No Lifeguards Were Harmed in the Making of This Movie

I went to see the Borat movie on Sunday, and it was one of the funniest things I'd seen in a while. I went with a pretty girl, but I'm not going to talk about that - I'm not superstitious, but it can't hurt not to jinx it already.

Borat pushes the boundaries in several ways, with his ridiculous attitudes to women, sex, and Jews at the forefront of his charge. Of course, the whole point of these fictional attitudes is to bring out the worst in the people around him, who are blissfully unaware of the situation they're in, and who will happily join in with songs like 'Throw the Jew down the Well', and cheer on Borat as he shouts 'may George Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!'.

But the end of the film pushed the boundaries too far, even for me. The plot of the film follows Borat around America, during which time he sees Baywatch on TV in his hotel room and becomes infatuated with Pamela Anderson. The film climaxes with him visiting one of her signings with a 'traditional Kazach wedding sack', embroidered with both of their names. He introduces himself and proposes to her - and then roughly puts the sack over her head and starts to carry her, screaming, out of the building. She escapes and runs to the car park, where Borat catches up to her and tackles her to the ground, before being subdued by Security Guards as the hysterical Anderson watches.

Because the majority of the film involves real people, you're lead to believe that this actually happened to an unaware celebrity. I had stopped laughing and was looking on in shock, feeling sorry for the poor woman, who probably feared for her life. I left the cinema feeling genuinely disturbed, and couldn't stop thinking about it.

Of course, the next morning I looked up the film on Google and found out that Pamela Anderson was in on the whole joke, and it had been an act. Her website even carries an advert for the film, calling it her 'greatest performance' (and it is, well, apart from that video).

Still, I don't remember feeling so disturbed since reading American Psycho. I'm all for exploring taboos, and I'm generally a very liberal person. But some things are taboo for good reason. Even now that I know that the whole thing was staged, I wonder whether it was appropriate to turn abduction and assault against a woman into part of a comedy sketch.