The Brünos Who Surround Us

Universal Pictures Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film is a satire of the highest form, says Lee Siegel—one that exposes the reckless ego in us all as we scurry to get in on his game, with no questions asked.

The critics who are calling Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno an unfunny, tasteless failure are wrong. Cohen’s latest film is the most effective satire since Jonathan Swift’s Digression on Madness.

Swift’s success in that extraordinary essay was to reach a point where madness and sanity blended into each other. Madness shouted the truth but also nonsense; sanity spoke both reasonably and insanely. The infinite regression of meaning allowed Swift to utter unutterable illuminations about human existence. The gifted satirist knows how to play with masks.

Brüno is not repellent because he is flamboyantly gay. He is a flamboyantly gay man who happens to be repellent.

Speaking of tastelessness, it was Swift who used the fantasy of anal birth to express the source of satirical wit: truth’s essentially asocial, sordid, disreputable nature. The great satirist derives the power of his assault on society from the body’s most ignominious orifice. He doesn’t speak truth to power. That’s boring, and anyway, power knows how to “spin” the truth. Rather, the effective satirist flings shit into power’s face. Real truth isn’t pretty. And it’s hard to wipe off, let alone “spin.”

There is anality galore in Brüno, the story of a gay Austrian diva, once prominent in the world of European high fashion—he is the former host of an Austrian fashion TV show called Funkyzeit—who falls from grace and travels to America to recover his lost celebrity.

Cohen’s previous satirical persona, Borat, a provocatively clueless visitor from Kazakhstan, also comes to America. But Borat betrayed its comic purposes by ridiculing the easy target of provincial prejudice instead of the subtler and more powerful biases that hide behind some “sophisticated” attitudes. In Brüno, Cohen sets out to correct his mistake by returning to a version of his first persona, Ali G, a similarly clueless white boy who is doing a black rapper who insulted some of the world’s most influential people who naïvely—and opportunistically—appeared as guests on his show.

Cohen’s target in Brüno is, superficially, the absurd pursuit of fame that seems to plague American life. It’s odd, in fact, that no one has made the connection between the media’s weird obsession with the death of Michael Jackson and Cohen’s deconstruction of celebrity hollowness.

What better target, after all, if you want to satirize the American obsession with fame than Paula Abdul, one of American Idol’s judges? Arriving in Los Angeles, Brüno decides to become re-famous by interviewing famous people and has Abdul over to his fancy new house. Unfortunately, he doesn’t own any furniture. So he has some of the Mexican workmen who are fixing up his new digs get down on all fours and serve as tables and chairs.

Tasteless? You bet. And the perfect conceit to expose true spiritual vulgarity. Abdul enters and, though visibly surprised by the novel accommodations, amiably slips right into her celebrity share of entitled attention and takes a seat on the back of one of the Mexicans. She chats chirpily with Brüno, indifferent to this new low in the history of immigrant labor. It’s only when Brüno has his assistant wheel in some hors d’oeuvres on the ample naked stomach of another Mexican that Abdul decides she can’t be there, abruptly gets up and leaves. But she was there, and happily so, and it’s not clear whether she leaves out of an eruption of moral indignation or because she finds the prospect of eating off an immigrant’s naked stomach hygienically problematic. You can sit on them, but when it comes to food…