An early quasi-police procedural showing J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation “smashing” a communist sleeper cell in Boston, Alfred L. Werker's 1952 docudrama Walk East on Beacon looks at first much like any other Red-baiting Hollywood production of the McCarthy era. On closer inspection, the movie offers us a keen insight into the Hollywood–Washington power nexus during the Cold War. Recently declassified documents reveal that the FBI's top brass helped not only to inspire Walk East on Beacon but also to cast and market the film. More intriguingly, America's most powerful military Cold War think tank, the RAND Corporation, was at the heart of the movie's screenplay. Hollywood scriptwriter Leo Rosten worked as a part-time adviser on social sciences for RAND and based key elements of his plot for Walk East on Beacon on top-secret RAND projects, principally the military uses of satellites and computers. Rosten's dual role is a perfect illustration of what historians have come to refer to as America's Cold War “state–private network,” an intricate, semi-secret complex that operated highly effectively outside official channels through informal links between government and civil society, and which played such an important part in the United States’ ideological and cultural battle with Soviet communism.Footnote 1
Six decades later, in 2014, the link between Hollywood and the RAND Corporation surfaced again, though this time more publicly. In June that year, North Korean government officials threatened a “resolute and merciless” response against the United States unless President Barack Obama banned The Interview, a Columbia Pictures comedy financed by the Japanese media conglomerate Sony that depicted the assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. In the ensuing six-month-long controversy, which was sharpened by the publication of thousands of hacked Sony emails by a mysterious group called the Guardians of Peace, it emerged not only that Sony Entertainment Inc.’s CEO, Michael Lynton, was a member of the RAND board, but also that one of RAND's Korean experts had informed him of The Interview’s potential for destabilizing Kim Jong-un's regime. Thickening the plot further, other hacked Sony emails and sources suggested close connections between Michael Lynton and US State Department propaganda officials. Though these revelations generally got lost in the Western media amid increasingly angry allegations of North Korean bullying and cyber terrorism, they raised important questions about The Interview’s political intentions and about America's security state–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century.
Linked to the myriad propaganda dimensions of the Global War on Terror, much work has been done over the last decade or so into how and why the Hollywood–Washington power nexus has constructed themes and theories of American foreign-policy imperatives and necessity in the way it has.Footnote 2 An equally vibrant body of scholarship has focussed on the role that the American entertainment industry, including film, plays as a tool of US “soft power” or as an instrument of US public diplomacy.Footnote 3 A third, related set of studies has explored the role of international markets in shaping the politics of Hollywood.Footnote 4 This article integrates all three of these developing and important fields via a detailed, empirical case study of the Interview affair.
Using the leaked Sony emails as key sources, the article argues that, while Pyongyang was wrong to label The Interview as an “act of war” by the American government, the movie was part of an informal network linking Hollywood executives with US foreign-policy and public-diplomacy advisers. While most American government agencies today have entertainment liaison offices that work formally with Hollywood studios, the Sony emails suggest that, as was the case with the “state–private network” during the Cold War, a significant amount of the political messaging that occurs in US popular culture is accomplished outside this framework, namely through the private communications of well-placed individuals with shared interests who prefer to hide their connection lest they be accused of propaganda or censorship. At the same time, the Interview affair sharply demonstrates the challenges that international media conglomerates face when politically charged material cuts across their increasingly globalized commercial interests. As we shall see, when navigating The Interview’s post-production and theatrical release, Sony found itself caught between those in Japan, China and South Korea who claimed that the movie would seriously endanger Asian relations and the many Americans (including Barack Obama) who interpreted attempts to neuter it as appeasement. The article shows how the Sony hack transformed The Interview from a gross-out farce into a powerful symbol of Western artistic freedom, but concludes by questioning whether the Interview affair was as much of a defeat for Pyongyang in its long-running propaganda war with the United States as many might think.
THE INTERVIEW'S DEVELOPMENT
For readers who have not seen it, The Interview revolves around an American television journalist, Dave Skylark (James Franco), and his producer, Aaron Rapport (Seth Rogen). The pair are recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to assassinate Kim Jong-un (Randall Park) after receiving an invitation to interview the Supreme Leader in North Korea. When Skylark meets Kim, he finds him surprisingly endearing and refuses to carry out the kill mission. By the film's conclusion, however, it is clear that Kim is nothing more than a savvy media manipulator, a cruel tyrant, and a dangerous, mentally unbalanced megalomaniac. Millions of his people are malnourished and 200,000 are in prison camps, while the regime spends $800 million a year on nuclear weapons. When Kim learns of an internal coup planned by his propaganda chief, he attempts to launch a nuclear attack against the West to restore his power, only to be killed by Skylark and Rapport, thereby bringing about democratic regime change in North Korea.
