Aggressively missing the point: Ben Stein's review of Borat

[Mandark]

Old, but undiscussed here I think.

The auteur and star of the movie, Sacha Baron Cohen, is a Jew of high degree in England and now in Hollywood. But much of the movie is viciously anti-Semitic. This includes not just some but many "jokes" about killing Jews, about how Jews are the devil, about how Jews will kill for money, about how Jews are like cockroaches (the last a direct steal from Joachim Goebbels, who compared Jews with breeding rats and insects). This is in a world where we just lived through an anti-Semitic holocaust with the same themes and another is promised by the terrorists in Iran.

These are not funny jokes. These are really just old-fashioned sickening racism disguised as hipness. It's also a smug joke by Sacha Cohen which is basically his endlessly saying, "I hate Jews, too, even though I'm Jewish, and hey, I guess I don't look Jewish because I can say all these horrible Jew hatred things and no one says, 'Hey, what are you doing? You're a Jew.'"

It's repulsive.

[Ichirou]

Borat is a pretty ugly movie, but it's not because it's anti-Semitic.  It's because it aggressively assumes all Americans are anti-Semitic.

[bagofeyes]

How did he come to the conclusion that Cohen really hates Jews? Jokes in a comedy movie?

[Ichirou]

Ben Stein is pretty much famous for not having a sense of humor.

[demi]

COMING FROM A GUY WHO'S GAMESHOW WAS ABOUT MONEY I FIND THIS HARD TO BELIEVE

attractive Jewish person

[ToxicAdam]

Is this any different than Bill Cosby being upset at black comedians for making racist jokes about their own people?

[Ichirou]

COMING FROM A GUY WHO'S GAMESHOW WAS ABOUT MONEY I FIND THIS HARD TO BELIEVE

attractive Jewish person

Maybe Sacha Baron Cohen is right about Americans, tho

[Flannel Boy]

Are you sure this wasn't written by Eel_O_Brian?

[Mandark]

Bonus obtuseness!  Stephen Hunter's essay on Starship Troopers from the Washington Post

Silly me. I thought the Nazis lost the war.

But here's the exceedingly strange new movie "Starship Troopers" commandeering 22 million American dollars in its first weekend and certain to make gobs more, while secretly whispering, "Sieg Heil!"

The movie recounts the adventures of a platoon of Mobile Infantry sometime in the next century as it does battle with a race of arachnid nasties on the far planet of Klendathu. It's an epic of bug blasting, a movie whose script appears to have been the instructions on a can of Raid. And in some profoundly disturbing way, it's Nazi to the core.

I don't mean to suggest that it's political propaganda in the literal sense or that it advocates Nazism. But it's a film that presupposes it. It's spiritually Nazi, psychologically Nazi. It comes directly out of the Nazi imagination, and is set in the Nazi universe.

It hails from what would be Year 64 of the Thousand-Year Reich, a sanitized utopia of heroic, sexless young folk grandly aware of their role as defenders of the known reality and descended from the Nazi pioneer generation of the 1930s and '40s. Of course the great Fuehrer has gone to Valhalla, but it's possible that in a home in some mountain fastness, some shiny facsimile of Holy Berchtesgaden, the 97-year-old Heinrich Himmler still dodders about, drooling and filling his Depends with waste, and on the odd clear day when his mind doesn't buzz with Alzheimer's he remembers with pride the greatness he helped create. In this universe, he has already seen "Starship Troopers" 14 times. He has been quoted in the New York Volkischer Beobachter as saying "Thumbs up!"

Fortunately, back here in grumpy reality, all that was blown to dust, crushed bone and ash back in Year 12, a very bad year for the Thousand-Year Reich and a very good year for the rest of us.

But you couldn't tell that from "Starship Troopers."

We'll skip the obvious Nazi fashions and the appearance of Doogie Howser late in the film in a black shirt, overcoat and SS-style cap; we'll skip the stylized swastika that is the Mobile Infantry's symbol; we'll skip the fact that the movie will soon be abbreviated in the vernacular "SS Troopers"; we'll skip the hazy intimation of a world fascist order contained in the film. Begin with the faces.

