics of che schlemiel, a key comic figure in Yiddish and Jewish American literature, which they trace through the work of Franz Kafka, I. B. Singer, and Nathan Englander.

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: Borat ana Levinas

79

Let me begin with an exercise in taxonomy that should establish why the ethical stakes are higher than in a typical Hollywood film. In its 2006 cover story. Rolling Stone gushed that Borat represents "one of the greatest comedies of the last decade and perhaps even a whole new genre of film." But it is not a "whole new genre of film": it is a documentary with some fictional elements, one of many hybrids now dotdng the documentary landscape, from the selfabusive stunt-meisters o Jackass to the brilliant and-corporate provocateurs known 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 and reality, beginning on the BBC in 1998 with the fake hip hop iriterviews of his popular "Ali G" character, and continuing to the summer of 2009, when Baron Cohen was undercover as "Bruno," a fake German fashion commentator who stars in the follow-up to Borat. Somehow the documentary qualides of Baron Cohen's work have received little attention, but what else could it be? Like Bruno, Borat features only a handful of actors in the midst of dozens of non-actors who have no idea about what is really happening. If Borat were predominantly or exclusively ficdonal, then it would be a mockumentary, as some reviewers erroneously concluded (The Washington Post fell into this camp).^ I cannot account for this gross mischaracterizadon except to suggest that it stems from the fictional nature of the protagonist and the "mocking" implications of the film. However, these qualides do not make Borat's "truth claims" (that most of what we see is authentic and unscripted) any less real. On the contrary, the film depends on the audience's accepdng its scenarios as genuine; we are not supposed to believe that the participants are simply actors of the sort used in mockumentades such as Meet the Rutles or Best in Show, two films in which the audience is expected to recognize the artificial, scdpted nature of events rendered in a nonfiction style. Indeed, Borat's particular/rissoM comes from the assumption that the objects of the sadre are genuinely unaware and not "part of the act"which makes it partially, if not predominandy, a documentary. Tellingly, the producers seemed to Agree: they described Borat as a "documentary-style film" in the legal document that interviewees signed so that their footage could be used.'

Hornaday, "Kazakh Zingers with Gale-Force Hilarity, 'Borat' Mockuinentary Takes America by Storm," Was/jm^fo Post, November 3; 2006, C-1. 'See http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/ll/17/entertainment /el04904S94.DTL

Vol. 30, No^ 1 2 0 1 1

I

80

Randolph Lewis

Recognizing the documentary aspect of Borat is relevant to assessing its ethical standing. After all, abusing an actor in a scripted scene is very different than inflicting the same punishment on an unwitting member of the public. To interact with the public on camera, documentary filmmakers have generally relied on the principle of informed consent, the notion that producers must divulge the full nature of the project to the people being interviewed. Instead of telling the truth about Borat, however. Baron Cohen and his producers treated their interviewees like "'marks' in a con game (to use the phrase Newsweek employed). Borat's producers used bogus names and cell numbers when they called potential interviewees, to whom they described a nonexistent relationship with "a Belarus TV station.""* It was the logic of a scam artist, not a principled satirist, and it was concealed behind a mountain of legal jargon on a convoluted release form whose purpose was to fend off potential litigation, not to provide a semblance of "informed consent." If anything, the producers secured ""deformed consent" through outright deception and a turgid legalese. By signing the document, the interviewee "agrees not to bring at any time in the future" any lawsuits or claims against the producer "or anyone associated with thefilm."It also states that the interviewee "is not relying upon any promises or statements made by anyone about the nature of the Film or the identity of any other Participants or persons involved in the Film."' In other words, interviewees were signing away their right to legal recourse everi if the producers misrepresented the real nature of the film. "I never felt like we tricked anyone in a cruel way," director Larry Charles says, before adding a note of ethical self-scrutiny:
When we were making the film, we had this almost Talmudic questioning of ourselves.""Who are wei' What do we really believe? How far are we willing to go? What is the line in the sand that were not willing to cross?'" We were constantly asking ourselves, ""Are we being fair? Do the ends justify the means?""'

