Spoilers.
I’m putting a question mark, because I’m not really going to review “Bruno”, in the sense of come down with an actual opinion about whether it’s good or not, homophobic or not—-I think that’s really up to the individual viewer, and more to the point, it was obviously made to be ambiguous enough that it’s really hard to say what the point is, though I strongly suspect that the joke’s on anyone who finds himself upset by Bruno’s over-the-top gayness. After reading Sarah Seltzer’s thoughtful review, I did want to add some thoughts.
As the character on the Ali G show, Bruno was funniest when exploiting the fear/desire continuum that feeds homophobia. Any observer of homophobia knows what I’m talking about—-homophobic straight people (or “straight” people in many cases) have all these longings to do things that are considered “gay”, and the stronger the desire, often the stronger the homophobia. And therefore the stronger the need to police your own behavior to make sure you don’t enjoy things that are gay. Which means that straight people are often paranoid, grim, and humorless, spending so much time policing their own desires that they can’t have any fun. Bruno can, in his best moments, expose how straight people are so intent on oppressing gay people that they oppress themselves. I’m sure you’ve seen the funniest Bruno sketch ever, and it’s funny because of this.
It’s also funny because of the second best thing Bruno does, which is hoodwink you with the ridiculousness of himself before hitting you over the head with the ridiculousness of straight people behavior. Your tolerance for this argument—-that everyone is kind of ridiculous, so we should just relax and stop trying to control and judge others—-will probably determine how much you enjoy certain segments of the movie “Bruno”. When “Bruno” lands its best punches, it’s usually in this vein, and despite people’s concerns that Sacha Baron Cohen is cognizant of this, he’s not subtle at all about making his view on this clear. At one point, Bruno is interviewing an ex-gay “therapist” about how to police himself for gayness (the conceit of the second half of the movie is that Bruno decides to become straight), and he asks the guy, “Can I be fabulous?” It’s a clean punch on the nose of the culture of homophobic policing, and its grim, joyless nature. Same story with the scenes involving cage fighting and a swingers party—-the takeaway is that straight people have no sense of humor about themselves, and they are particularly blind to how ridiculous their sex lives are.
I can’t say that I don’t believe that the intent of the movie is to aggressively confront the homophobia that defines straight culture and makes it such a miserable culture. And in some scenes, it works perfectly, such as when Bruno goes to a swinger’s party and exposes the conservative, homophobic attitudes that the swinging culture inculcates. You really couldn’t pick a better example to show that homophobia gets traction with straight people who have massive insecurities that they’re forever and grimly trying to deny. Bruno’s gleeful perversion is contrasted with the strong whiff you get from the swingers that they’re trying to prove something, coupled with their overly strong insistence on seeing a difference between getting aroused by fucking near people of your own gender and fucking people of your own gender. (At least for the men.) Like in the video above, there’s a lot of humor in the fact that straight men do get pleasure, sexual and otherwise, out of each others’ bodies, but they can never, ever admit it, because they’re crippled by their own homophobic policing.