NORTH Korea is not really comedy country. The rulers of the Hermit Kingdom are not renowned for their sense of humor. They do not appreciate satire, especially if it’s their supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, who is being satirized.
Sony Pictures found that out the hard way. We all know the trauma the giant film producer and distributor went through, all because of the low-brow comedy, The Interview.
The film pokes fun at Kim, depicting him as the target for assassination by two American journalists. Pyongyang didn’t find it funny, and the events that followed could provide an inspiration for an Oliver Stone conspiracy epic.
In June last year North Korea threatened Sony with “merciless” action if it released the film, which had a Christmas play date.
In November, Sony’s computer system was hacked and vital and sensitive documents were leaked to the Internet. Was it coincidence? The FBI didn’t think so, and was convinced that North Korea masterminded the hack.
Sony chickened out and shelved the film. But President Obama weighed in, chastising Sony for caving in and vowing to “respond proportionally” to the cyber attack.
The plot deepens. Several days later, the Internet in North Korea went dead. For several hours Kim Jong Un’s realm was mysteriously cut off from the rest of the digital world. Was this the proportional response Obama had promised?
Apparently not. Just after New Year’s, the US president ordered financial sanctions against Pyongyang’s intelligence agency and a number of Kim’s cohorts. That meant they couldn’t get their hands on their assets in the US, and American firms were banned from doing business with them.
So what’s next? North Korea launching its hopelessly misguided missiles? The US going to threat level Orange? All because of a movie that did not even get rave reviews?
“This could mark the first time in history that a movie was used as an excuse to start a war,” one reviewer of The Interview noted. A film starring James Franco and Seth Rogen is bringing us closer to a nuclear holocaust. What’s the world coming to?
Kim Jong Un should lighten up. He’s not the first dictator to be lampooned. Charlie Chaplin did a far better job on Hitler with The Great Dictator in 1940. The film was groundbreaking for Chaplin. It was his first movie where he delivered spoken lines, 13 years after “talkies” were introduced.
The Great Dictator was stinging but finely crafted satire. Chaplin played two Hitler-like characters, Adenoid Hynkel, who ruled Tomania, and his clone, a simple barber. Napoloni, the overlord of the neighbouring country, Bacteria, looked pretty much like the fascist Benito Mussolini. Chaplin went to town ripping Der Fuhrer. In one iconic scene, Hynkel danced with a bouncing globe.
Among the more recent attempts at spoofing world leaders, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad is noteworthy. The 1988 film, in which Leslie Nielsen debuts as Police Lt. Frank Drebin, is populated by the caricatures of Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gadhafi, Fidel Castro and Idi Amin.
The Dictator(2012), starring Sacha Baron Cohen, riled not a few Arab states for his screwball portrayal of General Admiral Aladeen, the despot of the North African republic Wadiya.
By making a big fuss about The Interview, North Korea may have become the film’s biggest promoter. Despite its late and limited release, it’s been doing exceptionally well. Last week, The Interview was playing in about 560 theaters, and, according to an Associated Press report, “has been rented, streamed or purchased 4.3 million times.”
It has earned more than $31 million from online and on-demand release alone.
Eat your heart out, Kim Jong Un.