Pyongyang's condemnation of The Interview as an American “act of war” in June 2014 was in many respects hardly surprising.Footnote 5 By this point in time, relations between the North Korean and US governments had effectively been frozen for six decades. The profound ideological differences between communist North Korea and the capitalist United States, the Korean War of the 1950s (which had partly prompted Walk East on Beacon and seen North Korea decimated by UN aerial bombing), the historic political divide between North and South Korea, the presence of 30,000 American troops in South Korea, and Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions are among the most important causes of tensions.Footnote 6 Over the years, each country has utilized a combination of words, sounds and images designed to stiffen national resolve, woo neutrals overseas and sow discord in the enemy's camp. Film has been an integral part of this propaganda battle, not least because of Hollywood's global reach and the importance that successive North Korean leaders have afforded cinema as a tool of entertainment and persuasion. Kim Jong-il, leader from 1994 to 2011, even invented his own theory of the cinema and, particularly in his later years, oversaw a number of films that portrayed the United States as akuy onsang (“the source of evil”).Footnote 7 For its part, Washington has largely been able to rely on the US media, including Hollywood, to consistently portray North Korea as a rogue, “mad and bad,” state, headed by mentally unstable dictators who threaten the free world, while lending discreet support to South Korea's long-running campaign of psychological warfare aimed at removing the Kims from power. Washington has invested so much in the battle for North Korean hearts and minds partly because opinion polls have consistently shown that the American public has no stomach for US military action against Pyongyang.Footnote 8
Judging from official statements, Pyongyang has grown increasingly sensitive to Western filmic depictions of North Korea over the past decade or so, presumably a reaction in part to President George W. Bush's January 2002 designation of North Korea as part of an “axis of evil.”Footnote 9 Most American journalists and politicians have characterized such sensitivity as evidence of Pyongyang's dangerous irrationality. In 2002, North Korean officials called for the banning of the James Bond movie Die Another Day, which centred on a delusional North Korean villain dealing nuclear weapons, and accused the US of using such movies to spread “abnormality, degeneration, violence and fin de siècle corrupt sex culture.”Footnote 10 Two years later, North Korean diplomats lobbied for the outlawing of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America: World Police, which lampooned Kim Jong-il as an insecure megalomaniac who was secretly an alien cockroach.Footnote 11 In 2012 and 2013 respectively, Hollywood's Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen both portrayed archetypal North Korean terrorists bringing their threats directly to America. Rather than taking offense on this occasion, Pyongyang instead acted more creatively and used footage from the films to produce online videos affirming the prowess of its military.Footnote 12
Despite Pyongyang's protestations, no evidence has emerged that any of these films were Western government creations. The same holds true for The Interview. However, because of its depiction of Kim Jong-un's death and North Korea's dramatic response to the film, The Interview certainly represents an escalation in the propaganda war between the two countries. Likewise, there are signs aplenty that artistry and commerce combined with politics and propaganda in The Interview’s case, even if the US government did not have a direct or heavy hand in making the film. According to the chief creative force behind The Interview, Seth Rogen, he and codirector Evan Goldberg developed the idea for the movie in the late 2000s, joking about what would happen if a journalist were asked to assassinate a world leader like Kim Jong-il. This idea partly came about after reading old newspaper reports about Mike Wallace, the host of the US television show 60 Minutes, interviewing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, and hearing that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had been a fan of Western movies. When, in late 2011, the twenty-eight-year-old Kim Jong-un took over from his aged father as North Korea's Supreme Leader, Rogen and Goldberg believed that they now had the perfect dictator for their script. They reckoned it would be more humorous to base the film around someone of their own age, and that Kim Jong-un seemed to be the sort of ruler who might indeed want to open up the notorious “Hermit Kingdom” to select foreign journalists. Kim had been educated in Switzerland and was rumoured to be fascinated with Western pop culture. Rogen and Goldberg were delighted when Kim shocked Western media by inviting the famous American basketballer Dennis Rodman to his private North Korean island in February 2013, as it seemed to make the premise of their film more realistic and therefore more marketable.Footnote 13
The all-important scripting of The Interview was done by Rogen, Goldberg and Dan Sterling in the winter of 2013–14. Sterling, who had worked on a number of television sitcoms including Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park, as well as the popular news/comedy program The Daily Show, was recruited to add political relevance and satirical bite to Rogen and Goldberg's stock-in-trade crude humor.Footnote 14 Initially, the thinking was that Kim Jong-un should not be identified by name for commercial and political reasons, but this changed after the scriptwriters’ talks with Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) executives and a team of comedians and actors including Jonah Hill and Sacha Baron Cohen. This was a significant decision, and one that added to later charges that The Interview was designed to destabilize North Korea. At the time, Sacha Baron Cohen and others argued that using Kim Jong-un's name would make the film “funnier and more interesting”; Dwight Caines, head of worldwide marketing at SPE, thought that having “a couple of inept James Bonds” recruited by the CIA to “kill the most notorious guy on the planet” would be “bold” and “fun with a dash of smarts.”Footnote 15 Inevitably there were limits to how bold Sony was prepared to be, however, which might explain why The Interview was preferred to the movie's first putative title, the highly provocative, Tarantino-esque Kill Kim Jong Un.Footnote 16
