I have the faint hope of being the FIRST to blog this puissant word, which may or may not have been coined by Anthony Lane in his review of Borat and Volver in this week's New Yorker. Lane's use of the term comes close to being its instantiation (on the evidence of Google, which points to two other uses, one an obvious misspelling of 'squirmiest'), but I digress... The money quote:
He [Sacha Baron Cohen] is a squirmist: a master of SECS, or Socio-Ethnophobic Comic Simulations, in which he adopts fictional personae and then marches briskly into the real world with a mission to embarrass its inhabitants. (New Yorker November 6, pg. 106)It's an illuminating, even scintillating review of both movies and (more important) of the sociocultural stuff that underlies them. Catch this bit of lambent skewerage:
So why send his characters here? Because America, to any filmmaker, is where the money is, but also because, to the connoisseur of hurt pride, it is where the sore spots are. (pg. 109)
Didja miss Ali G [Sacha Baron Cohen] does Chomsky?