[JulianHassan]

James Franco and Seth Rogan thought that a dictatorship was comedy gold. That is what months of trailer showings for “The Interview,” a comedy on the assassination of Kim Jong Un, broadcasted to theatergoers.

Dictatorship is a game of metaphysical charades. The only absolutes in life we have to fear are greedy Wall Street businessman, Koch-funded Republicans, and fear itself.

In a lecture on art and moral treason, Ayn Rand spoke about the day when a “fat babbit’s obsequious giggle” would cause an idealistic young person to betray his moral sense of life.

Well, Seth Rogan’s obsequious giggle has nearly destroyed Sony Pictures.

CNN eloquently, but unknowingly, makes the case for Hollywood’s own We the Living:

The tragedy is that all this fuss isn’t about something approaching a serious work of art. But aside from being trashily commercial, modern Hollywood also has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to making movies about bad people overseas. We often see evidence of greedy capitalists on Wall Street, or nasty homegrown Christians attacking gays and lesbians. But serious films about the shocking homophobia of the African continent, anti-religious persecution in China or the obvious evil of North Korea are strangely few and far between.

This may well be because the marketing people calculate that something so depressing won’t exactly be box office gold. Thus totalitarianism crops up in U.S. cinema either as fantasy (the Empire in “Star Wars”) or as something to laugh at (“Team America” also tackled North Korea, albeit with genuine wit). Proof positive of the essentially cowardly nature of Hollywood is that executives reportedly screened the ending of “The Interview” for the State Department — and won official blessing.

Perhaps this cyberterrorism will convince Hollywood that there are wicked people beyond their shores and that it is worth making far more intelligent movies about them — movies that go beyond cartoon stereotypes of East and West and deal with the realities of authoritarianism.

[JulianHassan]

I should add that the Ayn Rand lecture was about artists who laugh at heroes. Who was Sony getting us to laugh at?

Someone brave enough to murder a dictator?

[LeslieBates]

The University of Minnesota Film Society was having two showings today at a local theater and both shows were sold out.

[JulianHassan]

I should be more specific and say that not everyone who murders a dictator is a hero. It can be a louse or a rival thug. What the movie is making fun of in this case though are Americans in service of a special mission to protect the country, like the Navy Seal who killed Osama Bin Laden.

Is that why Obama became suddenly animated and inspired in defending the movie? (Like the glee Rand noted in McGovern, when attacking Richard Nixon). I’ll leave that to a psychologist. 

ARI published the following piece by Steve Simpson:

https://ari.aynrand.org/blog/2014/12/23/in-the-sony-affair-who-is-the-real-coward

For the political context and how to objectively communicate that to a general audience, it’s spot on. However, since this is a private space frequented by Objectivists, I feel like some of you could objectively understand why I believe Sony is a maudlin deadbeat qua artistic producer.

Another particularly ugly Sony movie was Julie & Julia by Nora Ephron, distinctly modern in that it ended with the opportunistic blogger insulting Julia Child’s character beyond the grave. (Before her death, Ms. Childs refused to meet the brat, so Julie concludes with a nod from Sony that her hero was not perfect).

I’m sure we share a collective sigh, whether or not we want “The Interview” playing on Capitol Hill. For aesthetic reasons, I don’t, but for political and perhaps cultural reasons, I understand why ARI intellectual Steve Simpson said he would like to see it defiantly played. And why some here might share that view.

But this whole mess stinks to high heaven of a (partially) retched culture, if the intended aesthetic victim who we are meant to laugh at, symbolically speaking, is Robert O’Neill. Combine that with a sitting president invoking free speech for artistic expression, not to protect individual freedom, but to add anti-life honor to insulting our heroes and to attack a private business.

Then, Sony both is and is not a coward. Steve Simpson is right in a sense, and so am I. Sony is both the victim and the killer, when it’s the “moral emasculation of an entire culture.”

(quoted from Ayn Rand, in Art in Education)

[LeslieBates]

I just viewed a local film society showing.

I spent most the show moaning about how stupid the Dave Skylark character was.

I don’t know what else to say.

[David Hayes]

I saw the movie on its fifth day in release, and am pleased that a film designed to offer bathroom humor and hedonistic protagonists, also manages to score points about Kim Jong-Un wielding brutal control his starvation-plagued population. The American reporter discovers that the street he was brought along with a well-stocked food market is a Potemkin Village, for instance.

I am not providing a spoiler to anyone who has seen one of the trailers (there are six at YouTube, including two for international markets) that Kim Jong-Un is said by his staff to neither pee nor poop, the special state of a God-like leader who (it’s said in the comedy) so efficiently burns his body’s energy that nothing is left. Though this may seem like a subject brought up once for a single instance of infantile humor, it actually sets up a development which changes the course of the plot and diminishes the stature of the Kim Jong-Un character. I wouldn’t have thought it had I not seen the film, but it does a good job of integrating its scatological humor with its plot and characters.

The film ridicules Kim Jong-Un, but doesn’t downplay the threat he is to his citizenry. In fact, a character attempting to undermine him from within his own government is depicted as heroic (except for appearing silly in the romantic realm), dedicated to a vital calling. Teen and young-adult audiences who come to the film for laughs are likely to carry away impressions that North Korea would be better were it rid of its dictator.

[Author]

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