At first I thought that the notoriously perverse director, Paul Verhoeven, had a particularly inane imagination when it came to faces. No indeed; he has a very good imagination when it comes to faces. He knows exactly what he wants. So regular are the faces of the "cast" -- the acting is so bad, the quotation marks are required -- that it clearly represents a conscious decision. The stars, Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey and Neil Patrick Harris, share this in common: They all look alike.

They have oddly square faces and broad cheekbones, unprominent noses. They're blond or at least fair and boast some of the whitest choppers seen this side of a Dentyne commercial. But it's more than shape and form: Their faces are also somehow uncomplicated, almost cartoon versions in flesh of actual humanity. Van Dien and Richards are particularly noteworthy in this regard. There's a simplicity and emotionless beauty that's far too vivid to be coincidental. They are generic. And all through the cast you see other iterations of the same principle: smooth, hairless, square, almost idealized faces. Even the odd token black person in this universe has the same bone structure and close-cropped hair.

What's going on? Well, one idea would be that these beings are produced through genetic engineering on an industrial basis, as in "Brave New World" or more recently "Gattaca." But there's no mention of that in the film. A more insidious possibility relates exactly to Hitler's crazed state: that the size and range of the gene pool has been greatly reduced through some form of purification. So in an unsettling sense, "Starship Troopers" appears to be set in a post-Holocaust world, a world where the body count didn't stop at 6 million but went on and on and on until only Aryan stock remained.

There are other, deeper issues. One is the movie's obsession that parallels a particularly loathsome Nazi obsession -- cleanliness. In fact the Nazis saw their adversaries as representing some form of filth or infection. Their idea of the best world was Judenrein, meaning cleansed of Jews. They murdered, in the millions, under the guise of showering. In their hyperfervid imagination -- visible in all their documents and propaganda -- Jews and Bolsheviks were seen as eastern "hordes" representing not merely the swarm but the swarm of infection and disease. Look at the concept of Lebensraum, living room: Essentially, it is freedom from the filth of crowding.

And that's exactly the obsession with the spiders of Klendathu. In the movie's best special-effects sequence, our heroic platoon stands off hordes of the monsters (who aren't even armed, as a matter of fact, and would seem to be no big deal for any moderately equipped industrialized power with good Krupp and Mauser firepower). The creatures have been imagined horribly as the worst kind of body filth -- they are not spiders at all, they are lice, huge infestations of crab lice, with ripping mandibles and piercing claws, who slay by rending their victims into parts. How filthy is that?

At its most visually impressive, the movie seems to recount a Hitlerian fantasy: a platoon of SS men in the far regions of the world standing firm against subhuman hordes, killing them in their millions and themselves dying in the best kind of nobility and sacrifice. The movie has a kind of pornographic relish in its depictions of slaughter. It isn't really set on Klendathu at all, but at Stalingrad.

You can take this even further with just a little research. The best description of the method of "Starship Troopers" came not from the great critics Anthony Lane or Janet Maslin or my brilliant colleague Rita Kempley. Rather, it came from historian Richard Grunberger, who noted that "brutal descriptions of fighting alternated with bathos-dripping `comradeship.' " That's it perfectly: the utter savagery of the fighting to the last quarter, intercut with the most sentimentalized, infantilized version of human relationships, as reflected in dialogue so bereft of individuality that it could have been written by either a hack or a machine. It's a world where two forms of emotional expression exist: puppy love or death battle.

What Grunberger is describing, however, isn't "Starship Troopers" but a lost work of utter banality titled "Gruppe Bosemueller," by Werner Beumelburg, a bestseller in Nazi Germany that was representative of a genre called Fronterlebnis, the notion of "war as a spiritual experience."

And that is exactly what "Starship Troopers" is selling. Unlike films from a civilized society that see war as a debilitating, tragic necessity, such as "Bridge on the River Kwai" or "Platoon" or "A Farewell to Arms," this movie sees it as a profoundly moving experience: war as ultimate self-help course.

