"A Documentary-Style Film": Borat and the Fiction/Nonfiction Question

Lewis MacLeod

Narrative, Volume 19, Number 1, January 2011, pp. 111-132 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press DOI: 10.1353/nar.2011.0001

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nar/summary/v019/19.1.macleod.html

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Lewis MacLeod

A Documentary-Style Film: Borat and the Fiction/Non ction Question

e literary reader . . . and a fortiori the literary critic, are not particularly interested in the truth value of a literary text, or the ontological status of the literary referent. Anna Whiteside, eories of Reference (175) e ontological question (what is real?) . . . dominates all other basic questions in our society. Siegfried J. Schmidt, Beyond Reality and Fiction (91)

e bizarre ontological position of Sacha Baron Cohens lm, Borat, is amply demonstrated by the fact that Baron Cohen won a Golden Globe award for best actor for his performance in the movie, while the vast majority of his co-stars signed standard consent agreements to appear as themselves in a documentary-style lm (Twentieth Century Fox). If Ive got this logic right, Baron Cohen was recognized for his exceptional and comprehensive ability to become someone other than himself, his ability to act out a ctional identity, while the people he shares the screen with wereand arereal historical subjects. If youve seen Borat, its not hard to understand the degree to which the lm puts the seemingly polarized categories of documentary and ction under pressure. Whats harder to unpack, I think, is the nature of this pressure and its implications, both for those involved with the movie and for those, like me, who are interested in the ontological and/or functional distinctions between ctional and non ctional discourses. In one sense, the simultaneousness of the movies excessive, caricaturish ctionality and its documentary dimension might signal Baudrillards murder of the real, the degree to which the real and the ctional have become interchangeable, and, conseLewis MacLeod is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Trent University. He writes about Modern and Contemporary British Literature, as well as West Indian and African literature. His work has appeared in many journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Mosaic, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and ARIEL. NARRATIVE, Vol 19, No. 1 (January 2011) Copyright 2011 by the Ohio State University

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quently, the pointlessness of di erentiating between the two. e fact that real people have sincere and (for them) un-ironic exchanges with a pretend narrative construction might well demonstrate what Zygmunt Bauman calls the weak, slack and underpowered institutionalization of di erences produced by postmodernity (123). Still, the outcry the movie has produced (its capacity to generate lawsuits, in uence international relations, invite and refute charges of racism and anti-Semitism, etc.) seems to suggest that, far from reinforcing Lyotards anything goes notion of postmodernity (76), the lm works to highlight a continuing anxiety about what reality might mean under a perhaps underpowered and underinstitutionalized, but still operational, preoccupation with truth and falsity. Indeed, Borats documentary dimension might well be part of what Linda Williams calls a new hunger for reality on the part of a public seemingly saturated with Hollywood ction (62). I think Linda Hutcheon has it right when she says the situation is not that truth and reference have ceased to exist [but rather] that they have ceased to be unproblematic issues (Poetics 223). Here, Id like to investigate the nature of fact, ction, truth, and reference in Borat, as well as suggest some ways we might account for the lms puzzling ontological position. e argument has two major phases. e rst section deals primarily with Borat (the character) and his relationships with what Im calling his addressees, the real people he encounters. is section has three main parts and examines the various cases for the ontological di erentiations between Borat and the people he encounters. e second major section also has three main parts and broadens the discussion to examine Borat (the movie) and its relationship with its implied audience. In this section, the ontological implications of irony are of particular importance. In Borat, Id like to suggest, the success and/or failure of irony is central to both the addressees and the implied audiences ontological categorization of Borat, with the result that the sincerity test we generally associate with irony simultaneously becomes a reality test. Ultimately, Id like to argue that, while Borat obviously and outlandishly irts with hyperreality, both its production and reception depend on documentary as a discourse of sobriety (Nichols 39), as a solid ground from which ction departs and to which, a er several complicated detours, it returns. In the end, Borat posits not a model of a real without origin (Baudrillard 2), but a complex and o en contradictory invocation of both reality and origin, an invocation that usually serves to privilege and protect Baron Cohen/Borat, to marginalize and expose the addressees, and to comfort and congratulate the lms implied audience.

BORAT AS FICTION: DISCONTINUITY BETWEEN BORAT AND THE ADDRESSEES

I think the fact that Borats addressees feel exposed and exploited is made clear by the multiple lawsuits led against the lm and its producers. Although all of the suits were unsuccessful, they point to several interesting matters to do with reality, sincerity, irony, and the nature/procedures of documentary lms. e fraternity boys from e University of South Carolina, embarrassed by their misogyny and drunken endorsement of slavery, claimed that they were plied with alcohol by the lm crew

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and that they were promised the movie would never be screened in North America. In making these claims, they argue for a separation between their sober and drunken identities, as well as a separation between the consumption of their identities by audiences in foreign and domestic contexts.1 Alabama etiquette coaches Cindy Streit and Kathie Martin, who endured Borats crassness at their dinner party, claimed their business was ruined by their appearance in the movie, that they can no longer operate as gures of elegance and sophistication because of their now-unavoidable associations with, among other things, bags of feces at the dinner table. For them, the encounter with the ctional Borat led to real-life nancial hardship, a hardship their lawsuit sought to redress. Michael Psenicska, the driving instructor who gamely attempted to keep Borat on the road, argued that his consent was fraudulently attained, that the producers preyed upon his generosity. As he put it, ey told me it was a documentary. But documentaries are about the Industrial Revolution, global warming, Winston Churchill, not what the hell he did (Fletcher). As Ill argue later, the question of what the hell he did is in many ways linked with the question of who the hell he is (Borat or Baron Cohen), but for now its important just to understand that, in almost every case, the lawsuits hinge not on whether or not the plainti s agreed to appear on screen with Borat (they did), but on whether or not the movie that was released corresponds with the description in the release form. Basically, the lawsuits hinge on the relationship between Borat and the category of lms we associate with documentary lms about Winston Churchill and the Industrial Revolution.2 Psenicskas articulation may seem a bit nave, but the procedural point he raises is complex, and the documentary dimension of Borat depends heavily on the strength and/or weakness attached to the second term in the standard consent agreements hyphenated construction, documentary-style. is hybrid term simultaneously makes a truth claim and admits an aesthetic dimension. As such, documentary-style might suggest a return to discursive notions of ctionality. at is, it suggests that the degree to which the lm departs from the factual/historical discourse of the documentary tradition is a matter of presentation, of style. Truman Capotes non- ction novel, In Cold Blood, is frequently gured in exactly this way: derived from historical fact, not generated by imagination but, because it borrows its stylistic approach from ction, more novel than biography. As many have noted, such an approach seems to subordinate historical data to the generative and situating processes of narrative. e non ction novel aestheticizes facts and, as a consequence, undermines the solidity of non ctions standard truth claims. Such a position is problematic in a variety of ways, of course. Although Dorrit Cohn has persuasively argued that the form of third-person omniscient narration is appropriate only to ction (a form that is, in any case, absent from Borat), it has been notoriously di cult to pin down, or even to sketch, what, exactly, a speci cally ctional language might look like. John Searle famously argued that utterance acts in ction are indistinguishable from the utterance acts of [normal, everyday] discourse (327), while in Truth, Fiction, and Literature Pierre Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen claim there is no language of ction (30). For Lamarque and Olsen, ctional status is determined by origin, not stylistics; ctional statements and entities are those that originate from a position within a ctional framework (59). In all