The residents of Glod, the small town in Romania where several scenes were shot, would probably answer ""No." The production team paid small sums of money to villagers willing to appear in the film, but never explained the true nature of the project, which ended up ridiculing the Eastern Europeans as gro-

""Devin Gordon, ""Behind the Schemes,"" Newsiveefe, October 16, 2006. 'http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/ll/17/entertainment/ el04904S94.DTL
'Charles quoted in Kathleen Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen: The Unauthorized Biography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007), p. 213.

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics; oraf and Levinas

81

tesquely primitive. "We enduted it because we ate poor and badly needed the money," said one resident."But now we realize we were cheated and taken advantage of in the worst way."' One Romanian Gypsy was tticked into weating a fist-shaped dildo as a prosthetic limb, and he offered one of the many complaints about the ethics of Borat: "They conned us into doing all these things and never told us anything about what was going on."' Similar complaints were heard from American participants in the film, sevetal of whom filed lawsuits. "Lives have been ruined by this comedy," said one unwitting participant in the infamous "feces in a bag" dinner scene shot in Alabama. "I realize that some people will watch the movie and find it funny, but for the people who were duped into appearing what happened was anything but humorous."' Such deceptions are far from the standard of ethical docuihentary. Indeed, responsible documentarians do not accept the notion of "anything goes" that guided image making almost a century ago. In 1907, in response to the Getman government's attempts to prohibit'the photographing of any person or his property without his express permission," an American editorialist writing in The Independent filmed that such restrictions were ill-conceived and probably un-American: "As regards photography ih public it may be laid as a 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 appears under the mantel of artistic freedom, and one might defend Borat with the notion that an artist can put aside ethical considerations when working to fiilfill some personal visionthat, as visual anthropologist Jay Ruby has written disapprovingly, the artist has "license to transform people into aesthetic objects without theit knowledge and sometimes against their will."" However, scholars have increasingly rejected this cavalier attitude toward the ethics of representation. In the past twenty years scholars have even begun to fotmulate a set of ethical principles that can be applied to documentarians.'^ For instance. Jay

'Quoted in Kathleen Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen, p. 255. 'Quoted in Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen, p. 256. 'Sally Speaker quoted in Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen, p. 252. '"Excerpt from an editorial,''The Ethics and Etiquet [sic] of Photography," in TJje Independent from July 11,1907,107f, quoted in Larry Gross, Image Ethics: The Moral Rijts ofSubjects in Photography, Film and Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. v. "Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 143. '^Brian Winston has discussed the problenis with importing "full-scale ethical systems" into documentary practice, given the "realities of the media industries or the demands

Vol. 30, No. 1

2011

82

Randolph Lewis

Ruby has proposed an "ethics of image making" that would require filmmakers
to wrestle with a series of questions: Have I been true to the principle of informed consent? Does my desire to make this film outweigh the desire ofthe subject to maintain his or her privacy? Am I depicting the subject in a balanced way? Asking the

questions is the essential part of the process, because solid answers are often elusive. "The best one can hope for," Ruby claims, "is that image makers should demonstrate that they are wrestling with the issues," and he praises several films for achieving this level of ethical self-consciousness: K. Braum's passing girl/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 the issues" in some fashion, it probably wouldn't satisfy those who take seriously the ethics of image making. Indeed, Borat is a far cry from the quiet and thoughtfiil works of nonfiction that Ruby noted above: it is a mass-market product with an audacious agenda that combines humiliation and illumination. Baron Cohen may position his film as a principled expos of America intolerance, but his methods are crude and sometimes cruel to the unwitting participants in his project. Although some individuals in the film come across as reprehensible enough to warrant their publicflogging(if we can judge from the limited footage that appears on-screen), many interviewees seem to have been victimized more for sadistic laughter than sociological insight. I am thinking of the confused young hotel clerk who shrinks from a raving Borat; a straight-shooting driving instructor who parries Borat's strange commentary without giving offense; a gracious Southern hostess who tries to show Borat how to use the bathroom while he pushes the boundaries of good taste; a seemingly benign comedy teacher who is made to seem humorless and dull. No doubt, some individuals appear to deserve the wrath of Baron Cohen (the homophobic rodeo cowboy comes to mind), but it is difficult to defend his comic assault on all of 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 176
of the same volume. In Selfless Cinema?: Ethics And French Documentary (Oxford: Leg-

