The Interview

Do you think maybe Kim Jong-Un doesn’t have a Canadian sense of humour? 

Even though this is a Sony production (American film made for a Japanese company) it’s a primarily Canadian satire. Seth Rogan wrote the story and stars (as Aaron Rapaport) and it was filmed in B.C. But more importantly, its targets are not just the North Korean dictator but American culture, in all its naive simplicity. Canadian comedy is especially tuned to its southern neighbour’s follies — it has to be or it would be swamped.

Indeed the satire of Kim Jong-Un is the minor aspect. True, the dictator has his godly pretence deflated, in scatalogical terms, but also in his sentimentalizing. Interviewer Dave Skylark (James Franco) destroys him by bringing him to public tears with memories of their demanding fathers and — what else? — a Katy Perry song about some windbag. Kim finds her music “empowering.” Though the film alludes to the North Korean peoples’ suffering and its brutal, self-indulgent dictator and though its climax does (spoiler alert) blow him up, the political substance stays at the level of an X-rated Mad magazine. It’s played for laughs not realistic political discourse. 

The bulk of the satire is against the American attitude towards politics and entertainment. The Skylark show takes pride in its success at providing what its audience wants. If Rob Lowe admits to baldness, have him on to remove his wig. Have everyone irate when Lowe’s confession is cut off in favour of a story about the threat of nuclear attack. If Matthew McConaughey has been shot having sex with a goat, “Get that goat. I have some questions for that goat” — as well as the star. The film shows American journalism run like the shallow entertainment industry—pandering to the lowest. 

Rogan’s basic joke is that this film does too. However funny the lines, they express a laddish, puerile titillation. Political strategy is limited to honey potting and dicking. The show’s first great success is having Eminem admit to being gay — a surprise despite his admitted “breadcrumbs” trail of clues in bis lyrics. Our unlikely heroes have the familiar Starsky and Hutch — back to Tom and Huck Finn — barely unadmitted bromance, and are given improbable hetero sex scenes to prove they’re straight as a bow. Sorry, arrow. Hence all the butt-hole jokes, including the stash of the CIA ’s back-up missile. The guest appearance of real TV news figures confirms the reduction of news to entertainment.  

Franco is especially effective as the personification of the ignorance in American journalism. He’s all the Fox bimbos rolled into one. He thinks Stalin is Stallone. Despite his film-sense he doesn’t understand the CIA’s intention to “take him out.” In his stupidity he’s helpless before the dictator’s palsy manipulation. But the film manipulates its audience the same way, with cheap sentimentality. Especially all his folksiness and American allusions, when the dictator gives Skylark a puppy he wins us over too. 

Kim Jong-Un has probably not received a more sympathetic representation in the West because the film plays him as a helplessly sentimental chap. He enjoys American entertainers and is up on the lingo. “I have no comment on Margaritas.” His rage and nuclear threat lose our sympathy but the film’s point is how easily we can be swayed by such cheap and ready emotion. That’s standard practice in US politics. Gift puppy Digby recalls Dick Nixon’s infamous dog Checkers and wife Pat’s cloth coat. The film’s target is our dumb politics, making us such easy dupes, rather than that particular dictator. 

The climactic action scenes also send up the American film audience’s expectations. For Skylark, “Kim must die. It’s the American way.” But the North Korean heroine prefers a systemic change over that one man’s death. The ridiculous plot Skylark initially proposes — a surprise arrival of a SEALS squad with an inflatable motor boat — finally happens. Before that Rapaport and an enemy bite off each other’s fingers (digital manipulation?) and particular attention is paid to a tank squashing the soldiers in a jeep. The slow-mo rocket en route to Kim’s helicopter points to the aestheticizing of violence in American films since the balletic shoot-up that closed Bonnie and Clyde.

The film opens on a sweet little North Korean girl innocently singing a scabrous attack on America (“Die America, please die”). That introduces the military use of sentimentality.  Skylark’s tagline — “They hate us cuz they ain’t us” — works both ways. As the dictator admits and the film proves, words can be more violent than weaponry. In emphasizing the Americans’ devotion to ignorance and cheap emotion the satire ranges beyond the putative target of North Korea to include America. 

     And what of the international politicizing of the film? Sony should have known what it was risking by identifying the North Korean dictator so clearly, instead of fictionalizing him like Chaplin’s Adolf Hinkle in The Great Dictator. Once committed to the project it covered itself in shame by however briefly aborting its release. Rogan and Franco emerge as very effective comic actors. Too bad Kim Jong-Un couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the film over his Chivas Regal, caviar and Havanas, secure that his citizens won’t be spoiled by such pleasures. Instead his thin skin and — so far — empty threats only deflate his power image further. For that relief much thanks.