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of these articulations, the basic point is the same; style has no ontological dimension, even if it is essential to the success and/or failure of ction. Borat itself works as a test case for this position when we consider the various confrontations with police that occurred during its production. Confronted by real police (and CIA) seeking explanations about what he was up to, Baron Cohen remained in character as Borat, arguing a erward that he thought, there cant be a law against speaking in a funny voice to a policeman (Strauss). at is, the peculiar way he speaks to a policeman, his tone, cannot constitute deceit (or ctionalitythough theyre di erent) and consequently cannot be punishable by law. However much Borat may trouble the ction/non ction divide, the problems it presents are not discursive but referential and contextual in nature. Instead of thinking of documentary-style as a matter of poetics, I think its more productive to consider it in terms of the interpretive positions it encourages its addressees and implied viewers to adopt. Id like to suggest that the term is both deliberately misleading and an entirely accurate description of the movie. It quietly accounts for the movies ctional dimension, while loudly asserting its documentary status. e waiver, like the lm itself, then, is both a fabrication and a truth or, more speci cally, both pretend and real. For the people signing the waivers, I assume, the word style would register as a kind of legalistic and/or linguistic redundancy, like saying an Italian-style restaurant, or jazz-style guitar. All movies have some particular style; this one is a documentary. Reading style this way does absolutely nothing to discourage anybody from thinking theyve consented to appear in a standard documentary. In this reading, documentary-style and documentary are synonymous. For the producers, however, style is made to bear a tremendous amount of weight. It marks the disjunction between a real documentary and a movie thats simply procedurally similar to a documentary in a variety of ways. e lawsuits against the lms producers tend to zero in on the term, arguing that, documentarystyle lm does not describe Borat and, therefore, [the signatories] have not waived any right to bring claims against the defendant (Corcos). Unlike the funny voice argument above, the plainti s here are attempting to locate a referential disconnect between the waiver they signed and the movie that was produced. If the waiver does not refer to/point to/identify Borat, then they are still free to sue for defamation. If it does, they cant. e repeated failures of these lawsuits speak to the referential accuracy of the producers term. Despite the confusion, documentary-style describes Borat very well indeed, and I think the disconnection experienced by the addressees is the result of a genre-confusion more than a referential disconnect, an inability to conceive of the unique narrative position the lm adopts. Its like a documentary but dissimilar in several crucial ways. Importantly, Borats simultaneously ctional and documentary dimensions have very little to do with popular mockumentaries such as Waiting for Gu man or e O ce. In her argument on Borat and the study of documentary, Leshu Torchin erroneously argues, rst, that the mockumentary is a rapidly growing subgenre of the documentary, and, second, that Borat ts the mockumentary model (54). Neither statement is true, as the mockumentary is a straightforward and unproblematic mode

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of mimesis, not a subgenre of the documentary. Its stance is always ctional, and both the lms participants and its implied viewers unproblematically recognize it as such. In the mockumentary, the ontological status of the actors is never in doubt; they are simply pretending to make a documentary in the same way other actors pretend to be in love, work at banks, ght crime, etc. Borat contains some scenes which might be mockumentary in nature, most notably those dealing with his producer Azamat Bagatov (Ken Davitian), but the lm depends upon its movement out of the ctional mode of the mockumentary and into the borderlands of documentary. In Borat, we have a much more complicated ontological muddle than mockumentary can muster, one in which it is possible to speak meaningfully about (and to historically document) conversations that take place between two distinct entities (Borat and his various addressees), despite the fact that that there is only one historical referent.3 In the context of the documentary-style movie, various Americans are speaking to a gure identi ed as Borat. In the context of documentary history, theyre talking to themselves. In Narcissistic Narrative, Hutcheon speaks of the referential illusion that troubles realist ction, arguing that the search for the referent in ction destroys the integrity of the sign, canceling out the Saussurian signi ed by presuming a direct collusion between referent and signi er (94). For Hutcheon, ctional discourse is enacted by the reader to establish a heterocosm which is autonomous from the real world, with a resultant autonomy [for] the referents of literary signs in relation to real referents (96). Literary signs point to literary, not real, referents, and the two worlds are ontologically distinct. Madame Bovary and Don Quixote make crucial errors in world-designation when they fail to recognize the disconnection between the worlds stipulated by ction and the world of everyday experience. Whether were searching for idealized images of love and beauty, like Quixote, or for someone to assume a portion of our embarrassment and blame, like the Boratlitigants, it seems to be pointless to go looking in the real world for gures who are constituted/stipulated outside that world. Indeed, in what is to me one of the movies most extraordinary plotlines, Borat becomes enamored with Pamela Andersons Baywatch character C. J. and embarks on a cross-continent quest to nd and marry her. Originally seeking the character, not the actress, Borat is reminded by the addressees that C. J. isnt real; their reminders thus create an astounding pedagogical cycle in which documentary subjects un-ironically attempt to enlighten a ctional character about the ction/non ction divide. eyre trying to anchor him in reality while everything they say demonstrates how that anchor has given way, how theyre in no position to navigate between the real and the pretend. As the above indicates, Borat complicates Hutcheons heterocosm considerably because he operates in a ctional bubble more than a distinct ctional universe. He isnt a gure in a populated alternate world; instead, it seems, he is a ctional microcosmos unto himself (a cosmos recognized by the implied viewers of the lm but not by the addressees). e question, then, is how far the ctional canopy extends. If we think about Borat as a gure from a little heterocosm, the answer is fairly straightforward. We accept the boundedness of the ctional world and the speci c nature of ctional referents, and we conclude that Borat, unlike most of his addressees, only

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extends as far as the lm in which he appears. e divide between Borat and his addressees is, as omas Pavel puts it, a divide involving di erent domains, populated by di erent kinds of beings (42). As a ctional referent, he is contained in an autonomous heterocosm, and everything he says and does is oriented toward a ctional dimension which is continuous with neither the real world nor Sacha Baron Cohen. Everything that can be known about Borat is contained in the ctional world in which he operates.4

