In the week Sony censored itself and shelved the Christmas Day release of The Interview, a comedy about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, I'm reminded of this slim book on my desk which I sometimes flip to random pages. One has this: "In the capitalist system of filmmaking the director is called 'director' but, in fact, the right of supervision and control over film production is entirely in the hands of the tycoons of the filmmaking industry who have the money, whereas the directors are nothing but their agents."
Or this: "In a capitalist society the director is shackled by the reactionary governmental policy of commercialising cinema and by the capitalists' money."
The writer is pompously Marxist, though he's not entirely wrong — look at Hollywood or most of the movies manufactured around the world. In the Sony case, however, it is first-class irony: The book I've just quoted, Cinema and Directing, was written by Kim Jong-un's father, Kim Jong-il, the movie-mad dictator of North Korea, the paternal champion of dreadful ideology and bad haircuts. Kim the Dad was a cinephile, and he wrote this book about how movies are a great tool to prescribe the communist belief and how the director is "the Commander in Chief of the Creative Group" — that sounds almost French. So it's particularly funny or doubly twisted that now Seth Rogan and James Franco — as well as the Sony bigwigs — have conspired to (cinematically) kill his well-fed son in a movie made by capitalist money, one that's not going to be seen by the world anytime soon after a terrorist threat scared cinema chains to cancel the booking (in 2004, Paramount's Team America showed Kim Jong-il being killed without any glitch). Now Sony is blamed for bending, North Korean spies are implicated, Thailand popped up in the news about the epic Hollywood hacking, and the US is considering a "response" against North Korea — the plot thickens in a freakish way that even Kim the Father would never have anticipated.
Self-censorship is censorship, and I stand by the principle of free speech, because that's what makes the free world different from dictatorial shells like North Korea or, well, you know where. Everything gets more complicated, nevertheless, when the role of cinema is entangled with domestic ideology, economic apparatuses and interlocking geopolitics. I haven't seen The Interview; from what I've heard, it sounds like a funny, heroic liberal fantasy only Hollywood could pull off. It's wrong to pull the film because I'm sure I'll enjoy it — watching a despotic bully being blowtorched alive is always fun — though I'm not sure if this Rogan-Franco comedy will contribute much to the discussion of art as political courage, or cinema as a rebellious weapon against tyranny (for that, look at jailed Iranian directors for a model).
For Hollywood, cinema is primarily a product. There's nothing wrong with that and, of course, the industry has been home to a number of great filmmakers and artists through the decades. But it's undeniable that the overriding purpose for Hollywood is the need to always keep the money machine spinning, either with Transformers or The Interview. At the other extreme, cinema serves a different purpose for Kim Jong-il: "Cinema has the task of contributing to the development of people to be true communists and to the revolutionisation and working-classisation [sic] of the whole of society." He wrote in his book, adding that "… and thus the director in the socialist system of filmmaking is fundamentally different from the 'director' in a capitalist society".
Arrogance has many faces, socialist or liberal. Kim Jong-il's ideas about movies were as selfish as the charge he laid against the capitalist filmmaking system: it ignores individualism and consigns "the director" or "the commander in chief of the reactive group" to be a cog in the wheel of an ideological juggernaut (the money system, though serving another form of selfishness, actually gives more credit to filmmakers). And without individualism and personal vision, there's no freedom, and the artistic creation is aborted in the womb. No wonder it's been widely reported that Kim the son is a big fan of explosive Hollywood films.
Recently, Thailand has gone even further by combining the two models — Hollywood's and Kim's. Documents have revealed that the 12 short films based on the 12 Values have a budget of 24 million baht (2 million for each 10-minute movie, which is extremely generous), and all to instil nationalistic dogma into our soft heads. In one swoop of genius we manage to merge the best of dictator-style art sponsorship with gung-ho Hollywood spending. For love or money, we're the best. Our Dear Leader should be proud.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.