During the scripting and production process, Rogen, Goldberg and Sterling did a surprising amount of research given that they were making a comedy and not a documentary demanding rigorous attention to historical accuracy. Sterling, for instance, read the recently published, best-selling accounts of life in North Korea, Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy and Shin Dong-hyuk's Escape from Camp 14. According to Sterling and Goldberg, the point of this research was to make the scenes set in North Korea look and feel as believable as possible (from the landscape to the buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms), but the anti-Pyongyang bent of so much of the literature they used inevitably colored the scripts.Footnote 17 Research brought the filmmakers into contact with a range of interested parties. Rogen claims he “talked to people in the government whose job it is to associate with North Korea or be experts on it.”Footnote 18 He is also on record as saying that both a retired CIA officer and someone who had worked closely with former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had seen and consulted on The Interview’s script, with the latter calling it “disturbing but funny.” In an interview with the New York Times, Rogen also declared that he consulted with several government officials over the course of the film, many of whom he suspected were connected to the CIA.Footnote 19
We must be wary of attributing too much credence to these statements of Rogen's, which might have been intended merely to boost publicity for The Interview. That said, the CIA has made strenuous efforts to strengthen its screen image since establishing a Hollywood liaison officer in the mid-1990s and movie producers have hired a number of ex-CIA officers as advisers on prestigious projects. The Oscar-winning Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, both released in 2012, are just two dramas that have recently been made in close collaboration with the CIA.Footnote 20 For its part, the State Department has a long, if checkered, history of advising Hollywood on how it can best serve US interests overseas stretching back to before World War II.Footnote 21 While running the State Department between 2009 and 2013, Hillary Clinton was a vociferous critic of North Korea and a great advocate of US “smart power” (combining hard and soft power resources), including Hollywood movies. When pressed by journalists in December 2014, a spokesperson for the State Department admitted that one of its top officials, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Daniel Russel, had talked with Sony executives about The Interview at some point.Footnote 22
As work on The Interview’s script matured towards the end of 2013, official interest in the movie grew, including outside the US. As a result, some Sony executives began raising alarm bells, thus demonstrating the difficulties involved in navigating the political and commercial aspects of a film like The Interview in multiple territories. Indeed, as many film scholars have articulated, the capital-intensive nature of Hollywood films often means that movies must attract either a large domestic audience or several multinational ones in order to recoup costs, and consequently, for economic reasons alone, transnational concerns about a film's foreign reception cannot be ignored.Footnote 23 In the specific case of China and Japan, concerns about a film's reception are further increased because the two countries rank as the largest and the second-largest film markets outside North America.Footnote 24 Hollywood studios have therefore eagerly attempted to capture a larger part of these markets’ box office revenues, but the process is particularly complicated in China by the fact that all films being considered for screening there must have their content approved by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, which, as Kimberly Owczarski puts it, is “a nebulous authorization process” at best.Footnote 25
In light of this, it is unsurprising that in October 2013, head of international marketing at SPE, Nigel Clark, sent the script of The Interview to the company's point man in Beijing, Li Chow, for his opinion on how the Chinese government would react to the film. Chow noted that China had recently distanced itself from North Korea and consequently that Sony was unlikely to get hurt in the region by making The Interview. Chow nonetheless stressed how “reactionary” and “unpredictable” the Chinese government was, and how angered it would be by a section of the film that showed the American protagonists sneaking into North Korea from China (and thereby hinting at Beijing's support for Western efforts to destabilize Pyongyang). In fact, the border between China and North Korea had long been disputed, and Beijing had recently become highly concerned about the economic problems posed by increasing numbers of North Korean refugees coming across the border caused by instability in Pyongyang.Footnote 26 Sony appears to have taken Chow's concerns to heart. In The Interview’s final cut, Skylark and Rapport enter North Korea in plain sight via a commercial flight to Pyongyang.Footnote 27
Six months later, after The Interview’s filming, further problems arose, this time over release dates. In May 2014, Keith Weaver, SPE's executive vice president of government affairs, alerted his seniors to the fact that The Interview’s scheduled release date across large parts of the world, 10 October, coincided with Foundation Day in North Korea.Footnote 28 This was one of the country's most important national holidays and involved ceremonies and weapons displays around the Worker's Party Monument in Pyongyang – the very place, it so happens, from where a missile was to be (and is) fired in the opening scene of The Interview. This “couldn't be a better way to antagonize Kim Jong Un,” noted SPE's senior vice president of international distribution, Steven O'Dell, who was particularly concerned by the knock-on effects in Moscow, noting that “N. Korea and Russia [are] currently very cozy.”Footnote 29 Sun Yong Hwang, SPE's managing director in Tokyo, did not appear as worried. “Do you think there will be a possibility that Kim Jun Eun [sic] may launch missiles to our office if we release it?” he jokingly asked O'Dell, referring to showing The Interview in Japan.Footnote 30 This levity may have stemmed from Hwang's knowledge that The Interview would likely never release in that country, partly because R-rated American comedies rarely did good business in Japan but mainly because of the movie's “inappropriate” theme.Footnote 31
“AN ACT OF WAR”
When, a month later, the controversy surrounding Pyongyang's reaction to The Interview burst across the mass media, nobody in Sony's higher echelons was laughing anymore. On 11 June, the first trailer for The Interview was released. On 20 June, Kim Myong-chol, executive director of the Centre for North Korea–US Peace and an unofficial spokesman for Kim Jong-un's government, publicly condemned The Interview as a sign of the “desperation of the US government and American society.” Five days later, in a departure from previous criticisms of Western films, Pyongyang promised a “merciless response” to The Interview and warned Washington that failure to stop the film being released would be considered an “act of war.” On 10 July, North Korea formally filed a complaint about The Interview at the United Nations, charged the US with “sponsoring terrorism” and reiterated its call for the film to be banned.Footnote 32