A NON DECEPTIVE PSEUDO PERFORMANCE: CONTINUITY BETWEEN BORAT AND THE ADDRESSEES
No such autonomy or discontinuity seems to exist for the people with whom Borat interacts. ey are subject to what Nicholas Rescher calls the descriptive inexhaustibility of real particulars (Possible Worlds 403), and the statement, Said/ did X during the lming of the movie known as Borat can, it seems, be unproblematically added to the list of valid descriptors attached to them. Although Borat is a gure from a (very, very tiny) possible, ctional world, he moves undetected (though certainly noticed) in the real world, and, as the real lawsuits make plain, his impact upon real people cannot be regarded as ctional in any ordinary sense. Borat is pretend, but the people he interacts with are gured as actual historical personages operating under a one-world model. e things they say to Borat are a matter of documentary, historical record, even though Borat himself is outside the scope of history. More importantly, perhaps, the addressees are recorded as themselves in the medium most people regard as the most historically authoritative, the living picture. As Siegfried Schmidt recognizes, video recordings claim to represent reality . . . much more strongly than . . . other sensory experiences (96). e addressees are caught on tape, not transcribed, described, or remembered, functionally guaranteeing the implied viewers acceptance of the historical accuracy of the account of their behavior. Deprived of the ctional discontinuity Borat enjoys, and without recourse to any heterocosm marking the boundary between their appearance in the movie and the rest of their lives, the addressees, it seems, must live with what they said and did in the movie. To me, this seems a little bit unfair. In Questions About the Nature of Fiction, Nicholas Rescher asks, can one produce ction by mistake? (33). To answer the question, he posits a dim-witted wouldbe historian who mistakes the Rambo lm series for a documentary and proceeds to construct historical accounts based on the data he nds in the lms. Such a history would, like ction, be a tissue of imaginary unrealities (33), but it wouldnt really be ction because, to return to Lamarque and Olsen, it doesnt originate from a ctional stance. In Reschers terms, the issue of intent is crucial (33).5 John Searle makes the same point at higher volume in e Logical Status of Fictional Discourse. I think these points are well-made, but, even if we accept that you cant write ction without intending to do so, might it be possible to be ctional without intending to be so? Is there a degree to which Hayden Whites meta-historicity might apply to historically identi able

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individuals unwittingly emplotted in a partly, but crucially, ctional narrative? Despite the apparently authoritative nature of the documentary videorecording, the statements of the addressees are not (to me) automatically historically authoritative in any straightforward sense because the statements of the addressees are uttered in such self-consciously constructed and ctionally charged contexts. If Borat is ctional and Borat forcefully dictates the terms of the conversation, the conversation itself might well be said to take place in context/world of his making (his own possible world), one which isnt necessarily continuous with everyday life. e addressees, then, might not unconvincingly argue that, just as they appear in a documentarystyle lm (subject to some, not all, the conditions of documentary) they have also appeared in a ctive-style lm, and, as a result, that they should bene t from this ctional license. Another way to think about this issue is to imagine a conversation between two old friends, one in the grip of dementia, the other not. When the deluded person sees a non-existent dog and asks his friend to pet it, the sane friend might reasonably perceive the pointlessness of attempting to correct his friend and move his hand in a petting motion. In such a circumstance, he will have performed the action as himself (he didnt take on a new and discontinuous pretend character), but he will have acted as himself in a ctional context of somebody elses construction, and, more importantly, he wont readily consent to the accusations that he is delusional when somebody shows him a videotape of himself petting the non-existent puppy. Hell just say he was compelled by a crazy context to act in ways that make him look crazier than he really is.6 Of course, the apparent authority of video is, in itself, problematic in its claims to transparent historical accuracy. As Schmidt notes, previous renderings of images and narratives (paintings, stories, etc.) overtly conveyed the fact that they had been fabricated, [while] photographyespecially lm, television, and videohas concealed with increasing e ectiveness the constructivity of [its] picture-making (96). Film, like all modes of storytelling, is generative, but because the constructivity of the lming process is e ectively concealed, the addressees appear to be straightforwardly revealing themselves, when they are in fact quite speci cally emplotted. e illusion of transparency (and/or the under-recognized constructivity) that the lm engenders is especially pronounced when the precise meaning of documentary-style is never made clear.7 Obviously, Borats addressees are like Reschers duped historian in terms of their ontological confusion, but, unlike the duped historian, theyre not really narrating anything beyond a broadly de ned idea of a constant (meta)life-narrative. Instead, I think the addressees are narrated by Borat/Baron Cohen insofar as they are positioned and produced by a force with surplus knowledge in order to produce speci c narrative results.8 As a result, the documentary dimension of Borat isnt any kind of hands-o , cinema verit a air but rather a highly invasive one in which subjects are staged and temporally manipulated by the docu-auteur (Williams 63). More to the point, the docu-auteur, Borat, isnt even unproblematically non ctional. If the addressees operate inside a scenario constructed by an author/creator and conducted by a ctional character, isnt their unproblematically secure position within documentary reality at least a little bit compromised by this process? Patrick ONeill argues

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that the world of story is an experiment, a provisional reality under constant observation from above, with the result that each character in a story is akin to a specimen in a display case, a prisoner in a bell-jar (41). In Borat, I think the addressees are observed in just this way by both the lmmakers and the implied viewers, people who see and know more about the plot than any specimen ever can. e addressees, then, arent just asked to pet a non-existent dog by a powerless and delusional friend. Instead, they are in many ways compelled from above (in the form of the cultural authority of the lm crew, the consent agreements, etc.) to participate in a delusion they cant fully comprehend or control. Given their status as narrative markers without knowledge of, or access to, the overall narrative framework in which they operate, shouldnt they be a orded at least some portion of Borats ctional immunity? If Borat is a kind of ctional autobiography, a narrative in which a pretend gure documents the events of his pretend life, wouldnt it make sense that the gures he encounters be at least a little bit ctional too?9 e ontological separation between Borat and his addressees, of course, depends upon on our acceptance of a one-man ctional world, a supposition that is neither intuitive nor in keeping with many theories of ctional discourse. A one-man heterocosm seems to shi the metaphor from a spatial one (which provides a platform for a variety of agents) to a narrowly de ned identity-speci c one that begins and ends with a single entity. More directly, it seems like cheating. Lamarque and Olsen note that the ctive dimension of stories (or narratives) is explicable only in terms of a rule-governed practice, central to which are a certain mode of utterance (the ctive utterance) and a certain complex of attitudes (the ctive stance) (32). From the perspective of the addressees, at least, Borat violates all of these conventions. It trades upon ctional utterances which the addressees process outside the ctional stance. According to Lamarque and Olsen, Borat cant have its cake and eat it too. If theres no ctional stance, theres no ction. e lms implied viewers clearly encounter a ctional character named Borat, but, in many ways, the addressees are victims of a much more straightforward form of deceit. Searle famously called ction a nondeceptive pseudo performance and delineated the uses of the word pretend in an illuminating way (325). In one sense of pretend, he writes, to pretend to be or to do something that one is not doing is to engage in a form of deception, but in the second sense of pretend, to pretend to do or be something is to engage in a performance as if one were doing or being the thing and without any intent to deceive (324). According to Searle, ction is pretending [only] in the second sense (325). So, while the implied viewer processes Baron Cohen acting as if he is Borat, the addressees do not. For them, pretending operates only in the rst sense. If we take ctionality to be a two-part structure involving both sender and receiver, then Borat and his addressees must exist on a similar ontological level. To overstate things a little, theres a line of argument that might compellingly claim that the argument for selective discontinuity (between Borat and Baron Cohen but not between the addressees and their real identities) is both unethical and unworkable; either both sides of these exchanges ought to be on the documentary/historical hook for what they say, or neither side should be.

