photographs, statues, exhibits, and monuments. For his father’s seventieth birthday, in 1982, Jong Il unveiled the Juche Tower, which was made of 25,550 granite blocks, one for each day the Great Leader had lived by that time, and surpassed the height of the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument by 2 feet. An instant landmark in Pyongyang because of its size and historical and political significance and capped by a glowing orb, the tower looks like a massive torch, triumphantly reaching for the heavens. That same year, the Arch of Triumph—modeled after the one in Paris, but thirty feet taller—celebrated Kim Il Sung’s return to Pyongyang in 1945, marking the location where he was introduced to the people by the Soviet military. The monuments not only commemorated the country’s founder but also cemented his son’s future status.
GLAMOROUS GUERRILLAS
Jong Il also harnessed the power of film and literature to build and solidify his position as the son of North Korea’s most famous guerrilla, as well as to play to his father’s ego. Soon after graduating from Kim Il Sung University, twenty-five-year-old Jong Il volunteered to be the cultural arts director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department. He used this position to marry his love of film with his political ambition, exploiting the power of cinema to constantly refresh the cult of personality and reinforce the regime’s narratives about the centrality of Kim Il Sung in the country’s history, present, and future. The younger Kim was a known movie impresario, a fan of James Bond and Rambo movies and the actress Elizabeth Taylor. He reportedly owned twenty thousand DVDs and videos, saw every Academy Award–winning movie, and was upset when James Bond was captured and tortured by North Koreans in Die Another Day. (The regime released a statement decrying the film as “insulting to the Korean nation.”)
For a sheltered, relatively shy young man who lived in the shadow of his father, film was a gateway to the outside world and a means to play god in the small part of the universe that he controlled. And while many of his peers outside North Korea were rebelling against the establishment, demonstrating, marching, and fighting for civil rights and national independence in the tumult and upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, Kim was busy trying to please his father and strengthen the status quo in North Korea. He recognized the power of cinema to shape perceptions, play on the emotions, and create uniformity of thought based on the shared experience of moviegoing. His films told emotional, heart-wrenching tales of noble North Koreans who fought and resisted Japanese imperialism with unwavering faith in Kim Il Sung and Communism.
But Kim was unsatisfied with the state of North Korean films and wanted to make them more modern, so he ordered the January 1978 kidnapping of a famous South Korean actress, Choi Eun-hee, in Hong Kong. Six months later, North Korean agents also abducted her ex-husband, Shin Sang-ok, a celebrated South Korean movie director, when he went to look for her in Hong Kong. The couple secretly taped Kim Jong Il complaining that “in South Korea, they have better technology. They are like college students and we are just in nursery schools.” In his high, squeaky voice, he also lamented, “We don’t have any films that get into film festivals.” The couple delivered. They made nearly twenty films during their eight years in captivity, satisfying Kim’s desire to develop North Korea’s film industry. To garner fame, he allowed the couple to travel to various film festivals; during one of those trips, they escaped to the U.S. embassy in Vienna.
Kim made movies with the aim of winning the hearts and minds of average North Koreans, to encourage them to worship his father and, by extension, himself, but clues to how Kim envisioned his role in North Korea could be found in his favorite Western films. As recounted in London-based filmmaker Paul Fischer’s book A Kim Jong-Il Production, Shin said that Kim was “like any ordinary young man. He liked action movies, sex movies, horror movies.”
But in the context of North Korea, Kim 2.0’s preference for James Bond and Rambo takes on a particular meaning. Shin recalled that Kim often had trouble seeing Bond and Rambo movies as fiction and viewed them more as “social realist docudramas.” Clever, charming, sexy, and arrogant, James Bond is someone most men might admire. Bond was a world traveler, jet-setting from Paris to Istanbul to the Caribbean to North Korea, bedding dozens of the world’s most