The defining moment in The Dictator comes when Sacha Baron Cohen sings ”Ebony and
Ivory” with the decapitated head of a black man. Cohen’s character, the fictional North African
dictator General Hafez Aladeen has just snuck into a funeral in Harlem, intent on stealing a beard from
the deceased. When Aladeen and his cohort are discovered, they hastily cut off the man’s head, and
narrowly escape an angry black mob. Once they’ve returned to their hideout, Aladeen slips his hand inside
the lifeless black head and uses it as a puppet to sing a mocking rendition of a song about racial
harmony. It’s a sequence that may well define Cohen’s brand of comedy which presumes to irreverently
satirize racial attitudes, while appropriating and hiding behind a black or brown mask.
Just as Aladeen is pursued by an angry mob, Cohen often leaves a trail of lawsuits in his wake, once his
real-life marks realize they’ve been duped. For many, like Ayman Abu Aita, the Palestinian civilian,
smeared as a terrorist in Bruno, and the impoverished Romanian villagers mocked in
Borat, there is little recourse. Cohen has the deep pockets of a Hollywood legal team, while the
residents of Glod don’t even have running water.
When you want to make it in Hollywood, however, you pick your targets carefully and go through their
agents. Only then can you safely teabag Eminem or ”kidnap” Pamela Anderson. When in doubt,
pick on someone smaller, a C-lister or an old woman and then call it satire.
The Dictator is Cohen’s first film as a Hollywood insider. Too famous to prank anyone with
internet access, Cohen has brought his minstrel show out of the realm of Candid Camera verite and
into the tamer genre of middlebrow American comedy. He brought his brown masks along with him, but the
racial satire is broader than ever before.
As you may have guessed from the marketing assault, Cohen plays General Hafez Aladeen, the tyrannical
leader of a fictional North African country called Wadiya. He has a coterie of female bodyguards,
outrageous fashion sense, and a penchant for executing anyone who crosses him. The movie follows Aladeen
to New York, where he’s meant to address the UN, but due to a political conspiracy, gets replaced with a
doppelganger. Aladeen finds refuge in a hippie co-op run by a naive vegan feminist played by Anna Faris.
Most of the film’s comedy rehashes Cohen’s ethnic fish out of water template, with Aladeen’s racism and
misogyny clashing against the liberal values of his new friends. At one point, Faris offers to take him to
visit the “rape center.” You can guess the punchline to that one.
Cohen also plays the doppelganger Efawadh, a dimwitted peasant who, when left in a room with naked women,
mistakes them for goats and tries to milk their breasts. He also drinks his own piss in front of a UN
Assembly.
Despite its retrograde premise and Arab minstrelsy, The Dictator opened last week to mostly
positive reviews, and almost no serious criticism. Mainstream pop culture sites, even those that typically
critique racism in the media, were curiously silent. It was a stark contrast to the high profile
controversies of the Pop Chips ad featuring Ashton Kutcher in brownface and Billy Crystal’s Sammy Davis
shtick at the Oscars. Is this because as Max Blumenthal tweeted, “Some minstrel shows are more
popular than others?”
To be fair, there has been some pushback. In an op-ed for CNN, Dean Obeidallah criticized the movie, not
because of its racist jokes, but because Cohen is white. “If you are going to mock and ridicule us
for profit,” he wrote “can you at least cast Arabs and Indians to play us?” There was
also this lengthy essay at Loonwatch and a more blunt assessment at Foreign Policy.
Two days before the film opened, Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi penned a satirical column for
Salon attacking Hollywood’s history of whitewashing. His article and the accompanying slideshow
called out familiar lowlights like Mickey Rooney as a bucktoothed Japanese neighbor in Breakfast at
Tiffany’s, but made no mention of Cohen or The Dictator. When I engaged with Mandvi on
Twitter, he denied that The Dictator fit his definition of whitewashing.
Mandvi responded that “whitewashing and minstrelsy are separate issues” and said that he
really couldn’t comment on Cohen’s character without seeing the film. (Mandvi has a small part in the
movie.) Ultimately, he claimed that the issue was too nuanced for Twitter.
Well, let’s look at those nuances. Below I present the most common defenses of The Dictator and
my thoughts on them.
But Aladeen isn’t an “Arab.”
Perhaps anticipating charges of minstrelsy, early in the film, Cohen has Aladeen deny that he is an Arab.
Racial ambiguity has been a hallmark of Cohen’s shtick ever since Ali G, harassed by an authority figure,
asked “Is it because I is black?”
But there’s no mistaking the inspiration for this character. A map in the movie situates Aladeen’s
homeland of Wadiya directly to the east of Sudan. Cohen has said that the film was inspired by a novel
penned by Saddam Hussein. Aladeen is also clearly meant to resemble the late Muammar Gaddafi. There’s also
a hint of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the film’s timely plot concerns Wadiya’s enrichment of uranium
“for peaceful purposes.”
Though Wadiya is clearly an Arab country, the film follows Hollywood’s Orientalist playbook, mixing
Persian, Arab and South Asian performers and cultural references. The central Arab characters are played
by Cohen, Ben Kingsley (who is part Indian) and Jason Manzoukas (a Greek American.) The movie’s theme song
is by Punjabi MC, a British Indian musician.
The Dictator’s humor is not racist. It’s about racism.