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FICTIONAL CONTENT REBOUNDS: BORAT, KAZAKHSTAN, AND THE THRESHOLD OF ACTUALITY

What Ive outlined above, I hope, are the basic cases to be made for positioning Borat as ctional or non ctional, for the continuity or discontinuity between Borat and the addressees. Lyotards claim that were in a cultural context in which anything goes is signi cantly challenged by both the legalistic cries of foul-play from the addressees and the theoretical emphasis on the rule-bound nature of ctionality. Indeed, the truth-di erentiating impulses of both the litigants and the theorists speak to the desire for clear, or at least workable, distinctions between what is real and what is pretend or, more generally, between what is serious and what is not. Borat clearly frustrates this desire, of course, but it also relies on it. Borat needs the conventions associated with both ction and non ction to have its e ect. In this phase of the argument, I would like to employ and extend some of Lubomr Doleels and omas Pavels ideas about ctionality and factuality in an e ort to account for both Borats historical non-reality and his clear historical presence. e result, I hope, is a way of approaching Borat outside both established notions of ctionality and the tradition of documentary certitude, an approach that comes close to accounting for the simultaneousness of Borats formidability and his immateriality. In Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Doleel arguescontra many of the thinkers addressed in previous sectionsthat the one-person world is the most felicitous and instructive starting point for ctional semantics (37). is position clearly accommodates Borat in an especially advantageous way, but it also simultaneously creates a discursive territory outside both rigid boundedness and collectivized rule-governed practice. And, if we accept the legitimacy of singularly stipulated ctional structures, we have room to discuss more idiosyncratic ctional formations, formations which are central to Pavels view of the relationship between ction and non ction. Without lapsing into anything like pan ctionality, Pavel uses the singularly stipulated nature of ctional structures to redirect the discussion away from normative procedures and toward the exibility of ctional worlds and their readiness to enter into the most diverse arrangements (136). In particular, Pavel describes scenarios in which ctional content . . . rebounds and enters into what he calls the really real world (84, 57). Cult and ction di er merely in the strength of the secondary [ ctional or mythic] universe, he writes; When su cient energy is channelled into mimetic acts, these may leave the ctional mode and cross the threshold of actuality (60). is threshold of actuality is precisely where Borat resides, and it is the very seriousness with which he is treated (the more than su cient energy channelled into his unsignalled-but-still-mimetic acts by his unwitting addressees) that makes him so potent. Even if almost everybody regards Borat as deranged and deluded, nobody feels Borat to be pretend. As a result, his ctionality is functionally suspended for the addressees, even though his overall ontological status remains static for the implied viewers. W. I. omas famously argued that, if men de ne situations as real, they are real in their consequences (57172). All the trouble Borat has caused seems to make his functional reality plain.

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Yet, even if we accept that the threshold of actuality can be crossed, there remains the important question of how a gure such as Borat comes to be de ned as real in the rst place, how broad caricature can be rendered so unrecognizable as to cross the threshold of actuality and be regarded as real. I think this question has a lot to do with two di erent types of otherness: the ontological otherness of ction and the cultural otherness of the foreign. Pavel has suggested that ction and reality involve di erent domains, populated by di erent kinds of beings and has argued that ctional worlds operate at di erent degrees of remoteness from the readers inhabited world (42, 90). Worlds with a high degree of remoteness, domains which appear vastly di erent from the readers daily world, can create interpretive problems when the reader attempts to process and/or assimilate the ctional world. Id like to suggest that Borats addressees gure Kazakhstan as an extraordinarily remote domain, one capable of producing a being as radically di erent as Borat. at is, Borats high-volume performance of cultural di erence escapes ctional detection because, to the addressees, Kazakhstan functions as an unmarked and open cultural space, a domain almost as remote as ction, one which accommodates misogyny and primitivism the same way some ctional domains accommodate unicorns and fairy godmothers. Borat manifests himself in everyday life, but he is emphatically not subject to the codes which govern the everyday. If he were, hed be much easier to deal with. If Borat were a straightforward gure from everyday life, of course, he would also be subject to the codes that govern the everyday life of which he is a part. If a regular person arrives at the dinner table with a bag of poop, censure would be swi ly forthcoming, but when Borat brings his bag, nobody gets especially upset. What this situation demonstrates, I think, is that Borat is simultaneously too present (physically) to be felt as ctional and too distant (behaviorally) to be regarded as fully real. His high-volume otherness, the degree to which he functions as an unfathomable representative of a far-o order, someone capable of almost anything, makes him appear as something decidedly outside everyday life, as an a ront to any one-world model of reality. Cultural content, like ctional content, then, can rebound out of one zone and into another, and this threshold-crossing capacity makes it di cult for the addressees to situate and evaluate Borat. Hes obviously here but, as obviously, out there. He is a formidable manifestation from another realm with unfathomable values and capacities. As a result, and perhaps counter-intuitively, his caricaturish behavior demands that he be treated more, not less, seriously than regular people.

DOES HE REALLY MEAN IT?: SINCERITY RULES AND THE FUNCTION OF IRONY
Up to now, Ive been framing this discussion in terms of ontology, in terms of possible/ ctional worlds, their exibility, and their capacity to rebound into actuality. In the remainder of this argument, I would like to try to redirect the discussion and to approach Borat in terms of its very speci c uses of irony.10 I also want to address the relationship between irony and ontology, the ways in which irony does and does not work to execute an ontological shi . Searle includes a sincerity rule for all success-