It is abundantly clear from the company's leaked emails and other sources that Sony was not part of any grand conspiracy to provoke North Korean aggression over The Interview and thereby either engender free publicity for the film or weaken Pyongyang politically. Though, as we have seen, a few executives anticipated some sort of reaction from Pyongyang, all were taken aback by its rhetorical ferocity. Still, it is noteworthy just how quickly and easily some at Sony turned to political advisers when the controversy erupted. Michael Lynton, who was both chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment and the CEO of Sony Entertainment Inc., stands out in this regard. As well as overseeing all of Sony's global entertainment businesses, Lynton held a number of influential positions pertaining to American foreign policy. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a body headquartered in New York that brings together government officials, business leaders and prominent members of the intelligence and foreign-policy community to discuss international affairs. Lynton was also among an elite group of US media executives to be on the board of the RAND Corporation, which was based a few miles north of Hollywood in Santa Monica. RAND had outlived the Cold War and enjoyed a global reputation for providing politicians, officials, businesses and the media with up-to-date information about anything from the adolescent use of marijuana to the threats posed by cybercrime and the group Islamic State. Its senior members include military officers, members of Congress and private sector leaders.Footnote 33
A couple of days before Kim Myong-chol's denunciation of The Interview on June 20, Lynton had sought advice about the film's political and diplomatic fallout from both RAND and the State Department. At this stage, Sony's concerns mainly focussed on American and Japanese citizens incarcerated in North Korean prisons. Pyongyang had recently arrested a number of what appeared to be American tourists on espionage charges, while the Japanese government was currently carrying out delicate negotiations about the fate of several of its citizens who apparently had been kidnapped and held incommunicado over a number of years by the North Korean authorities.Footnote 34 No less a person than Kazuo Hirai, the president and CEO of Sony Corporation, told Lynton to think extremely carefully about how The Interview might jeopardize this situation, especially when it came to releasing the film in particular countries. Lynton did not need persuading on this matter and arranged to discuss it with the US assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs, James P. Zumwalt. “My nightmare?” Lynton emailed a colleague, “they execute one of the kidnap victims if any are still alive because they are so crazy.”Footnote 35
Within hours of Kim Myong-chol's speech on 20 June, Lynton also sent Kazuo Hirai details of the first of what would turn out to be several conversations through the summer of 2014 with RAND defense analyst Bruce Bennett.Footnote 36 One of RAND's chief experts on Korea, Bennett was a firm believer both in the power of information warfare and, given recent political ructions and military purges in North Korea, in the vulnerability of Kim Jong-un's regime.Footnote 37 Lynton asked Bennett whether the North Koreans might be serious about launching retribution against the US or Japan if The Interview was released. After watching a rough cut of the movie, Bennett told Lynton that there were parts of it that “ironically … the North Koreans will love, but other parts they are going to really hate.” Pyongyang would especially like seeing a depiction of the CIA trying to kill Kim Jong-un, Bennett calculated, because it would corroborate long-standing North Korean allegations of US malevolence.Footnote 38 Overall, however, Bennett argued that Pyongyang was probably bluffing, including when, on 25 June, it claimed that The Interview was “an act of war.” Some months earlier, according to Bennett, Pyongyang had used the same phrase to describe a South Korean leaflet-by-balloon campaign directed against North Korea's leadership but had not followed through on its threats to destroy the balloon launching areas.Footnote 39
In view of what he called this “bluster,” Bennett significantly went on to say that Sony should, in his opinion, push ahead with releasing The Interview as planned. He also advised leaving the movie's ending, which saw Kim Jong-un being slain by Dave Skylark and Aaron Rapport, as it was:
I have to admit that the only resolution I can see to the North Korean nuclear and other threats is for the North Korean regime to eventually go away. In fact, when I have briefed my book on “preparing for the possibility of a North Korean collapse” [published in September 2013], I have been clear that the assassination of Kim Jong-Un is the most likely path to a collapse of the North Korean government. Thus while toning down the ending may reduce the North Korean response, I believe that a story that talks about the removal of the Kim family regime and the creation of a new government by the North Korean people (well, at least the elites) will start some real thinking in South Korea and, I believe, in the North once the DVD leaks into the North (which it almost certainly will).
The irony is that by making such a big deal of the movie, North Korea will likely cause a significant expansion of the audience that sees it.Footnote 40
Bruce Bennett was not the only one who saw The Interview’s potential for North Korean disruption. That same day, Lynton responded to Bennett, saying that he had spoken confidentially to “someone very senior” in the State Department, who entirely supported Bennett's assessment of the film. Encouragement also came from Josh Steiner, a senior executive at the financial services company Bloomberg LP and a fellow member of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Really interesting,” Steiner told Lynton after reading Bennett's appraisal of The Interview. “And I love the fact that he also wanted to provide artistic advice.”Footnote 41 Months later, when The Interview hit the market, a number of South Korean activist groups (some linked to the government in Seoul, others not) immediately began airdropping tens of thousands of copies of the film with Korean subtitles on DVDs and USB memory sticks into North Korea via hydrogen balloons. Prominent among these was Fighters for a Free North Korea, an organization run by former North Korean government propagandist Park Sang Hak and assisted by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. Hak and the HRF claimed to have air-dropped or smuggled dozens of Hollywood movies into North Korea in recent years, including Zero Dark Thirty, about the CIA's assassination of Osama bin Laden, and the anti-authoritarian Hunger Games series (2012–15).Footnote 42