This is one of the slipperiest defenses offered for racist humor- that it’s not really racist, but rather
ironically commenting on racism. The claim almost always deserves scrutiny. First of all, if this were
true, The Dictator would not have found such popularity among racists, as these tweets
demonstrate. OK, you might say, perhaps Cohen’s satire goes over the heads of your average American
racist. But this ignores the thorny nature of ironic humor. In the film, Aladeen refers to black people as
“subsaharans” and “blackies.” The white liberal audience laughs (mine did). Are
they laughing at Aladeen’s ignorance? At the violation of hearing a racial slur? Do they recognize their
own racism in the character?
In one scene, Aladeen remarks that darker-skinned men have lower sexual standards in women. The audience
laughs again, as if the joke has revealed an uncomfortable “politically incorrect” truth,
rather than pandered to a racist stereotype. Ironic racism lets audiences have our cake and eat it too. It
gives us permission to laugh at the violation of a racist joke, while comforting us that we do not share
the same toxic attitudes.
Most of the film’s humor- the racial caricatures, the creepy attacks on feminism, the numerous rape jokes
and the gay stereotypes have a similar thorniness. We’re invited to laugh at their wrongness but allowed
to feel superior to such backwards attitudes, because we’re good liberals who know better, while the
(brown) characters in the movie are savages.
But Cohen is an equal opportunity satirist. He makes fun of everyone, even Jews.
It’s true that in The Dictator, as in his previous work, Cohen’s humor relies heavily on
anti-semitic jokes. But here, as in Borat, he’s attributing those sentiments to the ethnic Other.
Cohen doesn’t really mock Jews. In fact, he makes a caricature of the Other’s anti-semitism. Borat, for
instance, was a vicious anti-semite whose village in Kazakhstan held an annual “Running of the
Jews.” This gag was based on a lie, because anti-semitism in Kazakhstan is actually quite rare. One
of the deeper ironies of the village sequence is that Borat was also racist against “Gypsies.”
And yet, Cohen the prankster had no reservations about exploiting the people of Glod to make the film.
Even in Cohen’s most notorious stunt, in which Borat led a bar full of “rednecks” in a
singalong of “Throw the Jew Down the Well,” it’s unclear how much he revealed about actual
anti-semitism. Though what we saw onscreen was a room full of rural white Americans cheerfully singing
about killing Jews, follow-up reports suggest that many of the patrons were in on the joke.
In any case, if Cohen were really an equal opportunity satirist, he would pick more challenging targets.
His frat-boy style satire doesn’t tip any sacred cows, for instance, when it comes to Israel. Cohen, an
Orthodox Jew who was raised in the Zionist Habonim Dror, rarely criticizes Israel and its policies.
Instead, his comedy exaggerates anti-semitism, while also attributing violence, homophobia and misogyny to
the Muslim Other. It’s pinkwashing as comedy.
But Aladeen makes a speech where he criticizes America too, right?
Yes, in the film’s penultimate scene, Aladeen gives a speech in which he inadvertently argues that
America with its income inequality, media consolidation and disproportionate imprisonment of African
Americans already has the hallmarks of a dictatorship. It’s the movie’s only attempt at critiquing a first
world target, but it mostly feels like pandering to Obama liberals.
The Dictator is not the work of a radical satirist, but of an establishment court jester. If
Cohen’s political sympathies are at all in doubt, check out his social media team’s obnoxious linkbait at
Buzzfeed, where Evo Morales is branded as a “dictator” mocked for wearing traditional Andean
clothing (seems they’ve silently edited this since I tweeted about it) and where Hugo Chavez
finds himself in a rogue’s gallery with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Kim Jong-Il.
The Dictator has much in common with voyeuristic spectacles like Boobquake and Draw Muhammad
Day, in which Western liberals engaged in Islamophobia while purporting to defend feminism and free
speech.
The Dictator is like a modern version of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.
I’ll let film critic JR Jones handle this one:
Cohen probably thinks he’s Charlie Chaplin lampooning Hitler, but of course Hitler was still on top
of the world when The Great Dictator came out in 1940; Cohen is actually Chaplin’s antithesis, a
first-world bully content to target the Other.
In other words, Gaddafi wasn’t Hitler. The War on Terror isn’t WW2. And this is a shitty analogy.
Whatever you think of The Dictator, it does not arrive in a cultural vacuum. It finds us,
instead, at the “end” of a bloody and illegal war that had grave consequences for the people
of Iraq. It appears as we are “winding down” our long war in Afghanistan. And while we rattle
sabers with Iran. It follows Obama’s, um, “unauthorized bombing” of Libya (Wadiya’s most
obvious inspiration) which led to the eventual capture, rape and execution of Gaddafi.
The film’s release coincides with a new era of drone warfare against Arabs and Muslims, of faceless
warriors dropping remote control bombs on Pakistan and Yemen. It arrives in an era of presidential kill
lists, indefinite detention and omnipresent surveillance of Muslim Americans. It opens while liberals
boast about the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s success in putting a due process-free bullet in
Osama bin Laden’s face. In short, Cohen’s minstrel show comes in the midst of a period of peak violence
against Arabs and Muslims.
There is no war without culture war, and Cohen’s Dictator shtick has the dubious function of
allowing us to laugh at (or perhaps justify) our recent and ongoing crimes of war and racial profiling.
After Cohen smeared Abu Aita as a terrorist in Bruno, he perpetrated the lie in an interview with
David Letterman while out of character. Branding ordinary Palestinians as terrorists to further
your own agenda? That’s what bullying governments do. It is not the stuff of satire.
The Dictator is not a product of the Arab Spring, but a sideshow in the unending War on Terror.