enda, 2006), her excellent book on Ftench documentary, Sarah Cooper asserts that the turn toward ethics in documentary studies was accelerated by the publication of Calvin Pryluck's"Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking," in Alan Rosenthal, ed.. New Challenges for Documentary (Betkeley: Univetsity of California Ptess, 1988), pp. 255-268.
"Ruby, Picturing Culture, 138.

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: orfli and Levinas

83

if an honest ptocess of infotmed consent had been followed. Imagine a ftank exchange between Baton Cohen and his prospective interviewees: "Hello, I am a prominent media figure hoping tp reveal the demons lurking within your fat-bellied Southern culture. Would you be willing to express your foul sentiments on camera? You may experience social humiliation and a powerfiil desire to litigate, but our ingenious release form will render you legally impotent. May I tum on the camera?" Obviously, the film could not exist in its present form without deception. ' Sutprisingly, most teviewets seemed to know litde about the problematic relationship between Baron Cohen and his interviewees (and few reviews of his most recent film, Bruno, seem concerned about it). After the film's extraordinarily successful release, it seemed to receive an ethical free pass, with reviewers seemingly blinded by Baron Cohen's claims of good intentions. Because the film was "built on firmly Jewish ethical foundadons," The Christian Science Monitor suggested that the filmmaker's noble aspiradons outweighed any problems in execudon.'"* Other reviewers were laughing too hard to think about ethics. Wridng in Time magazine, Richard Corliss noted his general discomfort with "ambush comedy," but then confessed, "With Borat... my ethical reservations ; wilt beneath the giddy pleasure this film gave and gives me."'^ ' Only a few small publications were willing to raise an ethicalVedflag.For example, Canadian Jewish News compared Borat unfavorably to ""the highly ethical behaviour of an earlier Jewish comedie impresario, Allan Funt, innovator ofthe Candid Camera series." Their article cast Funt as a thoughtfiil prankster whose popular television program was a reflecdon of a more innocent era. Much to his credit, Funt let his targets in on the gags, which wete fat mote innocuous in natute than being exposed as a knuckle-dtagging bigot.'* While Funt's camera regarded its subjects with compassionate bemusement as they stumble through surprising situadons (for instance, a car whose gas tank can never be filled). Baron Cohen has a colder outlook on human foibles and fallibility. Perhaps with this in mind, a professional ethics consuldng firm posted a comment on its website, cridcizing Cohen for turning "his targets' innate

''http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p20s01-almo.html ''http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1534437,00.html "http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.sp?id= 10723

Vol. 30, No. 1

2011

84

Randolph Lewis

kindness 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 conservative attacks on the film. While thefilm'sapparent rejection of political correctness might have appealed to some conservatives, pundits with an investment in populist rhetoric took umbrage at Borat's implied hostility toward heardand Americans. Writing in The New York Times, David Brooks fulminated that Borat provided a "supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation of the hoaxed hillbilly." Even fiirther to the right, Charles Krauthammer offered the same sort of critique, though with greaterfinessethan his ideological cousins at Fox. Perhaps forgetful that their corporate colleagues at 20th Century Fox had financed thefilm,reporters at Foxnews.com complained that ""America haters will love how Cohen uses Michael Moore-type scenarios to get his point across," adding without irony that "[i]f you want to enjoy good clean laughs this weekend, go see Flushed Away [a cartoon about English rats living in a sewer]."'* But ethics were not at the heart of the matter for most conservative commentators, who seemed primarily irritated by the film's apparent anti-Americanism. In fact, critics who really focused on ethics per se were sometimes scolded for their short sightedness or lack of humor. When The New York Times's resident "Ethicist" weighed in with a negative assessment of the film, an angry reader posted a response that suggested the real ethical lapses were in the objects of the satire, not the satirist: ""How ethical is it that people hold the views that Borat exposes in the films? Animal rights