As the row over The Interview continued to make international headlines in late June 2014, and Michael Lynton read reports of North Korean missile tests in the Sea of Japan,Footnote 43 Sony hastily constructed a four-pronged damage-limitation exercise. First, it modified the film's trailer, in an attempt to make it less politically offensive; for instance, it erased a clip that depicted Kim Jong-un's family.Footnote 44 Second, the company told Seth Rogen to stop making fun of the North Korean threats; “People don't usually wanna kill me for one of my movies until they've paid 12 bucks for it,” Rogen had tweeted irreverently on 25 June.Footnote 45 Third, Sony developed a list of “talking points” which the movie's stars should stick to during their promotional interviews with the press. These points emphasized how the film was first and foremost a comedy; that The Interview was as much a skewering of the media and US society as it was of North Korea;Footnote 46 that the film did not depict the real Kim Jong-un but a “hilarious movie character” based on the secretive leader; that the US had a long and proud history of making comedies, like Stanley Kubrick's 1960s nuclear satire Dr. Strangelove, which played with serious subjects; and that The Interview was not racist (“We're calling out the absurdity of jingoism”). Finally, Sony tried to distance itself from The Interview as much as possible by asking its executives to stress that the movie was a Columbia Pictures release and that “our parent company has little to no involvement in the creative direction taken.” While this last statement would eventually prove untrue, Sony also arranged to remove its logo from merchandise related to The Interview. This was partly to protect the company's name and its commercial interests in Asia, but also to reduce the damage The Interview might do to Japanese–Korean relations.Footnote 47
Sony's sensitivity to Asian diplomatic relations increased rather than decreased throughout the controversy over The Interview, further highlighting the complicated political situations in which international media conglomerates can sometimes find themselves. Nothing illustrates this better than the lengthy, and some might say bizarre, discussions about the shape of the movie's final scene, which has Kim Jong-un dying in a helicopter explosion. Emails exchanged between Seth Rogen, Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai and co-chairperson of Sony Pictures Entertainment Amy Pascal reveal that Hirai asked the filmmakers to tone down Kim's death scene drastically and to make sure that it never featured in the international version of the film. Rogen's team complied with the latter request and eventually agreed to make the scene “less gory,” but only after repeated appeals by Pascal for, among other things, “a few less fleshy parts that spurt out of the fire ball.” Rogen's team insisted on retaining Kim's head explosion because they believed, as Pascal informed Hirai, that “this is what is necessary to make it play like a joke.” Rogen emailed Sony executives several times during these exchanges to accuse them of “appeasement.”Footnote 48
Amy Pascal, for one, was deeply troubled by The Interview’s political and commercial complications and agonized over the best course of action. In her twenty-five years at Sony, she told Seth Rogen, she had “never gotten one note on anything [relating to a film] from our parent company.” Moreover, she had never been in such a politically sensitive situation involving a movie before. “I haven't the foggiest notion how to deal with Japanese politics as it relates to Korea,” Pascal fretted, “so all I can do is make sure that Sony won't be put in a bad situation and even that is subjective.”Footnote 49 Kazuo Hirai's apparently unprecedented involvement in The Interview’s creative direction can partly be attributed to the regional controversy surrounding Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe's recent announcement that his government intended to revise the country's pacifist constitution, and that Hirai feared the film would severely increase Korean–Japanese tensions.Footnote 50 Mark Schilling of the Tokyo-based English-language newspaper Japan Times argued that Hirai's reported trepidation about The Interview was entirely reasonable given Japan's intimate familiarity with North Korea's “capacity for, not only buffoonish threats, but deadly serious criminal actions,” including the kidnapping of several Japanese citizens, “many of whose fates still remain unknown.”Footnote 51 US-based film critic Matt Goldberg agreed and imagined that Sony headquarters was saying to Rogen's team that it was all well and good for those living in Hollywood to rile the North Koreans, because Pyongyang's missiles did not reach US shores. “They can damn well reach Japan [however,] so maybe you step a little gingerly when mocking the cruel, nuclear-armed dictatorship.”Footnote 52
While Sony came under these and other sorts of pressure to revise or even pull The Interview throughout the summer and into the autumn of 2014, RAND's Bruce Bennett continued to stiffen Michael Lynton's resolve to release the film. Bennett twice passed on messages from a friend, Robert King, who was the State Department's special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, to the effect that Pyongyang was all bark and no bite. One of these messages illustrated how skillfully the US government's official broadcaster in the region, the Voice of America's Korean service, was exploiting Pyongyang's “PR campaign” against The Interview. The VOA eschewed overt criticism of the North Korean government in favor of a bland, objective statement of the facts, thereby making Pyongyang's reaction to the film look ludicrous. Recent evidence suggested that the influence of foreign broadcasting like this was growing inside North Korea, despite strict censorship.Footnote 53
Bennett also sent Lynton evidence of South Korea's increasing interest in The Interview, including its value as a propaganda weapon against Kim Jong-un. In mid-July, the RAND expert told Lynton that an unnamed member of the National Assembly in Seoul and the Wall Street Journal’s Seoul bureau chief, Alastair Gale, whom Bennett knew personally, were particularly anxious to get preview copies of the film.Footnote 54 During the same period, Bennett furnished Lynton with a translated article about The Interview that had recently appeared on Radio Free Chosun, a South Korean shortwave radio station rumored to have been set up by the CIA that targeted North Korea in order to bring about regime change. The article poked fun at Pyongyang's over-the-top reaction to the movie and pointed out how it illustrated the North Korean regime's stifling of creativity.
Isn't Kim Jong Eun [sic], a portly form in a land of hunger, suitable material for comedic ridicule? If he doesn't like it, he should find a better way to go about things. Ordering salutes from the people and exuding arrogance in every photo further pushes viewers of the film to find commonalities between reality and fantasy.
