the seether is neither loose nor tight

[record]

I saw Bruno last night.I was expecting to love it (I loved Borat, saw it four times! And I loved the Ali G. show, and Bruno was my favorite character on the show!), but I ended up having a very negative reaction to it in the theater, trying to talk myself into being cool enough to like it, and then finally liking it even less, the more I thought about it. I still don't have a coherent reaction so much as a series of bullet points. And isn't that the whole POINT of LJ? :)

• The big difference between the dynamics of the Bruno and Borat characters isn't the nature of the comedy: they both are intended to provoke people into showing their ugly side. However, Borat does this by making people agree with increasingly absurd, un-PC things. Borat is the reducto ad absurdum of right-wing, provincial attitudes. Borat is also somewhat of a lovable rascal that you want to root for. Thought experiment: what if Borat had been a Jewish character? Not just Jewish, but a Shylock, the most disgusting and repulsive Jew an anti-Semite could ask for? Well...meet...
• Bruno. A caricature of homosexuality. In the show, he was sly and quickwitted. In the movie...he's just a buffoon. He is an utterly repulsive human being. Not only did I feel like I was witnessing a gaybashing...at many points in the movie, I felt uncomfortably close to wanting to participate in a gaybashing. Making me disgusted to see gay sex is no mean feat, right?
• It wasn't just his homosexuality. The way he continually forced himself sexually on people really rubbed me the wrong way. A naked man at the door of my tent propositioning me in the middle of the night would freak me the fuck out. Well, by "me," I suppose I mean "a heterosexual male who had been accomodating if uncomfortable of this person's supposed sexual orientation," which is a bit hard for me to imagine. Still, though. Someone in a focus group who's grossed out by seeing someone's penis seems like a perfectly reasonable person. To me. I don't think that being homophobic and not wanting other people's sexuality inflicted on you are the same thing at all.
• The parts of the movie that I enjoyed didn't need Bruno to be anything other than a reasonable person. The crazy stage parents, or the ex-gay counseling, had no need for schtick.
• Thought experiment: What if Bruno had been an extremely homophobic character? I probably would have liked it better. I agree that Sacha Baron Cohen's thing is meanspiritedness. But bottom line? I felt like he was being meanspirited towards his own character. Did all these people honestly read Bruno as a gay person? Or as a straight person mocking one? Did the audience see Bruno as a gay person? Did the audience leave MORE homophobic than when they came in?
• There are a few more points I want to make, but I have a meeting to go to.