The Interview is sort
of a modern equivalent of that 1960s TV series Get Smart. The jokes are more scatological, but the movie is
political-themed slapstick. That’s what I expected going into the theater, and
that’s pretty much what it is. What
was surprising was how much of the North Korean perspective made it in among
the silliness. I made a list of the points that were introduced in this
otherwise sophomoric movie:
1) The US has more prisoners,
even on a per capita basis, than North Korea.
2) The US has more nukes, and has
used them. (and, I might add, was the first to abrogate the treaty
prohibiting nukes on the Korean Peninsula)
3) North Korea has been in a
defensive posture ever since they drove the US out, while the US has gone on to
invade numerous other countries.
4) Hunger and other depravations
in North Korea might be due to bad Korean leadership as the US alleges, or
might be due to the cruel sanctions imposed by the US, in an effort to starve
the North Korean people into submission.
5) While there are two
perspectives on who fired the first shot in the Korean War, there can’t be any
question of whose soldiers were in whose country.
6) The US employs the tactic of
assassination of governmental leaders in sovereign nations as a “normal” option
to pursue its political goals. (That, of course, was the unchallenged premise
of the movie.)
I
can’t remember the last time a mainstream movie made those points, even in a
comedy that was overall disrespectful of North Korea and its leadership. This
raises the obvious question of why North Korea would have hacked Sony, unless,
of course, nobody over there had seen the movie. At any rate, I was surprised The
Interview raised the points noted above.
Since the movie is generating considerable chatter, it seems like a good
opportunity for the American left to remind people about the history between
the US and Korea.
For
those interested in finding out more about the Korean War, I can’t think of a
better book than I.F. Stone’s 1952 book “Hidden History of the Korean War.”
Check it out of your library or go here:
For a quick over-all summary, read Wikipedia’s article on US
/North Korean relations. I suspect that for the average American leftist, and
certainly for the average American, there is much that will surprise the
reader.
Here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Comrade Kim
Since
I started out discussing a movie that supposedly takes place in North Korea,
it’s worth mentioning a different movie, directed by westerners, but filmed in
North Korea, using Korean actors. The Seattle International Film Festival
included in its 2013 line-up a great little film entitled Comrade Kim Goes
Flying. It was a Belgium, UK, and North
Korean co-production. I loved this movie, about a young coal miner who dreams
of being a trapeze artist in the circus. With the assistance of her fellow
workers and a little mischief along the way, she overcomes the disdain of an
arrogant trapeze star who thinks miners should stay in the mines, to realize
her dream.
Although
both movies are light comedies, what a difference between the crass Interview and Comrade Kim’s uplifting, socialist, feminist message.
To view the trailer for Comrade Kim online, follow this link:
The Lesson of 1812
For
a while in my younger years, I thought Viet Nam was the first country to
successfully defend itself against the US juggernaut. I guess that’s because
I’m of the Viet Nam generation, and we thought we invented resistance to US
Imperialism. It was sort of like when I was a kid, hiking in the woods,
thinking that I was probably the first person to ever walk down that trail. I
don’t remember stopping at the time to wonder how the path got there if nobody
before me had passed that way.
At
a certain point I learned more, or got more humble, and realized that the
Koreans had done what the Vietnamese did, only a generation earlier. Both of
those wars were in many ways Cold War proxies. “If we don’t stop them over
there, we’ll be fighting them over here” was the mantra, no matter that neither
Korea nor Viet Nam showed any desire to invade us, or even had ships big enough
to do so. How surprised I was when one of my fellow soldiers pointed out the
shoulder patch all American troops in Viet Nam wore on their uniform (the MACV
patch).
Click here to see what the patch looked like: http://www.medalsofamerica.
The sword, coming from below, is piercing the Great Wall of
China. Even the patch on American uniforms exposed the lie behind US assertions
that we were in a defensive war! Of course that didn’t stop the Rambo movies from rewriting the verdict on that failed
war.
A
few years ago my wife and I took a couple copies of a 16mm film from Seattle to
Montreal. We had the only 2 known English language copies of a 1951 Joris
Ivens documentary film Peace
Will Win, and we were donating them to be
archived and preserved by Concordia University in Montreal. The film had
footage of Korean cities being napalmed by US forces.
Imagine
my surprise on arriving in Montreal to discover that Canadians are proud to
have successfully repelled multiple US invasions during the War of 1812. As a
child, I learned that the War of 1812 was fought to stop the British naval
practice of press-ganging. Canadians have a different version of the story.
They see that war as a defensive effort to stop the annexation of Canada by a
land-hungry US. I thought we won that war, they think they did.
Things
aren’t always the way we are led to believe. Consider again the points
mentioned in The Interview. I think it’s
a shame that the American left has bought into the US vision of “Axis of Evil”
North Korea. While I can’t recommend seeing The Interview, I do believe it gives good-hearted people an
opportunity to discuss the reality of a country that repulsed a US invasion and
is still being punished for it. See beyond the rectum jokes and help some
American, in the course of your film discussions, pull their head out of
theirs.
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