Culture has collided once again with reality over the Hollywood movie <i>The Interview</i>. This ill-considered film has become a major international incident, as well as a controversial censorship lesson. US President Barack Obama and the government of North Korea are at the centre of the dispute. It now involves an early shot in what experts call cyberwar, and the biggest exposure ever of corporate secrets.
For Sony, The Interview controversy has been a disaster. Huge amounts of confidential company information has been dumped for public perusal by a hack attack by the so-called Guardians of Peace (GOP). This hacker group is almost certainly part of the North Korean government's cyber-attack battalion, Group 121. Its existence has been known for years, and it has conducted previous attacks on commercial firms, mostly notably in South Korea. Pyongyang denies any direct control over the attacks, but openly gloats at Sony's discomfort.
One of the questions Sony has so far not addressed is why it considered that killing Kim Jong-Un in a fiery, close-up explosion was funny.
The Interview, which was to be released in some markets this Thursday as a Christmas Day attraction, has been put back in storage. The GOP hackers are threatening to attack theatres that show the film. It is obviously an act of self-protection for large US cinema operators to cancel screenings. Sony then had no choice but to cancel the release everywhere. The Interview is not scheduled for release in Bangkok, for reasons unknown. Early reviews of The Interview were tepid, and the subject matter was controversial to say the least.
The movie is supposedly a comedy about the assassination of Kim Jong-un, the current dictator of North Korea. Anyone who thinks "comedy" and "assassination" are unconnected knows little about Hollywood. The Interview is not even the first such recent film. In late 2001, Paramount Pictures released Zoolander, which was about the assassination of the prime minister of Malaysia. That film raised only a tiny fraction of the outrage that The Interview has caused, mostly because Malaysia is far more polite and civilised than the regime in North Korea. Zoolander played briefly and without protest or notice in Bangkok cinemas.
It was never clear with Zoolander — and it is currently still a mystery for The Interview — how the killing of a head of government is a subject for laughs. The Sony hacker GOP, in addition to dumping thousands of confidential memos, emails, contracts and the like, released the key scene of The Interview, showing Hollywood's killing of Kim Jong-un, including closeups of his head burning to a crisp. Sony's Hollywood set obviously believed this was hilarious. As the leaked Sony documents show, however, Sony's Asian executives were mostly appalled. South Korean colleagues protested and Sony's Taiwan office wrote flatly the movie "didn't stand a chance" at the Asian box office.
The Interview has now put squarely on the table the bigger issue of government-supported hacking. Mr Obama intends to try to parley the Sony hacking into greater US control of the internet. More to the point, he intends to retaliate against North Korea.
It's a movie that never should have been made. Now, however, it has effectively been censored by North Korea. That action, too, cannot stand. Mr Obama said outright that "Sony made a mistake" by cancelling the Christmas Day release. Clearly, Sony must now make the movie available worldwide, even if it has to resort to an internet or cable-TV release. That doesn't mean anyone should spend his or her hard-earned money to see it, of course. But Pyongyang censorship is unconscionable.
[Editor's note: A previous version of this story, now corrected, said that the movie Zoolander had not played at Bangkok cinemas. In fact, it had a brief run at a first-class cineplex.]