Suing ‘Borat’? High five!

IT’S NOT UNUSUAL in this era of reality TV shows for people to be filmed saying or doing something they’ll later regret. Less common is for them to turn their embarrassment into a lawsuit. Yet that is what two “cast members” in the movie “Borat” did last week.

Calling them “cast members” may be a stretch. Like all the other “average Americans” who appear in “Borat,” the two fraternity brothers from the University of South Carolina who filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox signed consent forms after allowing themselves to be filmed making racist, sexist (and often downright bizarre) remarks.

But they say the filmmakers misled them, plying them with alcohol and telling them the movie would never be shown in the United States. Because of these deceptions, the lawsuit claims, the students “engaged in behavior that they otherwise would not have engaged in.” The result, they say, has been humiliation and mental anguish.

If they can show that the filmmakers’ deceptions led them to sign the release forms, the pair may have a case. But it’s hard to come up with much of an ethical, moral or even logical defense of their actions.

Did they think that, in a YouTube world, the filmmakers would have been able to keep their movie out of the United States even if they had wanted to? What are we to make of someone who feels free to act like a bigot when he thinks no one is looking? Furthermore, why would these three students subject themselves to further exposure and mockery by filing a lawsuit?

Maybe these enterprising young men simply smell an opportunity for a cash settlement. Litigiousness, oddly enough, is one aspect of American culture that “Borat” does not lampoon. Clearly it doesn’t need to, as the fallout from the lawsuit provides not only free publicity but an extension of the film’s central gag.

As Borat himself might say: “High five — lawsuit can make benefit even if cultural learnings do not.”