"These comments appear on the "Ethics Scoreboard"' at http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/borat.htmi. The Scoreboard is a project of ProEthics, a professional ethics training and consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia. "A.S this quotation suggests, Moore is often evoked in discussions of Baron Cohen, even though their methods are quite different. What distinguishes the two is transparency. Despite a reputation for what his critics describe as careless chronology and slipshod analysis, Moore approaches his interviews without dissembling: he is simply "Michael Moore, muckraking filmmaker." This persona may be an artful blend of media performance and actual personality, but it does not misrepresent the nature of what he is doing. Unlike Baron Cohen, Moore is not a filmmaker working in disguise, nor is he a stealth satirist whose real point of view is hidden from interviewees. Like many documentary filmmakers, Moore may hope that his subjects will express outrageous sentiments that will make for compelling cinema, but he will not resort to blatant deception to achieve the goal. On the chronology controversy regarding Roger and Me, see B.J. Bullert, Public Television: Politics and the Battle over Documentary Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 146-182.

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: orflt and Levinas

85

protesters use covert cameras to expose cruelty to animals, so I see little dilemma with using decepdon to expose prejudiced views. The ends justify the (extremely fianny) nieans."" ' Some reviewers skated past the ethical quesdons by situating Borat in a larger tradidon of hard-edged social satire, although usually without making any qualitadve distincdons between Baron Cohen and the great stand-up comedians of the sixdes and sevendes. For example. Baron Cohen was sometimes compared to Andy Kaufman, even though the surreal American corhic usually confined his pranks to less problematic locations such as nightclubs, wrestling rings, and talk shows, where the nature of the prank was more obvious than it would be in the private homes or offices where Baron Cohen brought his crew. For comics like Kaufman, participadon did not hinge on a fundamental 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 public performance, such as the women willing to wrestle him onstage. Baron Cohen has also been compared to comics who skewer their own audience, although I would put most of them in a different ethical category as well. Lenny Bruce or Don Rickles certainly offended audience members with rude comments, but presumably everyone in the room was aware that a working comic was onstage. Everyone had purchased a ticket and knew that they were sitting in a nightclub observing a performance. Even when Lenny Bruce launched into a string of racial epithets, he eventually made his point clear: he was offering a socio-linguistic lesson iri the nialleability o words, not literally attacking people on the basis of race or religion. He never left town without explaining the fiill nature of his schtick, something that Baron Cohen was eager to do. Moving from stand-up to cinema, we might also compare Cohen to an older generation of Jewish comic filmmakers, most notably Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, each of whom took a different approach to exposing andsemitism and other bigotries. Although the antisemitism of the American heartland was richly imagined in the family diriner scene in Annie Hall, Allen has never made films as crypto-sociological treatises. As David Desser and Lester D. Friedman have argued, Allen's ""cinema participates little in the search for social jusdce, a point for which he has been criticized, most often by Jew-

"http://movies.netscape.com/story/2006/10/24/the-ethicist-on-how-borathoaxed-america