Bennett obviously approved of this rhetoric, the power of which, he thought, would only increase once The Interview was released.Footnote 55
At the same time he was communicating with his RAND colleague during the crisis over The Interview, Michael Lynton was also in regular contact with Richard Stengel at the US State Department. Stengel was a former managing editor of Time magazine, who in early 2014 had become undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. At Stengel's request in June 2014, Lynton drew up a list of senior Hollywood figures – including director Steven Spielberg, actor George Clooney and scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin – who he believed would be willing to help support US public diplomacy efforts across the globe. In September, Stengel also asked Lynton for advice on how to develop a media strategy to combat the threat posed across the Middle East by the Islamic State (ISIL). Stengel specifically wanted to know who “the Muslim Bob Geldof” was, in order to develop a Muslim-led “We are the World”-type video concert featuring both Muslim and/or hip-hop artists. Lynton replied by offering to talk with singer Cat Stevens's agent, David Wirtschafter, though Stengel made it clear that he did not want the concert to be seen in any way as a US government-orchestrated event.Footnote 56 In October, Stengel and Lynton met to discuss this matter further, as well as the State Department's wider need to counter “ISIL narratives in the Middle East and Russian narratives in central and eastern Europe.” When prompted by Stengel to “convene a group of media executives” who could help in challenging the “skewed version of reality” of US foreign policy that “millions” of people were getting, Lynton named 21st Century Fox's James Murdoch, Game Show Network's David Goldhill and Disney's Andy Bird, among others. Owing to a lack of evidence, it is impossible to know what, if anything, came of these conversations between Stengel and Lynton, but what is apparent is the Sony CEO's strong commitment to US public diplomacy. It is difficult to believe this would not have had some bearing on Lynton's approach to the Interview controversy.Footnote 57
The emails exchanged between Lynton, Stengel and Bennett suggest that despite the fact that most US government agencies have official entertainment offices that liaise with Hollywood, many of the state's ties to cultural production occur outside these formal, semi-open channels. Indeed, one of the things that the Sony hack helps demonstrate is just how much of the work of “U.S. messaging” takes place through the private communications of highly placed individuals who have a good working relationship and shared interests. These emails also reveal, however, that while government officials and entertainment executives often work closely to advance political agendas, both parties are wary of making that relationship transparent (as indicated by Stengel's insistence that his involvement in an anti-ISIL concert remain hidden). This is because, unlike in China, for instance,Footnote 58 the concept of propaganda is so disdained in Western circles and because propaganda is often thought to be less effective when such relationships are made known. In other words, when a product is a known result of government or corporate influence, consumers are more apt to become skeptical of that product's content; political messaging suddenly looks like political messaging rather than just powerful (or, in The Interview’s case, comedic) entertainment, and thus its message is harder to swallow.
Additionally, when it becomes clear that a company or government is trying to manipulate or, in Sony's case, soften the political message of a film, cries of censorship soon follow – cries that any company would hope to avoid. This happened with The Interview, for when news leaked that Sony was tempering Kim Jong-un's death scene and making other concessions to mollify the North Korean government, many American media outlets expressed outrage. Tweets alone prompted Matthew Labov of Forefrontmedia.com to send Doug Belgrad, president of SPE's motion picture group, a summary of the social-media chatter, most of which insinuated that Sony's editing of the film was an act of cowardice on the one hand and too similar to the moves of a repressive dictator on the other. An email that Seth Rogen sent to Sony executives around the same time also outlined how stories about Sony censoring The Interview to pacify the North Korean government would likely hurt the film “critically and thus financially.” Titled “Hey Guys,” Rogen's missive argued that
critics are very sensitive to censorship, studio interference, and creative vision. and that's the problem. no matter what i say, the fact of the matter is that someone in your studio leaked information that now makes [The Interview] seem like a compromised product. the head melting shot described vividly in all these articles is universally received as awesome by the articles writing about them, and when these critics see a shot that is decidedly LESS awesome, regardless of what story we put out there, the truth will be apparent: it's a compromised product … again, critics love nothing more than to wage a war on censorship, not to mention the obvious contradictory attitude of changing a movie to appease a government that movie is mocking for two hours. that just makes the movie seem dumb, which again, leads to bad reviews, less money, etc. … this is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy. That is a very damning story, and a very different one. whether you want to accept this or not, this has become a real issue that we fully believe will impact the finances of the film.Footnote 59
Thus while Kim Jong-un's death scene was a major red flag for Kazuo Hirai due to its potential impact on Japanese–Korean relations, Rogen's email foreshadowed the ways that the same scene would come to stand as an important symbol of artistic freedom in the West – a symbolism that would only intensify when major theater chains refused to show The Interview once a group of hackers threatened to attack any cinema playing the movie. In fact, what Rogen could not have known at the time he wrote his email to Sony was that, while Americans were indeed upset by the company's attempts to placate North Korea by modifying or deleting some of The Interview’s content, it would be this group of shadowy hackers that would ultimately prove to be the main reason why The Interview performed so poorly at the box office.
