What's a Good Liberal to do with Brüno?

Sacha Baron Cohen's new film, Brüno, has gotten a wary and reserved response from reviewers, and if Brüno is to be judged by its success as a political satire, Baron Cohen is on shaky ground. Jarrett Barrios, the president of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is representative in criticizing the film for reinforcing negative stereotypes about gay people. Barrios is worried some viewers will fail to see the satire and thus will not "appreciate the film's inarguably positive intentions."

But one might argue about Brüno's positive political intentions. To be sure, Baron Cohen's publicity apparatus has been careful to frame the film as a satire with the politically positive intent of ridiculing homophobia. What if, however, Baron Cohen the performer is ultimately driven not by political intentions but by aesthetic ones? What if the film is ultimately not a politically consistent satire but rather a work within the avant-garde tradition of undermining sensibility for its own sake?

Defenders of avant-garde art (of which I would count myself) like to think that its aesthetic and political intentions can go hand in hand. To "épater la bourgeoisie" (to shock the middle-classes) is to pave the way for a new and better political consciousness, at least so the argument has gone. But what if aesthetic shock does not lead to a raising of political consciousness? This is the problem Brüno presents.

The core of Baron Cohen's aesthetic is to create and completely inhabit a character (be it Brüno or Borat) whose nature upsets and unsettles the foundational beliefs of those he encounters. This aesthetic is assimilable to a liberal project of positive political satire, as long as the foundational beliefs of those he encounters are worthy of being skewered, such as homophobes or xenophobes. But what happens when the skewering appears to be for its own sake?

Two scenes in Brüno particularly exemplify Baron Cohen's aesthetic. The first one is the "Jerry Springer" -type talk show in which Brüno appears to describe his adoption of "O.J.," his African child. The largely, if not exclusively, African-American audience at the talk show begins showing hostility when Brüno indicates that he is a gay, single dad, who intends to use his "gayby" as a "dick" magnet. The audience has shown that they are homophobes and thus justifiable targets -- so far, so good, from the perspective of liberal satire.

But what rouses the talk show audience to visceral outrage is when Brüno shows them photographs of his family life with O.J. that depict O.J. being surrounded by bees, being held in a hot tub with naked men, and, finally, being tied to a crucifix. We, the movie-viewing audience, recognize and laugh at the obviously "Photoshopped" nature of these absurdly over-the-top photos. The talk show audience, however, is not in on the joke. They believe what they are seeing is real, and react to the apparent abuse of a child (and specifically the abuse of a black child by a white gay man).

From the perspective of liberal political satire, the talk show scene raises some uncomfortable questions. While the audience's reaction to Brüno is based on homophobia, it is also based on racially-charged shock tactics such as Brüno's announcing that, in naming the child "O.J.," he has given him a "traditional" African name. More fundamentally, the scene raises the questions of whether it is a justifiable use of satire to skewer an audience for being concerned about apparent child-abuse. But to raise these questions is to reveal how far Brüno is from having a centrally consistent political purpose. The talk show scene "works" (if it works) purely because Brüno has succeeding so completely in taking in and outraging the audience. He has succeeded in taking the absurd and making it real to them. This is an aesthetic, not a political, goal.

The other scene that vividly illustrates Baron Cohen's aesthetic comes near the movie's end, when Brüno, disguised as "Straight Dave" a homophobic wrestler, ends up kissing and caressing his wrestling partner Lutz, to the baffled outrage of the viewing crowd. The wrestling scene is easier to assimilate to a liberal satire of homophobia, but to do so would be to miss what gives this scene its power and makes it the most fully-realized moment in the film. As Richard Kim observes in his review for the Nation, "the resulting chaos is animated, one suspects, not so much by homophobia, but by a sense of betrayal." The reaction of the wrestling audience to the events is stunning. Having initially led his audience to an evangelical fever pitch by his homophobic preaching, his kissing of Lutz utterly betrays and shocks them.

In such moments, Brüno is best understood not as satire, but as a work of avant-garde art. In a way that would be the envy of his avant-garde predecessors, Baron Cohen succeeds in completely undermining the conceptual universe of the wrestling match audience. Through aesthetic artifice, Brüno destroys their faith. Next to this, Marcel Duchamp's placing of a urinal in an art gallery pales to insignificance. Baron Cohen may have pulled off one of the greatest avant-garde aesthetic moments of all time.

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David Aram Kaiser is the author of Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism.