AKA William

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[Ed: I know I'm a few days post-peak in talking about Bruno, but with my server upgrades slowing things down over here, I wasn't able to get a number of posts, including this one, up as quickly as I wanted. But I did and do want to get this one up. So here goes.]

As with most of the gay population, I was, despite experiencing a kind of Bruno-fatigue, still very excited to see Bruno.

I thought Borat was brilliant – Sacha Baron Cohen’s first big screen foray was a systematic destruction of our need to see outsiders as, well, outsiders. And that movie established a new standard for comedy’s ability to illuminate.

The idea that Cohen was going to portray a flamboyant gay man promised to be a big shot of adrenaline to us LGBTs and a much-needed anti-gay-vaccine for the anti-gays.

And it was. Of sorts. But instead of dosing us with a new message of our own humanity, Bruno was really nothing more than a mandatory booster shot. Portraying an outsider who imposes his worldview on someone else in order to expose that person’s prejudices was done better in Borat, and then it was not only better but new.

There one new thing in Bruno? Bruno happens to be gay. The “happens to be gay” might be an argument, an important one, for the gains we LGBTs have made through our constant fight for equal rights. But that’s where Bruno both began and ended.

Because of that, I don’t have much to say about the movie. And what I do have to say can (and probably should) be presented as a series of bullet points:

1) Bruno does not encourage homophobia. Every person who made an anti-gay gesture of any kind was the butt of the joke, and there is no way to misconstrue that. No homophobic person wants to align himself with a backward yokel with three teeth and two guns. And then say, “Hey, that’s just like me!”

2) There was nothing revelatory about Bruno. I didn’t walk out of the theater, the way I did with Borat, thinking about the world in a slightly new way. And I can’t imagine anyone else did either.

3) The movie was occasionally funny, very often uncomfortable to watch, and at times tedious. It felt about thirty minutes too long.

4) If Bruno did not have an Austrian accent, it would have been much more difficult to see him as the outsider that Cohen was hoping would pique our curiosity. It’s not just that he’s gay, it’s that he is not American, and he is on our soil that drives our willingness to watch Bruno and Bruno so closely.

5) Sacha Baron Cohen is the bravest man in the world.

And that’s about it for me. I’d expected to learn something from this movie. And I’d hoped that other non-LGBTs would be able to learn something, too. But for all of its overt homosexuality, this isn’t a movie about homosexuality or LGBT people. Instead, it’s a movie about how willing we are to stamp the foreheads of other people with a “Not Me!” stamp. And while that’s an important lesson for us to learn, it’s a lesson that more and more of us have already grasped. And for those who haven’t? I don’t know if they ever will.

The only real question Bruno left me with is: Why was Bruno gay?