Because of my long-standing interest in the Korean peninsula, I went to a theater to see the controversial Seth Rogen –- James Franco film, a comedy about a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Chong Un. I found it disturbing but not for its portrayal of North Korea. The “humor” was no surprise, trivial jokes about sexual orientation, appearances, getting high and such. The use of violence for comedic value has troubled me since seeing the film a few days ago.
The Senate’s report on the CIA’s use of torture complements the film; the casual depiction of mutilation and death for laughs in the film echoes the attitudes revealed in the methods and rationales for “extreme interrogation” described in the Senate Select Committee's torture report. In the film, human beings are mutilated and killed for laughs, while in reality, U.S. government agents got permission to torture human beings, however misguided or despicable, for information that may or may not have saved American lives. In neither case did the end justify the means.
Both the film and the torture are symptomatic of the deeply-rooted ethos of violence which manifests in our entertainment industry, in the indiscriminate use of firearms by Americans on all sides of the law and, most shamefully, in the government-approved use of torture and extra-legal detention, not to mention assassination by drone or other means. At times in The Interview, this pervasive reliance on violence to carry the plot touches on contemporary reality, as when the CIA deploys a drone to send an assassin's weapon to the American protagonists in North Korea.
At one point, the alternate reality of nonviolence breaks in, when a North Korean official who secretly opposes the totalitarian system persuades the American heroes that assassination will be less effective than exposing the true Kim Chong Un to the North Korean people. In the end, the filmmakers, like our government, rely on violence to save their lives and the lives of a multitude of innocents when Kim's response to his exposure as a flawed human being is to ignite a nuclear holocaust. Of course, this is just a film, and a comedic fantasy at that...and so excuse the graphic violence in it and thereby grow that much more inured to violence and that much more willing to rely on military and extra-legal means to achieve our ends.
The proper response to the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg film is to forget it and the media frenzy around its release. The proper response to the torture report is to acknowledge our collective culpability, repent, make amends wherever possible and act to ensure that no U.S. public official at any level ever condones or ignores the use of torture for any purpose.
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