A lot of people have been talking about The Interview lately. It’s a particularly controversial movie, and not in the “oh-hey-that’s-a-topic-no-one-talks-about” kind of way.
It’s more of a… “LET’S-LAMPOON-DEATH-AND-DESTRUCTION-AND-OH-BY-THE-WAY-THERE-ARE-HUMAN-RIGHTS-AND-SECRET-AGENTS-AND-WHAT-IS-THIS-MOVIE-EVEN-ABOUT-ANYWAY” kind of way.
The moviemakers claim to discuss human rights in the film, and that they spread awareness. Having watched it, I think that they actually hinder that goal of raising awareness, instead of aiding, well, anyone.
They gloss over the suffering people. They talk about subjects like borderline slave labor, without mentioning the prison camps. They discuss the lack of some basic human rights… but they’re talking about people going hungry, not about why.
The problem is not that some people don’t have lights on in their houses. The problem is that this lack of technology is being forcibly imposed upon the people by a government with a very small concentration of some of the brightest lights in the sky
.
(This map shows the lights on in South Korea, compared to those in North Korea. Notice that South Korea is brightly lit and industrial, and North Korea is empty and technologically desolate, with the exception of Pyongyang, where the regime resides)
But let’s just say for argument’s sake that they do show the real crises going on.
They still trivialize it.
The movie portrays the North Korean government as fat and stupid, and labels an extraordinarily overdone CGI death as being more important than the aftermath it will cause.
It takes the typical “buddy-cop” scenario, and uses it to lampoon something that is just a little bit too unreal to be serious, and too real to go un-talked-about.
So what you end up with is a whole new group of people who trivialize the human rights crisis.
And that’s not good.
Audiences watching The Interview need to realize that North Korea is a lot more than just nuclear weapons, assassinations, and forced assimilation. It is more than internet-hacks and cyber-threats. These big ideas are a screen, and masked behind that screen, there is plenty of very ugly, nasty activity.
The movie should be talked about.
Just not for the reasons that people are actually talking about it.
Think North Korea 