Borat, Eventness & the Nature of Community

26 November 2006 | Community, Eventness, Media | Comments

As a media professional, it’s difficult for me to stay ignorant about movies, TV shows and the like, try though I might to have an undiluted audience experience. Most of the time, information simply leaks in, and by the time I do get around to seeing something — particularly on the big screen — it has a been-there-done-that quality.

With the new(ish) movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” though, I managed to stay relatively clear, which was a lucky thing by the time my wife and I got around to seeing it Friday night.

We liked it a lot — I probably liked it more than Kathi did — had a lot to talk about after and both concurred that this was a movie best seen in the theater with an audience… the latter is what I’m thinking about today. Earlier in this blog and elsewhere, I’m talked about eventness and how crucial it is to my understanding of media.

Briefly, “eventness” is the unrepeatability of some forms of media or some experiences of media: a movie is the same in all the theaters it plays in, but the collection of people watching each showing is different; a live concert sounds different than the same song on an iPod; even though a play may have a long run, every eventful performance is different in some way.

We chose to see “Borat” instead of another movie because, right now at this very moment, Borat is a phenomenon, an event, and we wanted to be a part of that event before the movie dwindled into endless repeatability on late-night cable. And it was clear from the buzzing in the audience before and during the show that the rest of our moviegoers felt the same way.

With most movies, the other moviegoers act as a collective disinhibitor, almost like a drink of alcohol, your resistance to reacting to the narrative goes down in the presence of others. Most movie or playgoers are more likely to laugh out loud when watching something in the presence of others than they will watching late at night by themselves. With “Borat,” the collective experience is more important than with most shows because the movie is so relentlessly offensive.

To be clear, I was not personally offended by “Borat,” but it clearly gives offense, satirizing and insulting everybody it can think of with a clear conscience and a remarkable sense of balance. You must truly lack a sense of humor to walk out of Borat feeling particularly insulted because the show goes after everybody.

At our showing nobody walked out, nobody booed, everybody laughed. It’s such a squirmer that if I had been watching by myself I would probably have turned it off at some point– but in the theater the collective approval — or at least absent disapproval — of my fellow moviegoers kept me engaged and in my seat.

For an hour and a half or so, we Borat-goers coalesced into an ephemeral community, reinforcing, approving and policing each other’s responses to the screen. Just because it was ephemeral does not make this less valid as a community, and that has got me to thinking about the current emphasis in media circles on community, user-generated content, engagement and the like.

These days, media creators and marketers spend a lot of time thinking about engagement and how to bond audiences and customers more closely to media properties and the products advertising within them, but I worry sometimes that this is an impoverished notion of engagment because it expects SO MUCH of the audience.

You don’t have to spend a lot of time with a community for it to BE a community. Just think about your neighborhood: sure, there are the folks you know well, but there are also the folks who live on your street that you exchange nods with when you pass them at the grocery store. If, like me, you have young children, then there are the pickup dates at the local park or while trick-or-treating on Halloween.

We often think of joining a community as a big deal, like buying a house or rushing a fraternity in college. But it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to know your fellow community members well in order to be in a community with them, or for an event in that community to be important or memorable.

Coming soon: more thoughts on community, and why not all crowds are wise, or are all mobs smart.