Its most blasphemous stroke is its inversion of one of the greatest war novels ever written, Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." This film is explicitly conceived as a rebuke to that great humanitarian soliloquy. It plays with Remarque's opening scene, where a schoolteacher lectures the boys sternly on the duties of manhood, the disciplines of the fatherland and the glories of war. Believing him literally, our hero Paul rushes to the front, where he discovers the hideous lie his teacher has told him, as millions of other boys the world over are discovering the same lie.

"Starship Troopers" takes this conceit and literally perverts it. Not only does the teacher (Michael Ironside) tell them of the glories of war, he turns up as their platoon leader, a legendary figure known as "the Lieutenant." Initially missing an arm, he now has a mechanical one; he has been gloriously completed by war. Here, what Remarque treated ironically, Verhoeven treats literally. The lieutenant stoically guides the platoon through its most savage encounters with the spider hordes, and then -- this is the film's idea of heavy emotion -- is trapped and has his legs ripped off. His stumps spurting blood, he asks our hero Van Dien, who, far from being brutalized by the war, has turned into a butt-kicking NCO, for the ultimate act of intimacy in this world: to kill him. Now Van Dien is man enough to do just that.

That is love among the Nazis: a blast of withering fire through the heart.

When I saw Starship Troopers, I thought it was a nice popcorn movie and a pretty heavy-handed satire.  Apparently it was more subtle than I gave it credit for.

[bagofeyes]

Are you sure this wasn't written by Eel_O_Brian?

 

[CajoleJuice]

Malek is fucking gold.

[Ichirou]

Malek has been on a roll these last few days.

[brawndolicious]

How can anybody not see the satire in starship troopers?

and maybe ben stein is being sarcastic about borat.

[Mandark]

Is this any different than Bill Cosby being upset at black comedians for making racist jokes about their own people?

Yes.

and maybe ben stein is being sarcastic about borat.

No.

[Flannel Boy]

How is Borat anything but the old stereotype of the stupid, backward, anti-semetic, Polak? Though Borat doesn't come from Poland he often speaks Polish (how are you doing? and the like) and has a hatred of gypsies and Jews. Kazakhstan doesn't have, and has never had, many Jews of Gypsies. Poland has historically had large populations of Jews and Gypsies. If anyone should be offended, it should be me!
 

[brawndolicious]

I thought he speaks hebrew?

the dude ate azamat's asshole, give him a break.

[Mandark]

That's some exceptionally half-assed offense-taking, malek.  Ethnic outrage obviously isn't your strong point.

[Flannel Boy]

Mandark I'm trying to fake it as best I can.

Some of things Borat often says:

"Dzien Dobry" = Hello

"jak sie masz?" = how are you?

"dziekuje" = thank you

The village scenes were shot in Eastern Europe, using Eastern European music. He is basically making fun of the dumb backward Slav.

[TVC15]

I don't think Ben Stein is missing the point as much as he just doesn't think that sort of humor is funny.  Don't forget that he's a legit old hipster curmudgeon, and not of the comics sort.

[Smooth Groove]

I didn't know Stein was such a nut.  From Wiki:


After Mark Felt's identity as Deep Throat was revealed, Stein stated that Nixon would have prevented the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge if he had not been forced to resign. For his actions leading to that resignation, Stein said "If there is such a thing as kharma, if there is such a thing as justice in this life or the next, Mark Felt has bought himself the worst future of any man on this earth. And Bob Woodward is right behind him, with Ben Bradlee bringing up the rear. Out of their smug arrogance and contempt, they hatched the worst nightmare imaginable: genocide." [5]

Some have called Stein a "Nixon apologist" due to his fervent defense of Nixon's legacy. As recently as 2005, in the American Spectator, Stein said "Nixon was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering-up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war-starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton—a lying, conniving peacemaker."

Stein has written publicly to denounce the theory of evolution ("Darwinism," as he terms it), declaring it to be "a painful, bloody chapter in the history of ideologies," "the most compelling argument yet for Imperialism," and the inspiration for the Holocaust.[14][15] Stein has said of Charles Darwin that "His ideas led to genocide not once but many times"[16], and stars in an upcoming documentary advocating the teaching of Creationism in schools.