THE SONY HACK
In late November 2014, the controversy surrounding The Interview entered a second, more intense phase. A couple of weeks before the film's scheduled premiere in mid-December, sources within Sony reported that the company had been hacked and blackmailed by a hitherto unknown group called the Guardians of Peace. The group subsequently used the infrastructure of Sony's PlayStation network to disseminate a large amount of confidential Sony Pictures’ data. North Korea denied involvement in the hack, even after the Guardians of Peace issued a message, on 9 December, demanding Sony pull The Interview. On 16 December, the Guardians of Peace then warned audiences that cinemas screening The Interview could be subject to 9/11-style terrorist attacks. When stocks quickly fell in major cinema chains, Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark, Carmike Cinemas and Cineplex Entertainment – which together controlled about half of North American movie screens – refused to show the film. While the US Department of Homeland Security announced that the Guardians of Peace's message did not appear to be a credible threat, theater owners were nonetheless concerned that people would avoid any cinema showing The Interview, no matter what movie they wanted to see, leading Sony to cancel the theatrical release of The Interview. In mid-December, Barack Obama criticized Sony for pulling the film, stating that it set a dangerous precedent. This led Sony to reverse course slightly by releasing The Interview in roughly three hundred independent cinemas inside the US, along with theaters in select foreign markets, including Australia, New Zealand and the UK. More significantly from a financial standpoint, Sony also arranged for a last-minute digital distribution deal with YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video, and Sony's own site, SeeTheInterview.com, which helped Sony recoup a sizeable portion of The Interview’s costs.Footnote 60 (Global box office sales only accounted for $11.3 million of The Interview’s return, while digital sales totalled roughly $40 million during the first month of the film's release. Industry experts, however, still suspect that the movie lost money in light of its $44 million production budget plus marketing outlays.)Footnote 61
From Sony's perspective, the first phase of the Interview affair, from June to November 2014, had largely been about trying to balance commercial considerations with diplomatic pressures. The company had trodden this line carefully but largely successfully: though it had felt a need to revise parts of The Interview, it had rarely wavered in its determination to release the movie, not least because popular sentiment overwhelmingly supported this, especially in the US, its chief market and working base. During the controversy's second, shorter phase in December, however, Sony found itself between a rock and a hard place. It came under increasing political and public pressure from those who, on the one hand, saw The Interview as one of the most important test cases for free speech in a generation and the film's detractors as “un-American,” and others who, on the other, either blamed Sony for exploiting international tensions for profit or called for The Interview to be shelved altogether lest it trigger terrorist attacks in the US and elsewhere.Footnote 62
What added to Sony's dilemma at the sharp end of the affair was the US government's open and heavily publicized involvement in the debate about whether The Interview ought to be released. This was due, probably more than anything else, to Sony becoming the target of one of the largest and certainly most public corporate hacks in history. Barack Obama's administration interpreted the hack as technically short of an “act of war” but as a grievous violation of US sovereignty by North Korea. When that “cyber-vandalism” was followed by Sony's decision in late December to pull The Interview, the National Security Agency believed that a “red line” had been crossed. The very next day, alarmed by Sony's “surrender,” Obama convened his top officials in the White House Situation Room and, based on their unanimous recommendation, decided to take an action that the US had never dared before in response to a cyberattack by another nation: name the government responsible and punish it by, among other things, threatening to put North Korea back on the state terror list, imposing financial sanctions on the country, and, unofficially, shutting down North Korea's Internet access.Footnote 63
In these circumstances, when The Interview enjoyed a limited release on Christmas Day 2014, it was perhaps to be expected that US public opinion would unite in celebrating the movie as a blow against totalitarian censorship and a victory for American values. Sony itself played it this way publicly, as did acquaintances of Michael Lynton like the aforementioned Aaron Sorkin. In independent cinemas across the US people turned up to watch The Interview decked out in the Stars and Stripes. One theater manager even introduced The Interview by reciting America's old national anthem, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” while A. O. Scott of the New York Times described watching the film online in his mother's living room as “an act of patriotism … in defiance of a dictator.” Further blending nationalism with the cultures of media consumption, Sony announced it would release a special “Freedom Edition” of The Interview on DVD in February 2015.Footnote 64
But while The Interview was largely hailed as a victory for democratic values, it is clear that opinions about the film's artistic and political merits varied widely. Depending on viewers’ aesthetic and political tastes, The Interview was read as everything from a worthless low-grade gross-out to a politically irresponsible insult, and from a savage piece of satire to the very embodiment of America's free spirit. For instance, many critics who addressed the film's content commented on its annoying use of adolescent jesting. Robbie Collin of the British newspaper The Telegraph wrote that the movie was little more than “two hours of sex jokes and toilet humor” that must have made Sony's executives wonder if the film was worth all of the political and financial hassle it had caused.Footnote 65 Despite his “act of patriotism”, A. O. Scott of the New York Times was equally scathing, writing that the film was “pretty much what everyone thought it would be before all the trouble started: a goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce.”Footnote 66 More significantly perhaps, a number of other critics thought that The Interview’s premise and plot were wholly unbelievable, especially the parts involving the CIA.Footnote 67
By contrast, some critics praised The Interview highly. Echoing one of Sony's damage-limitation “talking points,” the US weekday television entertainment news program Access Hollywood thought The Interview was the best political satire since Dr. Strangelove.Footnote 68 Famed US film critic David Edelstein reckoned The Interview was a “savage” political parody because even though the humor was infantile, Rogen and Goldberg had thoroughly emasculated Kim Jong-un. This “is about the most punk thing you can do to a repressive, totalitarian, murderous, self-proclaimed god of a closed but increasingly porous state,” maintained Edelstein. The film's depiction of Kim as a man-child, who cries and soils himself on television when confronted about his daddy issues, would be an “execution-worthy crime” in North Korea, and precisely because the North Koreans would never dare to satirize their own leader, The Interview’s use of “tasteless violence” against the Supreme Leader made the film “all the more righteous,” Edelstein decreed.Footnote 69