Vol. 30, NO. 1 2 0 1 1

86

Randolph Lewis

ish critics."^" Generally, Allen seems to have other concerns, and uses cinema to work out personal issues related to sex, death, and the Eutopean att film tradition. Mel Brooks might seem to offer a better comparison among Jewish comedie filmmakers, but again Baron Cohen does not compare favorably. Like Cohen, Brooks "delights in attacking phonies and bigots" and fuels his art with "a sense of anget gtowing out of his Jewish heritage and battles with antiSemitism."^' Howevet, Btook's attacks ate much more abstract than Cohen's one-on-one confrontations with unsuspecting subjects. Fot instance, Btooks's The Producers (1967) depicted a fictional Broadway audience delighting in a Nazi musical that was intended to repulse, whereas Cohen makes the same point about American callousness (or indifference) using real people. I suspect that Baron Cohen has avoided ethical sctudny in part by being so wickedly funny, and in patt by employing a progressive rhetotic of social good and noble intentions. When asked about the film, Larry Rubin, a former director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said, "I can see that it's supposed to skewer anti-Semitism." Even if "some people don't get it," Rubin atgued that Baron Cohen's "heart is in the right place."^^ Once again, Borat seems to have escaped ethical sctutiny. Perhaps the best point of compatison fot Borat is not in Mel Btooks's comedie filmmaking not Andy Kaufman's stand-up comedy, but in the more recent television ptankstets who appeat on MTV's Punk'd and Comedy Centtal's The Daily Show, both of which ate engaged in sttaight-face tuses with unsuspecting people. Yet even these ptogtams cteate fewet ethical hazards than Borat. On Punk'd, duplicity is aimed at the host's celebrity ftiends and is then tevealed on-cameta (and unlike Borat, legal teleases ate signed afier taping). The Daily Show and its offspting such as The Colbert Report also fate bettet than Borat in tetms of "prankster ethics." Although some sketches on The Daily Show share Baron Cohen's willingness to keep the joke running well aftet the cameras have stopped, the point of theit satire is not usually as razor sharp as Baron Cohen'susually, it involves dimness, eccentticity, ot miscommunication that, at least so fat, has not ptompted a defamation lawsuit from an injured party. And unlike Borat, The Daily Show's correspondents do not lie about theit identity ot the name of theit ptogram: at wotst, they might

^"David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004; second ed.), p. 38. ^'Tynan quoted in Desser and Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers, p. 123. "http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p20s01-almo.html

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: oraf and Levinas

87

encourage their interviewees to overlook the program's ironic intent (i.e., the notion that spoofing, not information, is the goal ofthe interview). Compared to the flurry of lawsuits surrounding Borat's exposure of racist/homophobic tirades, Tbe Daily Show's penchant for comedie misrepresentation has ap- peared relatively harmless. To put the ethics of Borat into a broader intellectual context, I would like to turn to Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher whose major works. Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974),

have become increasingly important in the years since his death in 1995. Like Baron Cohen, Levinas rooted his work in Judaism (he wrote Talmudic commentaries) and saw it as a response to the horrors ofthe Holocaust that tore apart his family (Baron Cohen's comedie provocations were partially inspired by historian Ian Kershaw's notion that "the path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference").^' Levinas's Otherwise than Being was dedicated to the millions "who were victims of the same hatred of the other, the same anti-Semitism." Yet his response to antisemitism was very different from Cohen's. Where the young satirist chose to represent "the other" with a cheeky sadism, the esteemed philosopher believed in what he called the "irreducibility" ofthe other, the sense that we cannot understand other people well enough to represent them without great care, and that how we relate to them is our most crucial ethical dilemma. Perhaps there is nothingfiannyabout Levinas, who generally offers a dour tonic to the postmodern soul. Again and again, we see the same moment in his writings: "I find myself facing the Other... ."^"' This image appears throughout his work with considerable drama and force. Indeed, he puts the encounter between self and stranger at the core of his ethical project, one that proposes radical humility and profound responsibility toward the Other.. Where previous philosophers had made metaphysics into our "first philosophy," Levinas saw a basic self-centeredness in the constant questioning of being. To transcend the self, Levinas proposed that ethics should be our "first philosophy," even if the rewards are unknowable. Our responsibility to others is not based on the expectation of reciprocal treatment; instead, we must expect nothing in return. In The Humanism ofthe Other, he points to the "insatiable compassion"

^'Kathleen Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen: The Unauthorized Biography, p. 33.

^""Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 30.

