The revolution has an end

"Bruno": the most scandalous film of recent months

The most scandalous film of recent months was "Bruno" with Sacha Baron Cohen in the title role. In Ukraine, he was banned for "an artistically unjustified demonstration of the genitals." In the US, he became the leader of the rental weekend, earning $ 30 million on the move (then interest in him faded). With us, he shocked the hall, laughing loudly, but nervously.

British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen became famous three years ago after the farce Borat: Exploring American Culture for the Benefit of the Great Kazakh Nation (nominated, by the way, for an Oscar for Best Screenplay). His signature style is obscenity, that is, politically incorrect and physiological jokes. Typical toilet humor - in this case, this is not an insult, but a clear definition of the genre. Nevertheless, he is not a cheap slacker, but an intellectual hooligan. His creative profession is best described by the term "actionist".

Critics, both ours and not ours, disagreed whether to consider "Bruno" (in which the homosexual hero, a small TV showman from Austria, goes to conquer America in order to become the second famous Austrian after Hitler) is a political or anti-politically correct film, progay or homophobic . In fact, "Bruno" ridicules the craving of Americans for fame, peacekeeping and other humanistic acts of Hollywood stars (in particular, the adoption of babies from the third world, which, according to Cohen, they do for the sake of self-promotion) and ... yes, yes - homophobia. Cohen's films only pretend to be politically incorrect in order to show how society - any society - covers hypocrisy and latent hostility towards all sorts of minorities and -isms with political correctness. The critics agreed in a simple observation: "Bruno", from which at first you laugh wildly, albeit sometimes nervously, suddenly becomes boring. Although the genitals that shocked the Ukrainian censors do not disappear from the screen until the very end of the film.

"Bruno" is a sign that another radical era has ended - the triumph of this very political correctness. Political correctness has become one of the most reasonable ideologies of mankind, since it professed norms and vocabulary that allowed minorities to feel comfortable in the world of the vast majority. More precisely, it would, if it had not given rise to its own excesses, would not have given rise to a system of repression for violations of norms, and at the same time censorship, which forced them to turn a blind eye to the real, including criminal, problems of the same minorities. Political correctness has increased public hypocrisy: everyone speaks the right way, but still hates others. As a result, the pendulum, of course, swung the other way, and defiant political incorrectness came into fashion, one of the pioneers of which was the South Park animated series that appeared in the late 90s, which is now running in our country.

"Bruno" finally proved that political correctness in art is no longer a challenge, but a banal trend. It is not for nothing that in this supposedly sweeping film it was considered necessary to light up such persons who are afraid to lag behind the locomotive of modernity, such as Bono and Sir Elton John, who in the finale sits at the piano on a chair in the form of a Mexican immigrant standing on all fours (a parody of "we will give unfortunate Mexicans jobs !").

But in life, political correctness turned out to be another social utopia. Intellectuals turned a blind eye to the excesses of political correctness, hoping to educate the morality of the masses. And they themselves (the first - the authors of "South Park", now Cohen-Bono-Elton John), afraid of uncontrollable consequences, swung the pendulum in the opposite direction.

It seems that political correctness will become what it should become - and what it was at the moment when the Berkeley intellectuals invented it: a moral law within the educated class, which, with all the effort and all the illusions, you can impose on the population.

And the only thing that still shocks the audience, puffed up to make a noise, "Bruno", is the abundance of the male end on the screen. Right: this end is the best symbol of the end of another utopia. Fuck you! Fuck us all!