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ful and serious illocutionary acts, arguing that an assertion can only be made if the speaker commits himself to a belief in the truth of the expressed proposition (322). If we take ironic use as antithetical to sincere use, then Searles argument might work to restore both the non-serious ctionality of Borats utterances and the documentary seriousness of those of the addressees. Ironic use might restore the discontinuity between Borat and the addressees. Since no historically existent personage commits himself to the propositions Borat expresses, they can be neither real nor true. When Borat says he wants to hang homosexuals, no documentary illocutionary act occurs. When Rodeo Manager Bobby Rowe says the same thing, an assertion has been made. Im interested in the degree to which the ontological divide between real and pretend can also be imagined as a distinction between sincere and ironic, serious and non-serious, utterances. Although the addressees dont understand the nature of their position, theyre the only ones making assertions in Searles sense because everything Borat says is secretly in ironic quotes. He doesnt really mean it. Or, more precisely, Baron Cohen doesnt really mean it, even if Borat does. Borats anti-Semitism and the level of ironic distance between Baron Cohen and his character have, of course, produced a variety of responses questioning the appropriateness of overtly racist, misogynist, and homophobic humor.11 ese matters are important, of course, but Im particularly interested in Baron Cohens strategies for de ecting and/or defusing these issues. Borat depends on the implied viewers, but not the addressees, ability to di erentiate between Baron Cohen and his character, yet at the time of Borats release Baron Cohen was extraordinarily reluctant, both inside and outside the lm, to acknowledge that divide. As Torchin recognizes, both Borat and Borat refuse to provide a clear backstage (60). eres no straightforward acceptance of a ctional/non ctional divide between character and creator, and Baron Cohen generally seems intent on letting character occlude creator. Baron Cohen remained in character throughout the lming of the movie, which, if we accept the tenets of method acting, means he ceased to be Baron Cohen pretending and was instead Borat being. Much more importantly, I think, Baron Cohen made no media appearances to promote the lm, while Borat made several. In these appearances, Baron Cohen refused to participate in the generally recognized, back-stage promotional procedures associated with the genre. ere were no, Let me tell you how I did it revelations of the movie-making process, just a duplication of the movies own procedures: a ctional character at large in a documentary context. Borat, not Baron Cohen, sat across from David Letterman, Jay Leno, etc. and (sincerely) conducted interviews in his capacity as a Kazakh documentary lmmaker. e result, as Torchin recognizes, was that the talk-show genre [was] hijacked so that audiences and guests could no longer determine what factual information or even what performative information the talk show was delivering (61). Even if we can never invite Hamlet over for a beer (ONeill 36), Borat can kiss your cheeks and feel your penis, and the forcefulness of such assertions makes the apparently non-serious nature of ctional utterances less self-evident than might otherwise be expected. What we have here, I think, is the precise opposite of mimesis of process, performed at a very high volume indeed. Instead of experiencing the reality-troubling problems associated with placing the author inside the ctional text in the manner

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of, for example, Fowles and Vonnegut, Borats audience and his various media hosts experience the problem from the opposite side. ey encounter Borat outside the supposedly bounded and apparently imaginary world of his origination, and they never encounter any kind of real-world creator. Without any really real person to mark the ontological distinction between real and pretend, Borat becomes a more and more real gure (even if only in terms of the hyper-mediated reality of contemporary life). Unlike the addressees within the movie who see him as unfathomable but real, the viewer from outside the movie gradually domesticates Borat until he becomes part of everyday (mediated) life. A er a while, both the implied viewer of the movie, Borat, and the more generalized consumer of contemporary infotainment get used to seeing a ctional gure operate (more or less) unproblematically in nonctional contexts. To anybody paying attention to Western media in late 2006, Borat became just another part of the celebrity landscape, a red-carpet fact. is receptive position is in place even if we know theres a tax-paying, Cambridge graduate named Sacha Baron Cohen at large in the really real world. If the mimesis-of-process novel invites the reader behind the curtain to witness the procedures that underlie ctional production, Borats refusal to acknowledge any kind of backstage, his refusal to show both sides of the ontological split between real and pretend, disguises the processes to such a degree that the author seems to disappear. A er a while, we start to think that Hamlet just might come over for a beer a er all.

FIRING AND MISFIRING: TRIGGERING IRONY IN THE POST? IRONIC AGE

Under these kinds of conditions, its tough to imagine a straightforward application of the kind of sincerity test Searle imagines. Even if we retain both a desire and a need to di erentiate between sincere and ironic, real and pretend, statements, we still need to get around to addressing questions to do with which kinds of statements are ironic for which kinds of addressees, viewers, etc. In Ironys Edge, Hutcheon gures irony as an event, not an inherent quality of any statement or gesture. Irony happens or fails to happen in di erent contexts (5). Moreover, she claims that the disastrous mis ring of irony results from insu cient ironic signaling, from some failure to designate the special, non-serious nature of a particular utterance or gesture (1). For irony to work, Hutcheon argues, there must be something that triggers you to decide that what you heard (or saw) is not meaningful alone, but requires supplementing with a di erent, inferred meaning (and judgment) that would then lead you to call it irony (2). Without such triggers, irony fails. As Hutcheon puts it, irony signals dont signal irony until they are interpreted as such (151). Fair enough, I say, but what if the disastrous mis ring of irony is part of the larger (ironic) point? In Borat, the mis ring of irony signals is apparent in the amazing sincerity and credulity of the addressees, but these moments of failed irony are central to the ironic reception of the lms audience. In many ways, Borat speaks through, not to, the addressees, while delivering an in-group ironic communiqu to the second-tier audience, the implied viewers, whove been successfully triggered to adopt

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a ctional stance when it comes to Borat. In Borat, the familiarly elitist dimension of irony is exaggerated to a point where the success or failure of irony isnt just a oneworld matter of higher and lower levels of understanding, of people who either get it or dont get it, but, much more importantly, a multi-world matter that di erentiates between di erent classes of being. In Borat, the addressees inability to grasp irony signals a problematic partial transfer into a ctional universe. To fail to recognize Borat as ironic is not just to be the dumb guy who doesnt get the joke but rather to be the guy whos lost his grip on reality. As the lawsuits and the lengthy ontological discussion above suggest, Borats engagement with irony isnt just a matter of knowing; its a matter of being. In Borat, the apparently disastrous absence of semiotic signs signaling irony serves to mark irony not just as a sincerity test (Does he mean it or not?) but also as an ontological division (Is he real? true? fake?). In the space remaining Id like to examine how Hutcheons notion of ironic e orts that are too risky and/or mis ring might be reworked to accommodate Borats complicated ontological position. At the level of the addressees, Borat is the fullest expression Ive encountered of what Hutcheon sees as irony that is stingy with [its] textual hints (142). Its irony that depends on being missed. e addressees register documentary lmmaking as an inherently sincere and un-ironic enterprise, a project to do with global warming and Winston Churchill, and theyre encouraged (and, as Ive argued, even manipulated) to treat Borat as a real, if unbelievable, gure. If the addressees recognize the things Borat says as ironic, if they get it, theres nothing le for the audience to get, and the whole structure of the lm collapses.12 Hutcheon argues that, traditionally, the degree of ironic e ect is seen to be inversely proportionate to the number of markers necessary to get that e ect: dull or heavy irony provides many overt signals; elegant or skillful irony provides hardly any (Ironys Edge 152). Under these terms, Borat seems very skillful indeed. If we believe that the most e cacious irony is . . . the least overtly signaled, the least explicit and if irony ourishes when the risk of misunderstanding is greatest (152), then the credulity of the addressees is a marker of tremendous success. To be a bit cruel, their dullness marks the movies sharpness. e fact that so many people dont understand whats going on when it comes to Borat establishes a special, privileged position for those who do. Courting such misunderstandings might be mean-spirited and elitist, but thinly sliced irony that most people miss is almost always considered to be smart. In this sense, Borat is a picture of sophistication and elegance, a smart (or at least smartass) send-up of American ignorance and naivet. In quite another sense, of course, its very broad farce. e lm has been attacked for its fratboy boorishness, its juvenile scatological xations, in short, for being a dumb, dull gross-out comedy. I make no great case for Borats high-mindedness or genius, but the coexistence of these contradictory accusations is noteworthy. In the eyes of its various detractors, Borat is both too high and too low for its own, or anybody elses, good. Its both a self-congratulatory, classist manipulation and a kind of pandering to the lowest common denominator. Here again, we come to a point where modes of being and modes of utterance intersect. How people receive Borats utterances depends very much on who and what we take Borat to be. A receivers sense of the relative absence and/or overabundance of

