In this essay, I will be talking about how Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 movie titled “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” has different meanings and interpretations, making the movie a site of struggle over meaning. “Borat” is a mockumentary of Kazakhstan, something for the audience to laugh about with Sacha Baron Cohen posing as a Kazakh journalist, who has zero awareness of what is happening in the Western world, with scenes depicting him acting in socially inappropriate ways during his visit to America with his equally as clueless co-worker Azamat. To the Western world, it is a comedy which shows how people from third world countries act, and how Westerners, in particular Americans, are superior to citizens of developing countries in how they are smarter and more socially developed than them.

When thinking of popular culture in a wider sense, Fiske (2011) argues how jeans in America and the rest of the world have taken on different meanings to different wearers of the jeans. For example, to a middle-class American blue collar worker wearing jeans would mean a totally different thing than to someone who is wearing designer jeans in a different part of the world. Fiske uses the example of jeans to demonstrate to the reader how popular culture can become a site of struggle over meaning. “Popular culture is deeply contradictory in societies where power is unequally distributed along axes of class, gender, race, and the other categories that we use to make sense of our social differences” (Fiske, 2011, p.4). When usually popular culture is seen as a tool that unites people of different social groups, the reality is that it does quite the opposite. Since everyone is entitled to their own opinions, interpretations, and attaching their own meanings to different things, whether it be to, for example, jeans, a reality TV show, or a book, we end up with a society which is oversaturated with different meanings attached to all kinds of different things.

This idea also applies to the case of the movie Borat. As I have already mentioned in the introductory paragraph, the movie acts as light-hearted entertainment to the groups that are viewed as powerful in society (white Western people), it also can be viewed as offensive to the people that Sacha Baron Cohen is making fun of in the movie (non-white non-Western people). Even though in interviews the actor has said that the movie’s purpose was to expose America for its values (xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism), in actuality the majority of the movies’ Western audience interpreted the movie to be an expose of Kazakhstan and its people; them being sexist, ‘backwards’, racist among many other negative traits associated with the cultures and beliefs of non-Western, developing countries. The movie was not screened in cinemas in Kazakhstan, and different people who had accessed the movie, different opinions of it. Most upper- and middle-class people took deep offence in it, saying that the movie doesn’t reflect the true reality of how Kazakh people act and what they believe in. However, of course, there were numerous amounts of people who thought that the movie was humorous and were proud that Kazakhstan was getting recognition in worldwide media. Many other people, like myself, are conflicted about what meaning exactly this movie has to them. Should it be offensive because of the over-exaggerated, bizarre ways that Borat acts in the movie and how he represents the country, or should it be Kazakhstan’s moment in the spotlight?

While the movie is supposed to act as a satirical critique of the West through the offensive jokes and actions of Borat’s character, it fails to do so without mocking a non-Western country, ‘the film was banned in Kazakhstan, due to its portrayal of the country as antisemitic, sexist, and broadly “backwards”. Not in a subtle way, but in an obscene one,’ (Frazer-Carroll, 2020). If Baron-Cohen was to make a satirical movie about the West by using a Western character to do so, then maybe his intentions in making such a movie would be clearer and less subliminal, however at the moment, to the average middle-class white Western viewer, the movie probably will look like a satirical critique of not only the people and government of Kazakhstan, but all other non-Western countries with similar economic and political positions.

In conclusion, there are a plethora of different meanings and connotations attached to this movie, and every single one is valid to the person with their meaning and their opinion. I have personally watched the movie several times and every single time I have attached a different meaning to the movie. No clear-cut consensus has been reached on what opinion the whole of Kazakhstan has of the movie, however the experience of watching and interpreting the movie will be substantially different for the Western viewer and the Kazakh viewer. Even in instances where both viewers feel empowered by the movie, the meaning attached to that empowerment will not be the same. In closing, every single commodity, even a 2006 movie about an unheard of country, can become a site of struggle over meaning.



Bibliography :
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) IMDb. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443453/ (Accessed: March 12, 2023).
Fiske, J. (2011) Understanding Popular Culture. London, UK: Routledge.
Weiner, N. (2023) “The Politics of Culture,” Unit 4 Cultural Histories and Theories. London: Central Saint Martins.