Is The Interview deeper than PC critics are willing to admit?
I haven’t seen The Interview (yet), but Bridget Johnson has, and at PJ Media she posits that the film is deeper than critics will admit, perhaps because it also contains some very un-PC material. Her piece is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some highlights.
She begins by supporting the notion that the film be beamed into North Korea:
… the on-screen version [shows] North Koreans discovering what a blubbering idiot their supreme leader is, and how revolution ultimately comes from within.
I would point out that a well-established distribution channel exists in North Korea for the dissemination of forbidden video content: USB thumb drives. Video players that accept thumb drives have been dropped and smuggled into North Korea in significant numbers.
After watching The Interview twice online, I’ll venture to say the comedy goes even deeper into “messaging” territory about the danger of the regime than the legendary “ronery” Kim Jong-il send-up in Team America: World Police.
Is it Oscar material? Of course not, but it’s well-paced and even funnier if you’re up on current events.
A few observations without spoilers:
- John Kerry referenced as “that oak tree-looking f**k” — need I say more?
- Eminem and Rob Lowe have very funny cameos
- Randall Park as Kim Jong-un is at times more refined than we can ever imagine the young dictator, yet most of the time he’s as silly and off his rocker as we expect him to be. He was all bravado and bluster in one moment, and blubbering the next.
- Concise foreign policy quote that sums up Kim well: “He says that he’s going to blow up the world just to prove that he’s the s**t”
Johnson points out the abundance of un-PC content:
One can imagine that at least some of the panning of the The Interview as a useless, poor movie is a reaction to the massive volume of political incorrectness within — The Guardian, for example, rated The Interview as “20% sexism … 10% ‘funny’ accents”; The Verge referred to the film as a “dumb, racist, homophobic, misogynistic comedy that also happens to depict the fiery death of a sitting political leader.”
Intelligence veteran G. Murphy Donovan has pointed to several signs that The Interview may in fact be part of a psy-ops campaign sanctioned by American intelligence officials. We can’t know with any certainty, but the worldwide brouhaha over the film, with official North Korean denunciations, can’t hurt in making the film attractive in the underground North Korean distribution system. If thumb drives carrying the film end up carried into the Hermit Kingdom, that would be another tell.