To think of 2020 is to try to piece together the blended days into a coherent timeline, but the brain fog always kicks in and all that can be remembered are blips of major events that happened each month. One of the best surprises during 2020 were the numerous pieces of media announced and released within short windows: Taylor Swift released two albums “folklore” and “evermore,” pop princesses like Ariana Grande and Charli XCX spent quarantine making their own infectious albums, “Positions” and “how i’m feeling now,” and, of course, there was Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm. As we remained trapped in quarantine, the relic that is Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) arrived weeks before the election to provide political commentary on the conservatives of America, just like he did in 2006 with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in which Bush-era conservatism was his punching bag. But what does it mean now, in 2020, to see a film partially made in lockdown that directly targets American right-wingers, when their ideas have never been more overtly violent?
The character of Borat, imprisoned for his first film which caused great shame to the country of Kazakhstan, is assigned to bring glory to the nation by providing the current vice president of the United States with a gift. When he finally arrives in America, he discovers that his daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) has followed him, and she now becomes the gift to be given to the vice president. Subsequent Moviefilm is a direct interrogation of Borat’s own misogyny, sure, but also acts as an interrogation of America’s own widespread and complacent bigotry. Small scenes and moments add up into a grotesque portrait of the country, one that has become so accepting of propaganda, idealism, and hatred with quiet agreement that one can really tell exactly who is willing to spread harmful bigotry.
One of Borat’s more pronounced characteristics is his own bigotry. Borat is often unabashedly anti-Semitic, sexist, and racist, fitting perfectly within the realm of edgy humor so popular in the mid 2000s. But even in 2006, the unwilling participants of Borat’s first film refused to accept his bigotry and ideas. A driving instructor teaches Borat the importance of consent when the character wants to follow a woman driving next to him. A comedy teacher strays Borat away from saying ableist language, as he states that words that hurt people’s feelings are inherently unfunny. One has to wonder, though, if these considerations were true political stances, or simple American politeness.
Subsequent Moviefilm, by contrast, features several scenes in which bigotry and American propaganda reign. Early in the film, Borat is buying a cage for Tutar, still believing in the sexism rampant in his fake culture. When he asks how many girls can fit into a large cage, the salesman just says “one,” not questioning Borat’s plans to sell his daughter. Later, Borat asks a baker to write “Jews will not replace us” on a cake, and she does so without a second thought. At a ball, Borat asks a man how much he thinks Tutar is worth, and the man says, “five hundred dollars.” A mishap with swallowing a baby toy on a cupcake later leads Borat and Tutar to a women’s health clinic, in which a priest, despite being led to believe that Tutar is to abort an incestuous baby, urges the two to keep the precious life alive. He insists it doesn’t matter how the baby got there, all that matters is that it is a gift from God.
What’s scarier, seeing Borat in the first film get raucous applause for supporting the war on terror at a rodeo, or watching as nearly no one questions some of Borat’s most horrifying ideas? Both are representative of violent bigotry that actively works to kill, but one is more pervasive and harder to notice. The only people who do not buy into his thoughts are Jeanise Jones, a Black woman hired to babysit Tutar, and women in a temple, including a Holocaust survivor named Judith Dim Evans. It seems almost too obvious that the only people who actively represent progressive ideas are marginalized people, but they actively reject bigotry and embrace compassion.
The most frightening moment in the film isn’t when lockdown is called and the streets are empty, or when Rudy Giuliani is definitely taking his pants off after an interview with Tutar, believing he’s going to have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. Yes, this paints a dystopian image of America, and, yes, Giuliani is a clear threat to national security due to his own stupidity. Yet, everything pales in comparison to the moment Borat has to find shelter with right-wing QAnon supporters.
The men, with a giant “Don’t Tread on Me” flag draped on their home, believing in the virus as a Democratic creation, take in Borat out of politeness. Borat tries everything he can to get a rise out of the men, including dancing almost completely naked in front of them. They simply don’t care. They take pity on him, as at this point in the film Tutar has left to pursue her own career in journalism, and, mostly, they keep to themselves. Until, that is, when they teach Borat the conspiracies of QAnon, spouting the pseudoscientific propaganda fed to them by the Internet. In the world of Q, Donald Trump is a messiah sent by God to save America from the pedophilic, devil-worshiping Democrats. Borat believes it all, of course, and the spread of misinformation continues.
When lockdown began and we were all glued to our screens, media consumption was the escape everyone craved. Disney+, on July 3, 2020, released a recorded version of the stage musical Hamilton, and it soon became the most watched film during lockdown. In second place? Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, released 3 months later, in October. The spread of American propaganda and misinformation can be traced back centuries, but with Hamilton, Americans were consuming the most idealized version of our country, right before the celebration of Independence Day. With its diverse cast, rap musical numbers, and emphasis on fighting against the British white man as proud and resilient immigrants, Hamilton is the kind of American history they teach you about in elementary school. Subsequent Moviefilm, by contrast, is the America of the present, one whose citizens are poisoned by propaganda so willingly fed to them by people in power.
The constant spread of misinformation, helped in part by sites like Facebook and Reddit, has warped American ideas and politics so thoroughly that the “Trump era” is representative of widespread violence, unrest, and lies. This permeates through the screen in Subsequent Moviefilm, as chants of “USA!” explode at a Mike Pence rally and Borat performs a QAnon-inspired song at a right-wing event (during the pandemic, outside, masks off). American idealism has fully formed a failed state, one that doesn’t even recognize that the state has never been and might never be great. The character of Borat is able to anchor the film and keep it from being too depressing, and Baron Cohen revels in making fools out of everyone. However, even he can’t make the new American right-wing realize their own fallacies; chants of “USA!” tend to drown out any conscience.
When Borat’s film ends and demands the viewer to vote, it rings as a last ditch effort to convince the audience to make even a small change and resist misinformation. With the election come and gone, it makes the film a perfect time capsule of 2020, a year where everyone was telling everyone to vote because of the hell we faced, seeing it as the easiest solution. But Subsequent Moviefilm is anything but easy to digest, and change isn’t instantaneous. The film never shies away from showing just how far the lies of America have gone. Voting is nice and we’ve voted for what seems to be a substantial change. And yet, the most frightening people in the film will still be here in Biden’s America, still believing in every conspiracy fed to them by the American machine of capitalism.
And that might be what makes this 2020’s scariest film. Polarization has resulted in an explosion of internet-born lies. America is, rightfully, an embarrassment to every country around it, but the rise of fascism and QAnon is spreading across the globe. The portrait Subsequent Moviefilm paints is sinister. As the film became the second most watched film of quarantine, it felt like the populace waking up from the likes of Hamilton, seeing exactly what the country truly is. No more ahistorical takes in which slave-owners are played by POC, no more visions of an America built by immigrants rather than the Indigenous people who lived on this land first. We have to stomach that the country we live in is near dystopian, citizens believing in and propagating lies and bigotry in everything they do. Borat reveals that the biggest threat to America is itself — a country so engulfed in lies and greed that it convinces people that a deadly pandemic is no worse than the common cold just so these people can generate capital for CEOs and promptly die.
