“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.
Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.
Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.
It would be easier to take Maher’s stated project on its face if he, Charles and their editors didn’t insist on undermining the sincerity of the mission at regular intervals with rapid-fire cutaways, usually to either a bit of “ironic” found footage, or to Maher himself, ranting from the back of a moving SUV. Most of the interviews in Religulous, all conducted by Maher, start out almost startlingly strong, with the star’s uncanny knack for cutting directly to the heart of the matter on full display. But whether because his inquisitiveness is in short supply, or because he was never really in the room to learn from his subjects to begin with, Maher almost without fail finds ways to subject his subjects to ridicule. It’s one thing when he and a person of faith get into a debate; it’s frustrating that Maher refuses to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, but at least there’s an honesty to an unmitigated conversation between people who legitimately disagree. The real cruelty comes when Maher is polite (or, at least, not aggressively derisive) in person, but then uses cutaways and/or subtitles to make it clear that we’re supposed to share Maher’s conviction that Religious Person X is a drooling idiot. Maybe this is just part of the rules of the post-reality TV game, but such mean-spirited recontextualization, at least in this case, doesn’t feel like the right path towards a greater filmed truth. It doesn’t even produce footage controversial or incendiary enough to justify the methods by which it was obtained.
In Charles’ Borat, oblivious yokels were set up to believe that they were talking to a journalist, and in Religulous, interviewees are made to look like just as much of a stooge. Let’s say Borat’s biggest crime was offering a society lady a bag of his feces; it’s unspeakably offensive, and yet so gleefully absurd that you can’t really file it as cruelty. Like Borat, Maher approaches each subject as if in a sincere attempt to gather information, and then –– both in the room with his verbal mockery and attacks, and on a super-diegetic level with the cutaways and after-the-fact on-screen titles illuminating what Maher’s thinking in the moment –– turns the situation into an opportunity to gather comedy at the unwitting subject’s expense. While Sacha Baron Cohen’s fake reporter was armed with a faux naivete that essentially let him off the hook morally, even when he was been ejected from a building, Maher telegraphs an extremely hostile self-rightousness about what he’s doing. Either way, it’s still a film in which we’re supposed to cheer for the guy handing out sacks of shit.
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