Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
The Interview
US (2014)
[Source]
Barbara Demick
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea
US (2010)
[Source]
OK, this is a big surprise: North Korean expert Barbara Demick (I heartily recommend the book she wrote above) actually seems to like The Interview.
She writes in The New Yorker:
For a North Korean watcher, seeing “The Interview” is like seeing an earnest endeavor reflected back through a freak-show mirror. But, behind the silliness and the smut, the penis and butthole jokes, the filmmakers get a lot right about North Korea.
In the opening scene, an angelic schoolgirl with rouged cheeks sings, “Die, America, die. … It would fill my tiny heart with joy” in front of the monument to the Workers’ Party in Pyongyang. The little ditty precedes a shot of a missile blasting off. Of course, North Korea’s missiles aren’t launched from the middle of Pyongyang, but, giving the filmmakers artistic license, the scene perfectly captures the anti-American propaganda in a country where kindergartens, according to the A.P., feature posters of schoolchildren bayonetting a bloodied U.S. soldier. Or, as I wrote in my own book, “Nothing to Envy,” where there is a song taught to schoolchildren called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards.”
After the opening, the plot begins to progress: Talk-show host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen) fly to Pyongyang for an exclusive interview with leader Kim Jong-un, who they have been assigned by the C.I.A. to kill.
From the airplane’s interior, with its lace-doily-backed seats, to the protagonists’ lavishly appointed guesthouse, the atmospherics ring true. First-time visitors to North Korea are always surprised that such a poor country can provide comfortable accommodations and abundant food when it wants to make a good impression. The fictional journalists of “The Interview” are impressed, too.
Kim Jong-un appears at first to Skylark to be a gracious young man, unfailingly polite as a host and anxious to show that he cares about his people. (One factual error, however: he is played by the much too handsome Randall Park.) The two enjoy a friendly game of basketball, drink margaritas, and yuk it up. I’m assuming this scene was inspired by the visits to Pyongyang by the ex-N.B.A. star Dennis Rodman, who described a “seven-star” party with jet skis, cocktails, and luxury yachts, and who characterized Kim Jong-un as a “good friend.”
Kim and Skylark are also entertained by a troupe of semi-clad dancers, no doubt based on the gippenjo, the “pleasure brigades” of young women assigned to the North Korean leadership. At one point, Seth Rogen’s North Korean love interest, a propaganda official named Sook (played by Diana Bang) tells how Party officials came into her classroom when she was a schoolgirl and selected her for the personal staff of the Kim family. The description matches defectors’ accounts of attractive girls plucked from their hometowns to serve the leadership.
Kim shows Skylark a tank that he says was a gift to his grandfather, North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, from Joseph Stalin. Actually, the gift that Stalin gave was a bullet-proof limousine, but the scene works. As for the Siberian tiger that pounces on Rapaport—well, tigers largely disappeared from the Korean peninsula in the twentieth century, and I’m quite certain that there are none roaming freely in Pyongyang nowadays.
Skylark is initially convinced by a display of fresh fruits and vegetables in a supermarket that food is in abundant supply, but, later in the film, he has a moment of reckoning when he picks up one of the grapefruit and discovers it is a fake. Here the movie is effectively playing with the contrast between illusion and reality in the country. Visitors to Pyongyang in the famine years of the nineteen-nineties used to describe supermarkets that displayed plastic produce. (These days, Pyongyang has several expensive foreign-currency shops.) And the capital is often described as a large Potemkin village, an elaborate stage set designed to fool outsiders into believing that North Korea is as rich and powerful as its propaganda claims.
The real Kim Jong-un is the third generation of the Kim family to rule North Korea. He took power in his late twenties, in December, 2011, after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il. Educated as a child in Switzerland, he had more exposure to Western culture than his father. In “The Interview,” he is depicted as a fan of the singer Katy Perry. I can’t speak to the leader’s taste in music, but his brother is a well-documented fan of Eric Clapton.
From my viewpoint, what the film gets most right is the psychology of North Korea. The regime is held together by the myth that members of the Kim family are gods, ruling by divine providence. “The Interview” addresses this phenomenon with toilet humor when Skylark asks the fictional Kim, “Do you pee and poo? … You mean, you’ve got a butthole?” (I’ve never heard North Koreans speculate about the leadership’s toilet habits, but I recall a North Korean doctor telling me that she was amazed by Kim Il-sung’s death, at the age of 82; she hadn’t believed that he could die like an ordinary mortal.)
The film didn’t start out being about North Korea. Screenwriter Dan Sterling said in an interview with Esquire that he originally thought about an interview-turned-assassination with Osama bin Laden. But he decided that Sacha Baron Cohen had cornered the market for parodies of Middle Eastern tyrants. “So I went off and tried to figure out another notorious iconic world leader and country where we could send Seth and a buddy to get themselves in all kinds of trouble,’’ Sterling said. “I came back to them with North Korea and they were very excited about that because they were just as fascinated by North Korea as I am.’’
In the Esquire interview, Sterling said that the filmmakers did their research by reading numerous non-fiction books about North Korea (specifically citing Escape from Camp 14, about a concentration camp, and Nothing to Envy), and by watching video footage from the country. He also said that the script was reviewed by a “high-level person who was in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.” That person was not identified. Kim Jong-il was the film’s intended target until his death, three years ago, and the filmmakers substituted Kim Jong-un.
As a parody, the movie is almost as damning in its portrayal of U.S. attitudes toward North Korea. The fictional television journalists sound as hysterical as real-life American television journalists reporting on North Korean missiles capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States. (For many years, it has been erroneously suggested that North Korean missile fragments were found in Alaska.) And the plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un doesn’t sound altogether implausible. Peter Hayes, a co-founder and the executive director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, recently pointed to an August 14th U.S. Strategic Command symposium, currently on YouTube, in which a retired U.S. major general openly discussed assassination as an option to put in the “kitbag” to deal with Kim Jong-un.
The scene that has raised the most objections in “The Interview” is at the very end, when Kim’s head dissolves into flames. To me, it feels gratuitous. The actual money shot is when Skylark interviews Kim on a live international television broadcast and reduces the young dictator to tears. “I don’t need my father,” he sobs. “I am strong.” He is revealed as human and fallible, puncturing the underlying myth of North Korea.
Perhaps the truest words are spoken by the fictional North Korean propagandist, Sook: “Killing Kim won’t change anything. … The people need to be shown that he is not a god, that he is man.” When Skylark challenges her, she questions him, “How many times can the U.S. make the same mistake?”
Skylark retorts, “As many times as it takes.”
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