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irony signals is ultimately a matter of the receivers apparatus for reception and the reception position s/he assumes as a result. If the addressees nd irony to be imperceptible, its because they nd Borats presence credible and true. If critics nd the irony to be heavy and awkward, its because theyre overly familiar with ctional buffoons of his general type. Bluntly, how funny Borat is depends very much on how real he is. Each group approaches Borat with di erent evaluative mechanisms dictated by their original designation of Borat as real or ctional. e addressees encounter a moron in the street and have real, if bizarre, conversations with him; the implied viewers encounter a character in a comedy. It is hardly surprising that the latter group is more prepared for irony than the former. Indeed, Hutcheon argues that successful irony involves overlapping discursive communities of the sender and receiver: e greater the mutual acceptance of conventions of signaling the more likely an intended irony will be interpreted as ironic and done so with ease (Ironys Edge 148). is mutual recognition and acceptance, of course, is exactly what does not happen to the addressees in Borat. Borat presents himself as a gure of radical di erence, with almost no codes in common with his addressees, and the assumed absence of shared codes cancels out the possibility of successful irony in exchanges between Borat and the addressees. Borats radical otherness prevents both ironic interpretation and ctional detection. By positioning himself outside the possibility of overlapping discursive communities, he registers as neither funny nor ctional to the addressees. e truth, however, is that Baron Cohen (not Borat) and the addressees do come from overlapping discursive communities, and they do share a variety of conventions in common. Despite the lack of detection, irony isnt cleverly slipped in or past the addressees; its writ very, very large, yet still apparently undetectable. Whatever else we may say about Borat, hes hardly subtle. Indeed, the very heaviness of Borats performance, its excessiveness, seems to speak to the impossibility of irony happening at all. Despite Brenda Austin-Smiths claim that irony is the rhetorical necessity of the age, the critical accessory no one should leave home without (51), the addressees seem to indicate that the cultural conditions needed to produce irony have somehow evaporated. If the bag of poop doesnt trigger you to decide that what you heard (or saw) is not meaningful, then its hard to imagine what will (Hutcheon, Ironys Edge 2). Indeed, Borats provocations can, perhaps perversely, be read as repeated invocations of Searles sincerity test, begging the addressees to ask the question they never seem to ask: Are you serious? If were sympathetic to Baron Cohens project, the satiric import is clear. By repeatedly dramatizing the failed detonation of irony at the level of the addressees, Baron Cohen has a successful ironic exchange with the implied viewer, one that demonstrates the assumptions of primitivism and barbarism that inform American and/or Western constructions of the other. Because we quietly believe the other is capable of every type of abomination, Borats absurd behavior seems credible for those people, even if its beyond the scope of anything wed expect from people like us. Again, the language of the Standard Consent form is instructive in this regard. It

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plainly states that the producer hopes to reach a young adult audience by using entertaining content and formats (Twentieth Century Fox 2), yet, because Borat appears to be beyond the scope of Western culture, the precise meanings of the terms seem to have been misunderstood. e young adult audience in question is assumed to be impenetrably foreign, not domestic, as are the assumptions about entertaining content. e lawsuits seem to suggest that the signatories assumed a categorical distinction between our young adults and our ideas of entertaining content and formats on one side and their young people and their ideas of entertainment on the other.13 When the assumed binary of us and them is collapsed, the signatories feel betrayed, but this sense of betrayal is produced by their own problematic assumptions about foreign cultures and behaviors. In response to the accusation that the movie stigmatizes Kazakhs, Baron Cohen has insisted that, the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe exists (2). Bluntly, people ought to know better than to see Borat as a true representative of Kazakh culture, and the fact that they dont reveals their limitations. e meta-cues ought to be su cient to provoke both ironic interpretation and the ctional stance. In this account, the addressees arent deceived so much as prone to problematic interpretive stances as a result of problematic belief systems. Fair enough, but many of them are at least trying to be nice. Borat might be a marker of cultural myopia, but its also an example of cultural pluralism gone wrong, a dramatization of what Christopher Hitchens calls the painful politeness of American society. As Torchin rightly notes, the tolerance [of the addressees] may be born from condescension, but it is in equal measure kind (57). If the limitations of the addressees are on overt display, so too are their e orts to accommodate an outrageously unattractive stranger. Indeed, their contortions of politesse seem to suggest not narrowness, but an unbelievably elastic belief in cultural pluralism, an extreme reluctance to condemn behaviors the addressees simultaneously dont wish to condone. In this sense, Eliot Borenstein is entirely correct to imagine Borat as a profound challenge to the good manners and re exive relativism required by right-thinking people in a multicultural world (6). When Borat destroys the Southern dinner party, I dont see a stinging critique of residual antebellum social practice but rather some confused (yet also right-thinking) people trying very hard to tolerate, incorporate, and redeem his persistent e rontery. To me, the humor here doesnt rest on their belligerent stigmatization of the other but on their refusal to stigmatize him, on the desperate desire to accommodate him. What Im trying to show is that Borats ctionality and his use/misuse of irony are not culture-neutral [and] value-free but invested in relations of power based in relations of communication (Hutcheon, Ironys Edge 179, 2). More to the point, the problematic assumption of cultural superiority we nd in the addressees is duplicated, perhaps surpassed, in the ironists assumption of his cultural superiority. In this construction, its Baron Cohen who needs to answer to charges of a caricaturish, reductive construction of the other. e condescension of the addressees to Borat is matched by Baron Cohens condescension to them, with the primary di erence that theyre trying to help, while he means to humiliate.14

