The cultural self-imagination of the US and A in the 1970s and early 1980s was frequently spelled out through the figure of the foreigner, whose grotesque attempts to adjust and assimilate to American social habits and their attendant vicissitudes would mark the outlines of its ideal instantiation. We chuckled at “two wild and crazy guys,” Mork and Mindy, "the Coneheads," or Balki Bartokomous. How utterly appropriate then that this mode of representation should return with a retro-character straight out of a Paleolithic state of mind: Borat Sagdiyev, the intrepid Kazakh reporter. The latest rumors indicate that 20th Century Fox is scaling down the film’s US release to 800 theaters, because test audiences apparently declared themselves offended. Predictably, since Europeans assume that “political correctness” is official American policy, advance screenings of the film have garnered rave reviews in Europe. A German newspaper has gone so far as to declare the Borat the "funniest man in the world" and his film "sphincter-threateningly hilarious." It is true that the film frequently crosses the pain threshold. While its sophomoric nude wrestling sequence has already been hailed as a masterpiece in film history, I was mostly disturbed by the scenes in a religious revival tent because they actually reveal the limits of Borat’s satirical powers. In the meantime the newly independent, glorious nation of Kazakhstan is currently invested in its own retro-moves. With the help of Miramax, they have indulged in Nomad, a cinematic fantasy of narrative destiny with a purported budget of 40 million – American greenbacks, that is, not tenge, which apparently still exhibits an appropriately symptomatic tendency to suffer from linguistic confusion.
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