Naomi Alderman, writer for The Guardian, made an interesting observation of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character and how it parallels the famous obedience experiment by Stanley Milgram. If you’re not familiar with the ground-breaking psychological study by Milgram then check out the wikipedia article to brush up.
In The Guardian, Alderman explains how the very presence of Borat is like a micro-Milgram experiment where the “participants” are prodded to spilling their (racist) beans where they even allow Borat’s anti-Semitism and misogyny to run rampant, sometimes without objection and even worse, with encouragement. The Head Yenta once blogged about Borat’s “Throw the Jew Down the Well” performance at a country music bar, a perfect example where Borat tricks an audience into revealing it’s true colors (and they aren’t pretty).
Alderman writes:
The reason it is unsettling to hear Borat sing “Throw the Jew down the well” is because of the reaction of those listening. Some sit in mute astonishment and horror. But some join in. Some sing along, smile and stamp their feet. One woman even – unprompted, mind you – puts her fingers to her forehead to make horns when he sings, “You must take [the Jew] by his horns.” Borat is unsettling not because his opinions are outlandish but because he reveals how many ordinary people share them.
In the 60’s Stanley Milgram wondered why the German people allowed the Nazis to commit such atrocities to the Jews and performed an experiment that “shocked” the world out of its ignorance. Today, Borat is still shocking audiences and revealing the anti-Semitism that festers decades later.
That’s why SBC is a genius.
I remember when Borat was with a wine tasting group and he thought the Black servant was the slave of the old white guys, the white guys then confessed that they regret that slavery was abolished. Borat knows how to reveal the evil in the hearts of men.
I do believe that Borat is revealing the ‘evil in the hearts of men’. But there is another thing that is revealed that I dont think is specifically anti-semitic, as it is anti-whatever. I think the veneer of intelligence that people have often makes us forget that at a biological level we are animals who are ready to jump at the throat of whoever the loudest barking animal tells us is the ‘enemy’, or the ‘evil one’. I think there is an implicit reflex in people that inclines us to give our wills over to powerful personalities, and it is through conciousness, intelligence, and the qualities that we tend to associate with human beings that must be developed to overcome these reflexes.
At a more watered down level, it is this reflex complicity that keeps us silent in group situations when idiots speak who happen to be authority figures speak, and drive our businesses, political discourse and everything else down the tubes.
I think in addition to biology, from a psychologic perspective, we are well trained to be silent and complicit by our families, where as children we often spend the first few decades of our lives remaining silent in the face of the hypocracy and irrationality of adults, which children are usually all too instinctively aware.