to his will. Fear of the leader’s wrath may have minimized any consequences, for now, but the dependence on repression has boxed Kim into the existing paradigm of North Korean isolation. Whether he knows it or not, the building blocks of fear, the earliest of which were laid by his grandfather and built upon by his father, now constrain his vision and his ability to see beyond the walls.
It wasn’t too long after executing his uncle that Kim applied his tools of coercion outside his country’s borders to punish an American company, in an effort to shape the outside world with the considerable means at his disposal.
Kim Jong Un strolls into the studio for his interview, wearing his usual dark Mao jacket and matching trousers. He settles into his chair and smiles broadly to show the world his sincerity in this live international broadcast. In addition to telling the interviewer that he loves karaoke and that he is an accomplished painter—in his effort to show the world that he’s just a normal person—he veers into politics, condemning the United States both for starting the Korean War and for incarcerating more people per capita than any other country, including his own. The atmosphere gets more tense as the interviewer challenges him about his gulags and how he spends hundreds of millions of dollars on his nuclear weapons program even as he starves his people. Glaring at the interviewer, who is ignoring the approved questions, Kim seethes, “Dave, you are incapable of conducting a real interview. You’re a joke!,” pulls out a gun, and shoots Dave Skylark, the hapless American television journalist. Millions of viewers across the globe gasp in horror and disbelief, and at least some in North Korea begin to doubt whether their leader is in fact the god they were taught to believe in.
Still furious, Kim orders his commanders to prepare their nuclear weapons for launch, as Skylark and his producer, Aaron Rapaport, attempt to escape in Kim’s private tank. Kim chases them in a helicopter, shooting at the tank, but the Americans dodge the bullets. Skylark and Rapaport fire from the tank, hitting Kim’s helicopter and turning it into a ball of flames. Kim is dead.
In the last decade, North Korea has inspired an array of tacky humor in the “stoner comedy” genre, including The Interview, from Sony Pictures Entertainment. The film is based on an improbable scenario: The Central Intelligence Agency sends a hard-drinking, pot-smoking, and fun-loving television personality and his ambitious producer into North Korea with nothing more than a couple of strips of ricin to assassinate Kim Jong Un. Once inside the reclusive country—where they stay at Kim’s personal residence, another element that requires viewers to suspend their disbelief, given the leader’s well-known paranoia—Skylark strikes up a friendship with Kim. The camaraderie is understandable, perhaps, given Dennis Rodman’s visits to Pyongyang and his relationship with Kim. The film is replete with gratuitous violence, scantily clad women, heavy drinking, and even a basketball game between Kim and Skylark as the two bond over their mutual insecurity about not living up to their fathers’ standards. Skylark learns that Kim likes margaritas—even though his father thought they were “gay”—and loves Katy Perry’s song “Firework.” Kim admits, “I am thirty-one years old….The fact that I am running a country is batshit crazy.”
Before The Interview, there were dozens of documentaries and films that ridiculed and criticized North Korea’s tyrants, including the successful movie Team America: World Police about Kim Jong Il from the creators of the irreverent show South Park. The difference was that The Interview, an action-comedy depicting a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un by enlisting the bumbling duo of Skylark (played by James Franco) and Rapaport (Seth Rogen), elicited a serious response and highlighted the extent to which Kim would go to defend his name and honor. Clearly, The Interview had hit a nerve with Kim, and true to form, he took action. In November 2014, North Korean hackers broke into the systems of Sony Pictures Entertainment, stole confidential information from the company, and posted it online. The regime then announced that the release of the movie would constitute an “act of war” and threatened 9/11-type attacks against theaters that showed the film.
What drove Kim to respond in the way that he did? Was it because the movie depicted the luxurious and frivolous lifestyle of Kim and his loyalists? Perhaps exposing the regime’s propaganda of Kim’s godlike status and its farcical claims that North