<em>Bruno</em> Reveals Yokelphobia

When I first heard that Sacha Baron Cohen has filmed the climactic scene (a UFC match that turns sexy) of his summer movie Bruno in Fort Smith, I felt a rush of weird excitement. Arkansas is my native land, and I was excited to see what he would make of it, how he would capture the strange complication and allure of the place I call home. I knew he would be hard on my fellow citizens, but I expected too the cleansing, illuminating moments that I’d seen when Bruno visited Alabama on Da Ali G Show.

Of course I’d built it up too much for myself, so that reality could never possibly compare. Even so, the Fort Smith sequence seems a particularly weak moment in the film, less a crazed and bloody bacchanal than a real-estate infomercial that breaks out into a food fight. It feels very staged and staged in a particularly unfun way, a manipulative way, the crew pushing the drunk locals around, forcing the scenario, and passing out a lot of twenties to keep the whole thing moving along. Not unlike an average weekend at my house.

It is weird to see the production sink into the level of Bumfight tapes at this crucial moment, when it shows such a deft hand before. There are a profusion of sublime scenes in the movie, from the best ghost blowjob since The Brown Bunny to the casual misogyny of the preacher who attempts converting Bruno to heterosexuality by explaining just how impenetrably stupid and boring women are. As a character Bruno inhabits the screen in this movie in a way he never did on TV, smokily handsome and soulful despite being a complete moron. The movie is brutally funny throughout, and the fact that such a funny movie is also obviously inferior to its predecessor is really high tribute.

For Cohen, the bar is set unpleasantly high. In his career he again and again attempts to match the magical moment from the television show when he got an entire barfull of Arizonans to sing “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” In Borat, his victim’s torment was always fitting punishment: having your antique store trashed or having a Ziploc baggie of shit brought to your dining room table happened when and only when you had proved yourself to be an irredeemably racist asshole. By contrast, the yokels in Bruno mostly just get molested until they can’t handle it any more. Their bigotry is assumed, that or else they are being punished just because they are yokels.

And they really are pretty nice about it. The Alabama hunters only blow their top when they get the clear sense that they’re being made fun of. The crowd in Fort Smith has every reason to be pissed; they got dressed up and came out to a “sporting event,” but instead got a couple of weird-looking actors making out. The rage in their case isn’t so much for the gay act, I think, but more the awareness of having exposed their own awkward selves to some form of (unpaid) humiliation. Even yokel Ron Paul, sometime savior to the whole yokel race, lets loose with nothing more than a fairly charming epithet: “The guy’s as queer as blazes!” The phrase is charmingly folksy, something you can imagine Randy Quaid saying about the cowboy-hat-and-bandana kid in The Last Picture Show.

In the Fort Smith scene, one of the fat guys in the audience wears a T-Shirt that says MY ASSHOLE’S ONLY FOR SHITTING, which echoes a line of Bruno’s dialogue in the scene. But the shirt doesn’t belong this guy, of course, and is doubtless just the rush project of some overeager production assistant. However, our friend is still standing there wearing the shirt, a very drunk and (probably) very simple guy proclaiming a neurosis which he (probably) doesn’t have. It’s a weird moment, and to me the place where things get interesting.

None of this, of course, should distract from the fact that the South actually is a radioactively homophobic place. Arkansans, not satisfied with banning gay marriage in 2004, recently voted to prohibit gays from taking in foster kids. Foster kids, for fuck’s sake. But on a day-to-day basis, I’ve always understood the average redneck’s take on homosexuality to be they can do whatever they want in their own bedroom, just keep them away from your kids. Which when you think about it is only half insane, and not a bad average for the South.

by Jesse Holcomb