Vol. 30, No. 1 2 0 1 1

88

Randolph Lewis

that Dostoyevski asctibes to a chatacter in Crime and Punishment. That is the model to which we must aspire in Levinas's ethical universe. Coming face-toface with the Other, we must allow ourselves to feel ""the gravity of the love of one's fellowman." Although Levinas once complained that love is a "worn-out word," I think that is what he is talking about.^' The relevance of his ethics to documentaty has only begun to be exploted. The most sustained analysis of the connections appeats in the recent work of
Sarah Cooper. In her book Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary,

Cooper observes that much of Levinas's project tevolves atound an anecdote ftom Plato's Republicthe story of Gyges, the shepherd who discovers a magical ring that makes him invisible. Using his newfound powers for personal gain, Gyges tricks his way onto the throne ofthe kingdom. For Levinas, his acdons are reprehensible. Selfish, stealthy, and deceitfiil, Gyges embodies all that ethical behaviot must resist. Although Levinas wrote almost nothing about cinema, I believe that he would find litde to admire in Cohen's comedie project. After all, Cohen puts on the persona of Borat as if he has found a ring of invisibility that exempts him from social justiee. With his elaborate persona eoneealing his own faee, Cohen disappears from view without seeming concerned about the impact of his deceit on his interviewees. If the deception has wounded them on-camera (or later), Cohen offers no solace other than to point to the ethical motivations behind his wotk. Rathet than ttusdng the othet, he skewets ftom behind his comic mask, convinced that he is going out ""into a crowd of people who hate you," as he told Rolling Stone. In a manner that tutns Levinas on his head, Cohen substitutes hilatious sadism for selfless humility. Baton Cohen cteates a ftum fot engaging the othet, but it is ptobably not in a fotm that Levinas would have appteciated. As Jefftey Mutray has pointed out, Levinas demands a "dialogic engagement"" that allows us to gtasp the other in ways that transcend the superfieial level of appearanees. If we are uneertain about what we are seeing or hearing, then we must seek clarificadon rather than accepting what we sense at first glance. For Murray, this is as simple as asking, "Did you mean to say . . . ?"^* Baron Cohen could have invited such clarifications when the objects of his sadte expressed dubious opinions, but I doubt he was listening beyond whatever he heatd on the surface. Instead, he

"Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 187. ^'Jeffrey W Murray, "The Other Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas: Communication Beyond Relativism," in Sharon L. Bracci and Clifford G. Christians, eds.. Moral Engagement in Public Life: Theorists for Contemporary Ethics (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), p. 182.

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: Borat and Levinas

89

moved in the opposite direction, toward comic disconnection (in the form of "discovering" racist attitudes). By poking at the prejudices Baron Cohen might have provided an opportunity for his targets to acquit themselves, but more likely he was ""milking" the joke to the very last drop, or what might be seen as the revelatory ""gotcha" moment in which racism is exposed. Indeed, the Borat project was dependent on'"documenting" repulsive attitudesthe $17 million dollar project could not exist without them. Given this dependence on expressions of ill will as comic fodder. Baron Cohen and his producers might have been tempted to entrap and exaggerate (through editing) whatever darkness they could tease out. I am not claiming innocence for the subjects of Borat. Instead, I am suggesting 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: Arizona cowboys who seem to sing along with Borat's nasty song, "Throw the Jew Down the Well," may not be the antisemidc troglodytes that they seem on first glance. Some may be unsure of what is being said; some may be indulging a strange foreign visitor with a camera crew; some may not be paying attendon. Yet the edidng of the scene casts them all in the same unflattering light. With a hint of defensiveness. Baron Cohn admits that the scene fails to clearly establish his point that these people are antisemitic rednecks: "Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semidsm."^' Again, Baron Cohen may mean well, but his film actually performs an ethical disservice in Lvinasian terms: by giving us a caricature, he makes it more difficult to see the face of the other.^* Baron Cohen has talked about feeling persecuted in public: perhaps a more ethical response would offer conciliation rather than comic aggression.