[TVC15]

I imagine there was always that aspect to him, what with the whole working on Nixon's staff thing, but since he seemed to be a good humored person, working for Comedy Central for years, even, I am guessing that 9-11, the general conservative shift of the country's media, and old age pushed him into the extreme right.  It's a shame, because he was good at what he did in the funny shit.

[Mandark]

I don't think Ben Stein is missing the point as much as he just doesn't think that sort of humor is funny.  Don't forget that he's a legit old hipster curmudgeon, and not of the comics sort.

I really think he was misreading the film, at least the parts that dealt with anti-Semitism.

The point of the cockroach scene is that Borat's cartoonishly dumb and superstitious, not "haw haw, Jewish people really *are* like roaches!"  Stein seems to think that Cohen's kidding on the square, rather than skewering bigots.

There are some shows that sort of straddle the line between the two, but I thought Borat was completely obvious.

[TVC15]

I don't think Ben Stein is missing the point as much as he just doesn't think that sort of humor is funny.  Don't forget that he's a legit old hipster curmudgeon, and not of the comics sort.

I really think he was misreading the film, at least the parts that dealt with anti-Semitism.

The point of the cockroach scene is that Borat's cartoonishly dumb and superstitious, not "haw haw, Jewish people really *are* like roaches!"  Stein seems to think that Cohen's kidding on the square, rather than skewering bigots.

There are some shows that sort of straddle the line between the two, but I thought Borat was completely obvious.

Well, I hate to defend the intelligence of the American public, but I think the reason that Borat was so successful at what it did was because it did straddle that line, but to those of us on the smarty man non-midwesterner side of it, it was completely obvious.

I know Ben Stein is a man of some intelligence and definitely has the cultural background to get the jokes.  I mean, he worked for the Nixon administration, he's probably on some level personally familiar with the easter european bumpkin stereotype.  The iron curtain wasn't that curtain. . .ous.  I think he just thinks the joke is in poor taste because he's probably from an era where any anti-semitic-tinged humor was just not kosher.  I mean, I'm all for anti-semitic humor, but it looks like Ben was an American jew vorn right after WW2, so maybe he was endowed with a sensitivity for that sort of thing, and we all know he's been all about making culturally iconoclastic statements lately.

I don't agree with him--I love Borat--but I can see where his point of view is coming from, at least a little bit.

[Mandark]

Well, I hate to defend the intelligence of the American public, but I think the reason that Borat was so successful at what it did was because it did straddle that line, but to those of us on the smarty man non-midwesterner side of it, it was completely obvious.

You have a point, but I think it applies more to other parts of the movie.  The parts where he was dealing with Southerners, evangelicals, etc. veered a bit more towards Craig Kilborn-era Daily Show, and stuff like [/u]this,[/u] which I really didn't like.  His later point about southerners being mocked is a lot more legit.

But the anti-Jew parts (especially the Running of the Jew and the Bed & Breakfast sequences) were wildly over the top and generally disconnected from anti-semitism as it's practiced.  I can't imagine actual anti-semites nodding their heads in silent agreement.

I think Stein's just at a place psychologically where everything is political, in the narrow right-left sense.  If someone's mocking something from the wrong side, he assumes all their motives are suspect.  The generational thing might play into it, too.  My grandmother (older than Stein) will still start sentences "I still don't like the Germans, but..."

[TVC15]

I think he's just an old fuddy duddy now, Mandark.  I thought he was cool for a while there, what with Win Ben Stein's Money and all, which would imply he didn't take himself so seriously.  I previously alluded that I thought maybe he got a case of the 9-11s or something, but it looks like the show went on until 2003, so I guess that wasn't it.  Although the war started in 2003, and maybe the Vietnaminess of that is giving him trippy acid flashbacks.

[huckleberry]

Ironic he would be defending the Nixon legacy since Nixon was a known bigot and anit-Semite.

[xnikki118x]

Okay, he thinks "Darwinism" is bad? It's natural selection at its finest!

Although the war started in 2003, and maybe the Vietnaminess of that is giving him trippy acid flashbacks.