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IRONY AND THE CARNIVALESQUE: A DIGRESSION INTO BRUNO AND ALI G

Irony, of course, o en arises from an unequal power encounter (Asad 16); it hierarchizes both cultural capital and linguistic exchange, though not always in predictable ways. Sometimes, irony seems to be an agent of carnivalesque instability, which suspends ordinary power relations and allows for indirect and subversive critique. At other times, linguistic and cultural capital are aligned such that those who command ironic discourse do so as a means of reasserting their positions of superiority over their cultural inferiors. Id like to conclude by suggesting that the edge of Baron Cohens project seems to cut both ways. Two of his other important characters, Ali G (a wangsta rapper and commander of a dizzying arsenal of slang terms) and Bruno (a gay fashion reporter desperate for insider knowledge), are, I think, essentially carnivalesque. ey speak an oblique truth to power and ironize both the agents and the institutions of power. ey tend to target people in positions of authority and attempt to dramatize the dubious and/or problematic nature of this authority, as when Ali G attempts to get Newt Gingrich to promote anal sex as a way around the abortion/unwanted pregnancy issue. In the Ali G segments, the temporary triumph of the little guy o en amounts to little more than an amusing e ort (a) to insert the absurd into cultural territories associated with high seriousness or (b) to simply waste the time of people who ought to have better things to do. In most cases, Ali G and Bruno are aligned with the implied viewers, outside the frameworks of any o cial power but possessed of alternate and, it seems, sophisticated discourses which challenge established claims to authority. So, for example, Ali Gs use of slang and Brunos esoteric references to the Austrian fashion scene serve to disorient the powerful people they meet, pointing to areas over which the powerful have no jurisdiction, temporarily disrupting their claims to authority. Borat is a di erent, more problematic, matter. While Ali G and Bruno address themselves to the powerful and make appeals to distinct, if ba ing, cultural practices, Borat generally addresses himself to every day people and, as indicated above, does so through burlesque pantomimes of his own cultural bankruptcy. Bruno and Ali G, I think, tend to interact with addressees who command more, not less, cultural authority than their creator Baron Cohen commands; they tend to punch above Baron Cohens weight.15 Borat o en punches down, and this imbalance has disturbing cultural implications. e potentially carnivalesque power of Borats ironic position is compromised considerably if we start to view him as a vehicle by which a Cambridgeeducated, upper-middle class comedian mocks and derides his social inferiors for the amusement of some more sophisticated audience who is in on the joke. Its one thing to try and make Boutros Boutros Ghali look silly; its quite another to destroy an antique shop because you dont like that theyre selling Confederate memorabilia. In these scenarios, the lm is not just looking past or through the people with whom Borat interacts (past the addressees and to the implied audience) but also guring the addressees as abstract markers for political opinions it wants to skewer. If we think of Bergsonian farce in terms of people colliding like things, its clear that the cartoonish

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quality of many of Borats confrontations discourages sympathy with both Borat and his victims. e problem, again, lies in how we gure the ontological status of those involved in the confrontation. Borats pain is make-believe; the pain of his addressees isnt. Curiously, then, despite the centrality of documentary subjects to the lms overall e ect, the apparent non-seriousness of Borats ctionality works to make the su ering/humiliation of his addressees seem unimportant, to make their discomfort part of the joke. It makes their humiliation seem less real, an extension of Borats ctionality, even though the lm simultaneously seems to expose their real shortcomings. Because the slapstick and gross-out dimensions of Borats dealings with the addressees (unlike the satiric, politicized dimensions) dont point to any larger issues, theyre easily contained within the quasi- ctional mode of the movie, and the implied viewer is encouraged to treat them as funny things that happened in a movie. e implied viewer is asked not to consider the prosaic, real-world drudgery of having to re-stock and clean up the shop (because thats not funny or fun), while s/he is simultaneously encouraged to think of the real-world implications of the addressees problematic political and cultural positions. When it comes to their homophobia and xenophobia, the addressees are historically real and deserving of condemnation. When it comes to the problems Borat creates for them, theyre people colliding like things. Borat is the Road Runner, and everyone else is Wile E. Coyote. In this paper, Ive been trying to work through the selective ctionality of Borat and to demonstrate the various ways in which the recourse into ction might work to protect one participant in a linguistic and/or cultural exchange, while failing to provide similar shelter for the addressees. When both participants behave poorly, only one is held accountable. Id like to conclude by suggesting that, despite the formidable protection ctionality seems to provide for Borat, the lm ultimately depends upon a simultaneous insistence on Baron Cohens real-life subject position as an observant Jew. In his Rolling Stone interview with Baron Cohen (as himself), Neil Strauss rightly notes the comedian has been reluctant to divulge any information about himself, because every new fact is . . . added to his scant o cial biography, but, Id like to argue, the very scantness of the biography means that a tremendous amount of weight is attached to each established item, most importantly to Baron Cohens Jewishness. When Baron Cohen does the press junket for Borat in character, he seems to be seeking the kind of non-documentary asylum outlined above. He absents himself from documentary investigation, preserves his personal privacy, and allows the ctional Borat to become the celebrity and absorb public interest.16 Given the life-devouring nature of the contemporary media, the desirability of adopting such a position is plain, but, a couple of interviews notwithstanding, this approach also makes serious and legitimate inquiries into Baron Cohens aesthetic and political decisions di cult to pin down. ( eres no point in asking Borat if hes troubled by the apparent disconnect between the subversive and conservative aspects of his lm.) In the absence of any such discussion, Baron Cohens (real) Jewishness becomes a proof that his o ensiveness is only pretend, calming nervous viewers and allowing them to enjoy Borats anti-Semitism without disquieting self-critique. Despite the scarcity of biographical information about Baron Cohen, Ron Rosenbaum rightly notes that weve all been told by the 5,000 Borat pro les that . . . Sacha Baron Cohen

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is a practicing Jew from an Orthodox family. is singular suspension of the biographical embargo is necessary because we need this bit of documentary information, because the liberal audiences a rmation of Borats ctional performance isnt possible without this non ctional grounding. Borats ctional anti-Semitism isnt possible without Baron Cohens documentary status as a Jew. e result is that (the lm) Borats implied viewer (i) processes (the character) Borats addressees as documentary subjects, (ii) processes Borat as ctional and (iii) processes Borat as the speci c historical construction of a real Jew named Baron Cohen. Borat speaks through the addressees and to the audience, while the audience simultaneously looks through Borat to Baron Cohen.