Other critics praised the way The Interview handled Kim's removal from power, which they saw as offering up a comedic dramatization of an important political issue, namely when it is legitimate to assassinate a foreign head of state. Richard Brody of the New Yorker magazine credited the filmmakers for setting that bar very high by implying such an act was only justifiable when an attack on the US was “verifiably imminent” – a message that retroactively opposed the philosophy that had guided the US into the Iraq War and its removal of Saddam Hussein from power. The pair are not asserting a type of pacifism, he wrote, but are affirming “a policy of prudent and patient but ready and robust defense.”Footnote 70
Other reviewers would have none of this. Andre Seewood of Indiewire wrote that making The Interview was both politically and morally irresponsible as it “directly insults” a foreign head of state that has “tumultuous relations with the United States.” Seewood argued that satire which alluded to but still disguised the identity of its film subject, however thinly, was an acceptable cinematic practice, but that clearly identifying one's target by name “turns a joke into an insult.” Thus, in his opinion, Charlie Chaplin's satirizing of Adolf Hitler through the character Adenoid Hynkel in his World War II classic The Great Dictator – a movie Sony executives themselves compared with The Interview during productionFootnote 71 – was fine, but The Interview’s going after Kim Jong-un by name was not. Other critics reasoned that Americans would be greatly offended if a hostile nation made a film about the assassination of Barack Obama, especially if that nation was one of the top exporters of commercial entertainment worldwide.Footnote 72 The aforementioned Mark Schilling of the Japan Times also had misgivings about the film, especially as it related to Sony's decision merely to temper The Interview’s death scene rather than pull the film entirely. Schilling argued that Kazuo Hirai had “pussyfooted when he should have stomped” given the dangerous line that Rogen and Pascal were about to cross. “Japanese-style tact, known as enryo, with its consideration for the feelings of even ignorant outlanders, can be wonderful,” Schilling wrote, “but when you see someone about to douse a fire with gasoline, suggesting – ever so delicately – that they use a slightly smaller bucket may not be enough.”Footnote 73
Regardless of these and other criticisms of The Interview’s content, judging from media reports a clear majority of Americans believed that the movie's distribution after Sony had been hacked struck an important blow for Western values. This sentiment was best represented by the A-list actor George Clooney, who maintained that Sony simply had to put The Interview online if the theaters were not going to show it: “We cannot be told we can't see something [especially] by Kim Jong Un, of all fucking people.”Footnote 74 Even President Obama weighed in, calling Sony's original decision to withhold the release of the film a “mistake” that violated American principles. Obama argued that overseas dictators could not be allowed to “intimidate us out of releasing a satirical movie. Imagine what they start doing once they see a documentary that they don't like or news reports that they don't like … That's not who we are. That's not what America is about.”Footnote 75 Rogen and Goldberg wryly echoed this rhetoric on the DVD of The Interview. Before the main menu appears, the two tell viewers that if they are watching the movie, “they are goddamn, fucking American heroes,” and Rogen implores viewers to “enjoy their freedom” while watching the movie.Footnote 76
CONCLUSION
The propaganda war between Washington and Pyongyang has grown more vigorous and complex over the past decade, a result, among other things, of the growth of transnational media and of Western filmic depictions of North Korean villainy. Most activity in this war passes under the average person's radar and often only makes international headlines when one or both of the governments want it to. The Interview is a perfect illustration of this, a Hollywood movie that most people would never even have heard of had Kim Jong-un not declared it tantamount to an American act of war in the summer of 2014. By the time the Interview affair ended six months later, the film had been at the center of one of the most serious episodes in US–North Korean relations for over fifty years. In the process, when looked at from an international perspective, Pyongyang had arguably suffered one of its worst propaganda setbacks to date. First, Pyongyang's early criticism of The Interview had underlined its reputation in the West for being “mad and bad,” the very epitome of a “propaganda state.” Then its retaliatory threats played into the hands of those Americans who claimed North Korea was part of a warmongering “axis of evil.” Finally, Pyongyang's presumed links to the Sony hack and to the Guardians of Peace's warnings of another 9/11 allowed the Western media to portray Kim Jong-un as a terrorist thwarted by America's faith in the freedom of speech.
Conversely, it can equally be argued that the Interview affair amounted to a propaganda coup for Kim Jong-un. Most of Pyongyang's propaganda is aimed at its own populace, to reiterate the government's argument that North Korea is at the center of world politics. The Interview affair made global headlines and placed Kim Jong-un at the center of the Western news cycle. The affair also reinforced North Korea's nuclear threat to the West, which many experts believe is exaggerated.Footnote 77 It can be contended that by flexing his political muscles over The Interview, Kim Jong-un may well have strengthened his position as North Korea's new leader. Certainly there is no evidence yet that reports about or DVD copies of The Interview have in any way destabilized his government.Footnote 78
Uncertain though we may be as to who gained the most from the propaganda battle over The Interview, the affair has certainly helped to clarify the American media's place within the wider conflict. Contrary to what some conspiracy theorists argue, the US government does not secretly control Hollywood, nor did it use The Interview as a cat's paw against a new and naive North Korean leader. It bears repeating that the hacked Sony emails prove that The Interview was neither financed nor inspired by an arm of the American government. Those emails and other sources do show, however, that elements of the “state–private network” that played such an important role in helping the United States win the Cold War against the Soviet Union back in the twentieth century, via such movies as Alfred L. Werker's McCarthyite Walk East on Beacon, still operate in the present day. One of these is the close relationship between semiprivate think tanks like the RAND Corporation and senior Hollywood executives. Another is the Hollywood–State Department “network” that exists in relation to US public diplomacy. Yet another is the discreet “consulting” roles played by current or retired CIA or State Department officials in Hollywood productions.
Together, these elements form the backbone of the Hollywood–Washington power nexus today, but pointing to the existence of this nexus is not to say that movies like The Interview are first and foremost political projects. As the Sony emails also tell us, Sony's chief reason for making The Interview was to make money, not propaganda. The company's priorities then got extraordinarily complicated once Pyongyang turned The Interview from a movie into a politico-diplomatic cause célèbre. Sony executives subsequently found themselves having to juggle multiple concerns about, say, Japanese–Korean relations with, among other things, complaints about cowardice from highly paid Hollywood stars and accusations of censorship from the American media. In the end, then, The Interview reveals just how problematic it is to exercise soft power successfully through cinema in today's transnational marketplace, where concerns about foreign relationships collide with box office sales.
