Bravo Brüno!

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest brilliantly
exposes homophobic hypocrisy

PANIC BUTTONS: Brüno

by MATTHEW HAYS

Behold the fuss over the latest feature film from Sacha Baron Cohen. Brüno is undoubtedly the most anticipated movie of the year, given that Cohen’s last film, Borat (also based on one of the characters from the hugely popular Da Ali G Show), was the comic sensation of 2006.

I loved it. It’s everything we’ve come to expect from a Cohen project: crude yet somehow sophisticated, remarkably sophomoric while full of insight. What kills me about response to this film is how some queer onlookers are actually suggesting there could be some dangers in Cohen’s over-the-top representation of Brüno himself. On the Web site CBC Arts Online, Sarah Liss accurately describes Brüno as “a grotesque exaggeration of homosexual stereotypes: he is mincing, superficial, frequently unclothed and enjoys rubbing his, er, desires in the faces of strangers… Brüno seems engineered to reveal the queen-y boogeyman that haunts homophobes.” So far so good, but then Liss goes down a predictable, unfortunate road: “Trouble is, he may also reinforce that sense of gay panic.”

To be fair, it’s understandable that queers see how we’re represented as hugely contentious—Hollywood, of course, famously got it wrong for an eternity. But Cohen is so clearly an ally, it’s astonishing that anyone could think he’s trying to appeal to homophobes.

As British author Richard Dyer has noted, we tend to think of stereotypes as negative. But Cohen uses the crude and rude Brüno beautifully, lulling any potential homophobes in the audience into a sense of disdain for the character, especially during the first reel, when anal-sex jokes abound.

But Brüno is mere bait for Cohen’s real targets: homophobes (some international, but mainly American). I wallowed in the film’s cruel set-ups, in which Cohen again fuses political theatre and documentary filmmaking techniques, effectively trapping scads of people in their own fear and hatred of homosexuality.

It could be argued that what Cohen is doing is taking a page from the queer playbook. It was author Philip Core who suggested that camp (the distinctly gay strain of humour) was “the lie that tells the truth.” This is precisely what Cohen is doing in Brüno: taking a fictional character and outing America—a country that boasts equality for all—for its toxic hypocrisy.

BRÜNO IS NOW PLAYING