CONCLUSION
My DVD of Borat arrived in the mail in a cardboard sleeve. Its laid out like most of the rest of the discs Ive ever seen, with prominently placed pull-quotes from positive reviews and a list of the awards the lm has gathered. It loudly reminds us of the lms comic value and Baron Cohens role in creating it. Inside this sleeve, the primary images are repeated on the plastic cover for the disc but with antiquated graphics and with the text switched from English to what Im told is a garbled version of the Cyrillic alphabet. e images become less distinct in an apparent e ort to approximate the diminished resolution produced by repeated photocopying. e disc itself appears to have been burned, is devoid of any kind of design, and features the single word Borat handwritten at an odd angle. Even before we press play, then, weve e ectively been asked to approach the movie at least twice from two distinct stances. e cardboard sleeve admits its ctional status and acts as a documentary summary of a clearly recognizable narrative form; it itemizes the lms many successes and reminds us of its status as a comedy classic. In cardboard, Borat is a Hollywood movie and encourages the interpretive stance appropriate to the genre. In plastic, we nd what Hutcheon calls repetition with ironic critical distance, one that signals the beginning of play ( eory xii). e cardboard sleeve isnt part of the show, but the plastic one is, and were rewarded for paying detailed attention to the minutiae of the doubly rendered packaging. is amusing but inessential comic moment is more subtle, but less signi cant, than any meta-ironic cue well nd in the movie itself. Its fun to notice, but its not disastrous if we dont. Nobodys future depends upon it. Near the end of Ironys Edge, Hutcheon invokes James Cli ord to ask the question: What are the dangers, in the extreme, of putting the whole world in quotation marks? (qtd. in Hutcheon 202; Cli ord 25). is question is culturally important and complex, but I think Borats unhappy addressees would welcome such a world. It would, at the very least, simplify their situation and put protagonist and antagonist clearly within the same world. e problem for them is that the whole world is not in quotation marks and that the selectively positioned marks of the movie are con gured to their considerable disadvantage. To re-work Cli ords construction, the question Im asking is this one: What are the dangers, in the speci c, of putting parts of the world in quotation marks but never telling people how and where theyre punctuated?

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ENDNOTES
1. Insofar as the legal argument focuses on where the movie was screened rather than what it portrays, it suggests that the fratboys are troubled not so much by the fact of their bad behavior, as by the fact that they cannot consign it to some distant, Eastern European scrapheap. ey thought they would be able to leave their boorishness behind; theyre upset that it follows them around. 2. e exception here is New York nancial analyst Je rey Lemerond, who shouts and runs away as Borat attempts to solicit hugs in the street. Here, the issue isnt consent so much as newsworthiness. Although Lemerond did not sign a release, the street chase itself was deemed to fall under the broad category of a newsworthy incident. According to the judge, nonconsensual use of a persons image to depict newsworthy events or matters of public interest is exempt from the law (Associated Press). Here, the very public nature of the interaction (unlike all the other suits) changes the legal status of the suit.

3. My use of the awkward term addressee speaks to the di culties of describing Borats relationship with others. Co-stars seems too benign; victims too accusatory, etc. 4. is descriptive exhaustibility is aptly summed up by Nicholas Wolterstor when he says: We shall never know how many children had Lady MacBeth in the worlds of MacBeth . . . not because to know this would require a knowledge beyond the capacity of human beings. It is because there is nothing of the sort to know (133).

5. And, as he goes on to argue, inadvertent historical correspondence doesnt cancel out ctionality. Even if, unbeknownst to the author, reality is actually enacting his scenario [he has] nevertheless . . . produced a work of ction (33). 6. Here again, the point rests heavily on the issue of intent and, even more crucially, the cameras inability to document it. e sane man will claim he never really believed there was a real dog there, just as, Im sure, the fratboys will argue that they didnt really mean the o ensive things they said. All might well claim that they have simply made e orts to accommodate the unstable positions of their conversation partners, that their words and gestures ought not to be subject to normal evaluative processes and ought instead to be considered in very much refracted light of the person at whom they were aimed. For example, I think the car salesman (who attempts to explain the term pussy magnet to Borat) is simply trying to do his job (which involves satisfying and reassuring potential buyers) in the bizarre misogynist context Borat creates. 7. As I hope is clear, Im not arguing for pan ctionality here; nor am I arguing that all narrative modes are equally authoritative. Like most people, I trust photographic evidence more than recollected accounts. Im just trying to locate the problematic nature of any notion of documentary as an unmediated rendering of real life. 8. Torchin has noted the false mapping of actual encounters that occurs in the movie when events that happened in Massachusetts are depicted as if they happened in the South (56). 9. And I do mean a little bit. I dont want to make too much of this. Obviously, the lms success depends upon the fact that the implied viewer gures the addressees as real. One of the lms primary achievements is that it manages to construct such high-level absurdity from the material of apparently real life. It is decidedly more di cult to coax outlandish scenarios than it is to simply imagine them and act them out, and the I cant believe this is really happening! experience of the audience is one of the movies major strengths. Borats mode of creativity clearly takes place under much more austere conditions than ction normally does, and its negotiation with reality makes the tricks it plays more risky; not coincidentally, the rewards are o en greater as well. All Im suggesting here is that the documentary status of the real scenarios and characters

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in the lm, while central to the implied viewers appreciation, is, upon inspection, less straightforward than it might immediately appear. 10. As will become clear, this section is indebted to Linda Hutcheons work on irony, both in terms of Hutcheons own thinking on the subject and in terms of her various syntheses and summations of other work in the area. Her ability to locate and articulate key issues in the broad-ranging discussion of irony has been essential to the construction of my argument. 11. Ill be touching upon these issues in what follows, but this discussion remains more narratological than overtly political. For a detailed assessment of the politics of representation in Borat, the interested reader would do very well to seek out issue 67.1 of Slavic Review, devoted entirely to the movie. 12. It seems obvious that such moments must have occurred during lming, that some of Borats addressees must have found him too implausible to be real or true. 13. Again, such suppositions come very close to many articulations of ction in terms of possible worlds. e assumed remoteness of Kazakhstan, its youth, and its notions of entertainment make it very di cult for the addressees to think of their lives and Borats life in a single conceptual framework. 14. Here again, the ontological dimension of the argument becomes tricky. Baron Cohen claims that the joke is on people who think his Kazakhstan exists. Is the joke, then, also on people who think his ( ctionally predicated, narratively manipulated) American South actually exists, or does the documentary dimension of the lm prove that such a world really does exist? 15. e 2009 feature lm, Bruno, complicates this general process somewhat. e movie contains more interactions between Bruno and normal people than the TV show, but the general distinctions between Borats procedures and those of Bruno and Ali G remain in place.

16. For example, a paparazzi photograph of Baron Cohen would be incredibly uninteresting because he has so successfully forestalled the publics identi cation with him. We know what Britney Spears had for breakfast but precious little about Baron Cohen.

WORKS CITED
Asad, Talal. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press, 1973. Associated Press. Judge Tosses Out N.Y. Businessmans Borat Lawsuit. CTV News, April 2, 2008. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080402/borat_suit_080402?s_ name=mReview&no_ads= (accessed February 20, 2010). Austin-Smith, Brenda. Into the Heart of Irony. Canadian Dimension 24.7 (1990): 5152. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. First published 1981 in French by ditions Galile. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodernity and its Discontents. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997. Borat: Cultural Learnings For Make Bene t Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Directed by Larry Charles. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006. DVD. Borenstein, Eliot. Our Borats, Our Selves: Yokels and Cosmopolitans on the Global Stage. Slavic Review 67.1 (2008): 17.

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