Fictional characters in a real world: unruly fictionalised encounters in Borat, The Ambassador, and the Yes Men’s media hoaxes

ABSTRACT

This article is a study of the critical potential and ethical implications of encounters between fictionalised characters and unsuspecting real people. Through the case studies of Borat, The Ambassador, and the Yes Men’s media hoaxes, I aim to show how the use of fictionality as a performative strategy creates a liminal interaction that possesses a critical force which cannot be created in either classical documentaries or fiction films. The article brings together theories of fictionality as a rhetorical strategy and theories of unruly documentary artivism to investigate to whom the guise of fictionality refers and to which risks they are exposed. It is argued that the practice of unruly artivism can be characterised as a specific type of metamodernist art, and that encounters between fictionalised characters and real people (which I term ‘unruly fictionalised encounters’) constitute a subgenre which is characterised by the ethically-complex deceit of the unsuspecting real people.

KEYWORDS:

• Fictionality
• hoaxing
• unruly artivism
• satire
• Borat
• the Yes Men
• The Ambassador

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The political implications of fictionality in The Ambassador have been investigated by Jacobsen et al. (2013) and Iversen and Nielsen (2016). See also Reestorff’s important work on the unruly artivist practice of Mads Brügger in The Ambassador (Reestorff, 2013).

2. In the documentary the word ‘pygmy’ is used but, since it can be considered pejorative, I will refer to this group as the Bayaka people in this article, as this is what members of the Aka and Baka tribes call themselves (see Duke, 2006; Markowska-Manista, 2017).

3. This is characteristic of Mads Brügger’s documentary method. In Det røde kapel, The Red Chapel, from 2006; 2009 he travels to North Korea as part of a theater group which pretends to worship the leader, Kim Jong-ll. The true purpose of the trip was to unravel the atrocities of the regime. In Danes for Bush from 2004, he travels to the US as a pro-Bush campaigner in order to uncover right wing behaviour to which he is unsympathetic. I have named this strategy ‘method documentary’ (cf. Jacobsen, 2012) because Brügger infiltrates the milieu he wishes to expose.

4. The British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is known for his various fictive characters who interact with unsuspecting real people. Borat first appeared as a character in Cohens Da Ali Show which was broadcast in 2000. Cohen has since created the fictive characters of Brüno in 2009, Admiral General Aladeen in The Dictator from 2012, and in 2018 he created the TV show ‘Who is America?’ in which he appears in numerous disguises to lure powerful Americans into exposing their unsympathetic behaviour.

5. For a thorough investigation of the controversy between Baron Cohen/Borat and the Kazakhstani government see Saunders (2007; 2008).

6. On 2 December 1984, more than 600,000 people in the small towns surrounding the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal were exposed to the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate. The exposure, which was caused by an accident, lead to an estimated 15,000 deaths, and many of the survivors have struggled with various repercussions, including the birth of mentally and physically disabled children. (See for example Taylor, 2014).

7. For an analysis of the Yes Men’s media hoaxes in relation to satirical fake news, see Jacobsen (forthcoming b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louise Brix Jacobsen

Louise Brix Jacobsen is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University. She has published on contemporary media and the concept of fictionality in various contexts (e.g. to the journals Narrative and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies). She is currently doing research on fictionality in Fake News and Media Hoaxes and is contributing to and co-editing the book anthology Fictionality in Literature (forthcoming Ohio State University Press, 2019).