"http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/sacha_baton_cohen_the_real_borat_finally_speaks/page/3 ^'Levinas often wrote with Martin Buber in mind. His writings arefilledwith a respectful, but careful, distancing between philosophies that might seem quite similar on first 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 is based on what one writer summarizes as ""mutuality, open-heartedness, directness, honesty, spontaneity, frankness, lack of pretense, non-manipulative intent, communion, intensity, and love." Unfortunately, Borat has much more in common with the "I-It" relation, which is based on ""self-centeredness, deception, pretense, display, appearance, artifice, using, profit ... exploitation, and manipulation." See Richard L. Johannesen, Ethics in Human Communication (Prospect Heights, II.: Waveland Press, 1983), pp. 64-66, quoted in Murray,""The Other Ethics," p. 189.

Vol. 30, No. 1

2011

90

Randolph Lewis

As Levinas has written, "The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumadc effect of persecution, of my freedom as a consdtuted, willfiil, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible. . . . I am "in myself through the others."^' But Baron Cohen wanted it both ways, to unleash his aggression while at the same time claiming the ethical high ground that we might associate with a careful student of Levinas. As I've tried to suggest throughout this article, these positions are incompatible, and because Baron Cohen seems unlikely to give up the aggressive element of his work, he should not be allowed to elevate his project into something that it is not, at least not without inviting careful scrutiny from skeptical observers. Of course, his disingenuous frame is not the only problem with Borat. Even if he stopped framing it as a noble effort to unmask the ugly face of the heartland bigot, it would hardly erase Borat's ethical shortcomings, which are woven into the fabric of the film fi'om the moment of its conception as something closer to cynical ""gotcha" journalism than thoughtful ethical intervention. Yet acknowledging the real nature of the film, whether in the production stage as unsuspecdng people are confronted with camera, or later when the film is being marketed in a way that will make it ethically palatable to sensitive viewers, would at least have the virtue of honesty. To explore a more transparent approach to the film in which its aggression and deceit could be acknowledged as core elements, rather than obscured behind inappropriate references to the Holocaust and higher purposes, we might return to the time of Levinas's birth, when French philosophy was dominated by another figure, also Jewish, but far more secularHenri Bergson. For Bergson, laughter must be cruel because it serves a cruel function: it is a social disciplinarian. Writing in 1900, Bergson argued that humor arises from our observation of inflexible behavior "where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being" (i.e., a slapstick scene in which a minister tumbles into a pothole because he is reading a Bible as he walks). Of particular relevance to Borat is the passage in Bergson's famous treatise on laughter in which he writes that society is "suspicious of all I N E L A S T I C I T Y of character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separat-

"Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 112, quoted in Michael Renov, ITje Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 161. One of the leading theorists of nonfiction film, Renov describes his intellectual debt to Levinas throughout this fascinating volume.

Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: orflf and Levinas

91

ist tendencies, that inclines to swervefi'omthe common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity." In other words, Bergson believed that the comic must be the policeman of "unsociability," by which he meant socially divisive attitudes or practices. The prejudice that Borat exposes seems to fit the bill: it breeds division, suspicion, and even violence that undermine the ""utilitarian aim of general improvement" that Bergson prized so highly. If we laugh at the inelasticity of mind that bigotry represents, perhaps we are howling at Borat's victims because of their rigid adherence to an older code of racial and gender hierarchy, not to mention their lack of "wide-awake adaptability" of the sort that would allow them to get the joke. If we entertain the Bergsonian perspective fot a moment, we might atgue that Borat makes a significant ethical contribution with its sharp corrective of deviant behaviors, even if it violates every dictum of interpersonal ethics that 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 filmmakeraccording to Betgson, the comic must have a hard heart in order to fulfill his or her social fiinction. Had nature not"implanted in the best of men, a spark of spitefialness" necessary to engage in satire, then society would have lost an important tool for converting ""rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners wherever they are met with." Bergson even recognized the pitfalls of writing about laughter: the scholar "who gathers a handfiJ to taste may find that the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter."'" No matter how well intended, the unkind humor of Borai may leave a bitter after-taste, one that is unavoidable in wotld in which the exceptionally flinny and the exceptionally cruel are intertwined as Bergson suggests. Although Levinas suggests a gentler path that would replace Borat's distortions of the Other with an honest dialogue about difference, one that I find much more ethical in its implication, Bergson suggests that the satirist must wear ""the cruel shoes" that Steve Martin once wrote about in his own comic prose. Or perhaps the satirist must accept that, as Mai-tin entitled his 1979 stand-up album, "Comedy Isn't Pretty." But this Bergsonian line of thought has its own limitations: aft:er all, it is a form of functionalism that merely explains""what is?" without asking "what should be?" Borat might serve a valuable

