Bloggers review movies. Whodathunkit?

At last: Larison posts his Apocalypto review! Read, and be amazed. I'll probably have more to say about his review and Rod Dreher's "here's why I'm not seeing Apocalypto" post soon.

And while you're exploring religion and the movies, Anthony Sacramone has one of the finer reviews of Apocalypto I've read, along with a rather amusing (and quite accurate) take on The Fountain that skewers its shallowness while praising its ambition.

Borat is nothing! Borat is everything!

The movie critics were as unanimous as they can be in declaring the awesome hilarity of Borat, making the slapdash, gross out mockumentary one of the best reviewed films of the year.

But now the real fight is on as the pundits vie for interpretive authority over this oddly energizing film. Nearly everyone agrees that Borat is funny, very funny—“a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology,” as Charles Krauthammer calls it—but what does it all mean?

According to one camp, represented rather well by Jonah Goldberg, Daniel Larison, and S.T. Karnick, pretty much nothing. It’s good for some chuckles, but that’s about it. According to Krauthammer, it’s indicative of “an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude many liberal Jews have toward working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.” Christopher Hitchens, one of the few who will argue that the movie isn’t very funny (“infantile and repetitive, and doesn’t know when to stop”), claims that the movie reveals “that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse.” Steve Sailor gives us the Sailoresque interpretation that it’s really funny because of the way it exploits ages-old East European stereotypes (he writes here that "the reason the critics go on and on about how "Borat" exposes the horrors of anti-Semitic Red State America is because they need a politically correct excuse for laughing at the Stupid Foreign Man"). And a chorus of the usual suspects, as well as Cohen himself, celebrate the movie for its brave exposure of America’s (not-so) hidden racism and stupidity.

I’m sure there are other viewpoints I’ve missed, but this is a reasonably representative sample. Now what are we supposed to make of it?

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, I think the last bit is really pushing it. Parts of the movie might work, like John Podhoretz writes, as “a satire of anti-Semitism,” but the conventional liberal view that the movie is primarily an indictment of a strong undercurrent of racism in America is just absurd. At best it tells us that there are still some boors out there, like the rodeo manager who speaks so crude and ill of Muslims and gays, with unfortunate views, and then gives us an opportunity to laugh at them for acting as they do.

Mostly, though, I tend to think that these varying viewpoints are all somewhat correct. Is it reasonable to view the movie as just the funny and nothing but the funny? Absolutely. It’s a riot, and a dumb, bawdy, vulgar one at that. And on a lot of levels, that’s all it needs to be.

But, like a lot of much-maligned performance art pieces (and Cohen is, like the Jackass crew and Tom Green, really a commercial, populist heir to the legacy of 70s and 80s performance art), it tells us something—a lot of things—about ourselves and those on screen, whether Cohen and its creators intended to or not. So, it does reveal something about our willingness to put up with outrageous behavior, and maybe it tells us a little about the way some religious practices are viewed by outsiders (not surprisingly, they think of them as weird), and it does play a little bit to forgotten foreign stereotypes. It’s a big, episodic movie, and depending on which scenes you think are key, you can pull a lot of different ideas from it.

As I wrote in my review, I think, somewhat like Hitchens, it tells us something about our country’s reflexive politeness and unwillingness to scold bad behavior when it comes from foreign cultures, and, maybe more importantly, I think it gives a space in which to appreciate and laugh at the many, many peculiar people in our nation, and the wonderfully bizarre, often hilarious situations into which their personal quirks put them. The movie acts like a big billboard that says, “Look and laugh, America, at what a gloriously absurd place you are, at all the strangeness and hilarity you breed.” It gives us a chance to realize this and to laugh at the grandiose absurdity that flourishes all around us.

Addendum: Okay, I suppose if I wanted to get really meta, I’d say that the movie itself isn’t even the most interesting thing to look at here. Instead, I'd argue that it's all just a Rorschach test that tells us more about the pundits than it does about the movie. Hitchens delivers a contrarian defense of the movie’s alleged suckers (and marks himself even more by claiming the movie isn’t funny); Sailor tells us the hidden reason behind our laughter is our reaction to racial stereotypes; Krauthammer explains that it reveals the misperceptions of liberal Jews; Larison warns us against reading too much into pop culture; Goldberg tells us the pundits are all full of themselves; I wax ecstatic over the glories and oddities of American excess. Somehow, none of this is surprising.

Lifestyle politics

I ought to be polishing (well, writing a conclusion to) my review of this, but instead I’ll dive headlong into Larisonland, a place I often fear to tread, if only out of a pervasive phobia of getting buried and eventually suffocating under a mountain of blog copy.

In responding to my point about the difference between political conservatism and lifestyle conservatism, Larison writes:

Each time I read over Peter’s post, the bit about ideology always brings me up short. On why preserving a way of life focused on natural loyalties and guided by a spirit that values restraint, prescription and prudence, among other things, is not an ideology.

[snip]

It has long seemed to me that ideology is that sort of abstract commitment to a proposition or theory that one makes that has little or no relevance to how you live. Being a good liberal involves accepting a number of rather dubious claims about the nature of man and society and setting policy accordingly. Allegedly, what you do in your own, “private” life is no concern to anybody. Likewise, being a good communist or fascist ideologue has everything to do with toeing party lines and supporting the right kinds of policies. Living ethically is neither here nor there, except insofar as it comes into conflict with policy.

[snip]

Ethics is the heart of real politika, the things concerning the polis or community. One’s ethos, one’s way of life and habitual practices, defines what kind of politics a man has, and what kind of community he and his will create and maintain….If conservatism is a worthwhile state of mind and persuasion, conservatism ought to have something important to say.

Larison has lots of smart stuff to say—often thousands of words of it every day—but it seems to me, once again, that what Larison is doing is making conservatism into a sort of manifesto for living. But to my mind, that’s not the place of political alignment; that’s the job of the church, of the conscience, of whatever overarching ideas about existence to which one subscribes. To be a conservative is not necessarily to be a Christian, though I believe the two go in kind with minimal friction. A religion can, and probably should, dictate, in however general or specific terms, a way of life to its followers.

But a political ideology, a political movement, one that is primarily about figuring out proper means of governing, should be, in fact, the opposite—a way of allowing opposing, contrasting, varied ways of life and belief to thrive with as little interference as possible. Larison’s conservatism would be preached from the pulpit, infused in every minute and every decision of life, and while I have no quarrel with (and, in fact, heartily support) careful, principled existences, I don’t wish to see that sort of all-encompassing belief take over the political realm. There is a place*, for sure, to discuss how one should live their life, what principles, faiths, and notions are decent and good, but the goal of politics, and thus of political movements, should be to clear a space for those ideas to flourish, not try to inject itself into the discussion.

*That place is probably in dorm rooms and on little-read blogs.