'The Interview' and the Sony hack (one)

I saw a brief preview of it a few weeks ago and, frankly, I was shocked. A Seth Rogen comedy about the assassination of a sitting foreign leader hardly seemed the stuff that Christmas comedies are made of.

While I have not seen the complete movie, its plot is simple enough. A hack TV producer (Seth Rogen) and the host of the TV show he produces (James Franco) get a chance to interview Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. When the CIA learns of this, it drafts the two into a crazy plot to assassinate Kim. The preview I saw emphasized the part of the movie that shows how funny it can be when two ordinary citizens are drafted into the CIA and have to be taught the craft of assassinating a sitting dictator. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Probably what is less known is that the upshot of the movie is that assassinating Kim is a bad idea. No spoiler alerts are necessary to inform you that Kim is eventually killed, but the circumstances are not what you think. In fact, the movie posits a situation in which North Korea is on the verge of a nuclear attack against the United States (something most experts think is not possible), and only then do our heroes decide that it is justified to kill him.

The movie was produced by Sony, a company that has recently been the target of a massive computer hack. The United States government blames the government of North Korea, which acted, it claims, in response to The Interview. Threats have been made that the movie theaters in which The Interview was to be shown will be targets of terrorist attacks. As a result, Sony has decided to withdraw the movie.

No great loss?

The loss of another Seth Rogen comedy is hardly cause for general mourning, but maybe we shouldn’t judge too quickly.

Political comedies and dramas date back to the ancient Greeks. Both Aeschylus and Euripides were condemned and chased from Athens because some of their plays looked too closely at the failure of the first democracy to live up to its lofty ideals.

Shakespeare’s historical plays can be seen as some of the greatest propaganda ever written to bolster a family’s (the Tudors) claim to the throne. During his lifetime, Queen Elizabeth I reigned without having married and with no direct heirs, so it is not surprising that many of Shakespeare’s tragedies deal with the question of succession to a throne. At its most fundamental, Hamlet is a political drama in which a rightful heir has been usurped by his murdering uncle with the perhaps knowing assent of his mother.

In more modern times, Charlie Chaplin satirized Hitler and Mussolini in The Great Dictator. While the movie is obviously a fantasy, Chaplin proved that biting satire can often expose the raw nerve of truth. His film was not seen in Germany until long after the war.

The right to make bad movies

Of course, a Seth Rogen comedy can hardly be compared to these great works of art, but that is probably missing the point. Saying that certain works of art can be, effectively, censored because of their content, but only if they are not very good art, is hardly a solution.

The kind of censorship that has prevented The Interview from being released is not the worst kind of censorship. In this case, the movie has been made and will be there for anyone to see and judge on its own. Perhaps it is a good movie, perhaps bad. In any event, it has been made.

It is the movies that are not made that are at the heart of the true censorship in our society. Show business is, first and foremost, a business. There is a very small group of people who decide what movies get made and what plays are produced – maybe several thousand at most. Of course, there are no connections among these people, and they hold no meetings to decide what plays or movies to make. Instead, there is a general feeling that there are certain subjects that it is best not to touch.

The invisible hand of the government

More than 50 years ago, an interview with Rod Serling (the creator of The Twilight Zone and the screenwriter for Seven Days in May, a fine movie about a potential military coup in the United States) talks about the problem of censorship. It is relevant today: Serling concludes that a backward but vocal minority can force commerce-minded corporations to censor our most public arts — movies and TV.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Iraq war, there were few if any major artists who made movies or wrote plays about those subjects — at least none that saw the light of day. None were done for many years. Even now, there is a reluctance to depict the subjects of terrorism and torture, except on television. Strangely enough, in shows like 24 and Homeland, we see torture and terrorism discussed in a dramatic fashion. TV seems to have come full circle, from being the most censored outlet, to one of the least — just behind the Internet. Why and how this happened is the subject for another day, but it would make a fascinating tale.

In the law, there is a saying “good cases make bad law.” Many times, the facts of a case cry out for justice, for rectifying a wrong, but our courts are reluctant to do that because, by doing so, they may set a precedent that will have dire consequences.

Sony is withdrawing The Interview not because it wants to censor the subject matter of the movie, but because a backward but violent minority has scared it into submission. By withdrawing The Interview from general circulation, though, Sony may have had a good case, but it is setting a very bad precedent.

For Susan Beth Lehman's take on the controversy, click here.