Good R. Browdwell BOrat

The News

By Ray Pride

November 2, 2020

Good Dr. Bordwell: “Defending some of his wildest films, Hong Kong director Tsui Hark pointed out, ‘Sometimes it’s fun to be stupid.’ True enough. But we need to be stupid in sync. When a leader is being stupid and only some of our fellow citizens are, it’s a lot less fun. The situation invites you to respond with meta-stupidity: Showing how invincibly stupid others are being by doing something stupid yourself. One option is silly satire (‘Saturday Night Live’), but there’s a more deeply disturbing alternative. You can be stupid in a savage, no-holds-barred way. This can disturb your audience. Shock defeats geniality, obliterates wit. You get called heavy-handed, on-the-nose, over-the-top, and other hyphenated things. You may even move into the realm of the grotesque. Blunt, tasteless, outrageous grotesquerie has been an important artistic strategy through the millennia. Bosch, Bruegel, Goya and other artists have taken exquisite pains to present giddy images of human folly, bursting the limits of taste and sense. Unsurprisingly, in America the grotesque flourished during the 1960s, in R. Crumb comix and Paul Krassner’s Disney orgy. The realm of the stupid grotesque is one that Sacha Baron Cohen has made particularly his own. It suits our moment. The Republican Party’s steamrolling takeover of civil society, begun in earnest in the 1980s but turbocharged under Trump, has created a Golden Age of American agitprop. Responding to the lava flows of vile, vacuous sludge on social media, carefully crafted counterstrikes have shown a fair bit of wit. Call it the spontaneous genius of the American people. That usually comes down to jaunty disrespect…”

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