I guess that sounds strange. Sacha Baron Cohen's entire career is premised on shock and surprise, he's supposed to get at some kind of essential truths only he is sage enough and fool enough to expose. But I don't actually think homophobia in America is much of a target for him. Homophobia is obviously an enormous problem, one that does everything from drive kids to suicide in despair over anti-gay bullying to passively supporting legal structures that impose huge costs, both financial and emotional, on people and their families. But you'd have to be grown in a vat not to know that some people in America don't like gay people, and react emotionally, and sometimes violently, when they meet them. And as Megan McArdle points out, it's sort of dubious that you're revealing something meaningful about American attitudes towards gay people when you do things that are patently offensive, totally without regard to the genders of the actors and the objects of those actions. Megan writes, after seeing Bruno:
A lot of the jokes, for example, rely on making very, very explicit passes at straight conservative men. But the men all behave pretty well. Though one target throws around the word "queer" in a way that made me like him less than I already do, no one says anything nastily homophobic; they just tell "Bruno" to knock it off. The tension as these scenes build up is occasionally interesting, but the weakness of the denouement means they never pay off. I haven't laughed so weakly at a movie in years. Plus there's always the disturbing knowledge that I'd be deeply, deeply offended if any straight man approached me the way he went after those men.And if you're grasping so badly for a reaction that you're reduced to harassment, you're not really acting much, are you? I think a great deal of my reaction to Bruno is predicated on Baron Cohen's performance in Sweeney Todd, which I thought was wonderful, full of solemnity and menace behind the blowsy arrogance. Baron Cohen can do more than strut around in hot pants and act stupid, convinced he's doing something meaningful. I wish he'd just do it, already.