'"All quotes from The Project Gutenberg Etext of Henri Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, http://www.gutenberglorg/dirs/etext03/oaemcl0.txt. For a wonderful analysis of Bergson's views on humor, see Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (Thouasand Oaks, CA.: Sage, 2005), pp. 111-138.

Vol. 30, No. 1

2011

92

Randolph Lewis

corrective function in exposing problematic behaviors, but that doesn't exempt it from ethical scrutiny, especially when it is dealing with ordinary people who have been conned into participating. If the filmmaker was willing to trick his subjects into appearing on camera, how can we trust the editing and marketing of the film? What 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 do have other characters, actually, that I want to start developing in the next six months," Baron Cohen told Rolling Stone in 2006. "But I think it's going to be harder to do stuff in a reality setting. I'm just really looking forward to starting to do movies on set." Reality is not worth the headache (ethical, legal, logistical) for a comic who can create almost everything he needs in a studioexcept, perhaps, the/r5so that made his quasi-documentary something unusual on the postmodern mediascape: an outrageously sadistic satire with self-described good intentions. A paradox of ostensibly progressive ideals and abusive technique, Borat suggests that what is right is not fiinny, and what is funny is not right, but this dichotomy is an illusion: from Duck Soup to Richard Pryor, there has always been a middle ground of ethical humor in which the hypocrisy of the powerful is exposed and the ensuing laugher is rooted in a sense of justice and delight. Where Baron Cohen erred was in aiming at the powerless, deceiving them into participation, presenting their apparent prejudices as indisputable fact, and then congratulating himself for providing an innovative response to social pathologies. Earlier I described the Bergonsian approach to humor, which at least would have the virtue of candor. In pointing this out, I do not mean to gloss over Baron Cohen's ethical shortcomings, which I find serious and disturbing, but rather to argue for greater transparency and less self-deception in how such projects are presented and understood. Instead of framing his comic barbs in a self-interested rhetoric of social uplift, thereby hiding the deeper contours of his project behind an ethical smokescreen. Baron Cohen might have been satisfied with the considerable laughter and public attention that his work provokes. In this more transparent mode, he might have flaunted the hilarious cruelty of his bold project, avoided ethical justifications altogether, and allowed his audience to make up their own minds about the decency of his endeavor. As ofthe summer of 2009 when he released Bruno, the controversial follow-up to Borat, Baron Cohen seemed to have learned this lesson, remaining silent about the film and its intentions as it made its way into widespread release and more than $137,000,000 in worldwide box office. However, without his distracting commentary about the ethical underpinnings of his work, its harsh undercurrents seemed to have attracted greater attention. As one Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Prankster Ethics: orat and Levinas

93

wtitet noted in Esquire magazine in response to the reeerit film, ""the laughter is a little too easy in its eruelty and too pernieious in its influence. We live in a great era for pranks, but it's also a great era for' fraud, and the two are inextricably linked. Why do we love to wateh the public humiliadon and betrayal of perfeet strangers?"" Echoing as it does the great ethieal inquiries of Levinas, this simple quesdon is one that we might well pose to filmmaker and audienee alike.

"Stephen Marche, "Wny We Can't Let the Brunos and Madoffs Play Us Anympre," sqMre,June23,2009.

Vol. 30, No. 1

2011

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.