An activist in South Korean has sent more than 80,000 copies of the slapstick comedy about the assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to the hermit kingdom in hopes that The Interview will spark questions about his deification.
A North Korean defector himself, Lee Min-bok has taken it upon himself to get the movie into the hands of those living under Kim’s autocratic rule. Doing so has meant tying copies of the DVD to helium-filled balloons and sending them across the border from South Korea, where he now lives. He’s had to do so under cover of darkness and with military supervision because North Korean forces have shot down similar propaganda balloons — and even threatened even harsher actions in retaliation to The Interview balloon drops.
“[We] do not hide the fact that we will counteract this time with cannons or missiles,” a North Korean propaganda website said recently.
To Lee, the risks are worthwhile — even though he’s not a fan of the movie.
Lee told CNN that he thought the Seth Rogin, James Franco flick was “vulgar” — and couldn’t bring himself to watch the whole thing. Still, he thought it conveyed and important message.
“The regime hates this film because it shows Kim Jong Un as a man, not a God,” Lee said. “He cries and is afraid like us and then he’s assassinated.”
In the movie, Kim is portrayed as a Katy Perry fan with daddy issues, and worse — his apathy towards the suffering of his people is put into the spotlight. This characterization bears stark contrast to notions refined shots of him aboard submarines who is met with tears of joy from throngs of North Koreans who adore him — at least in public.
While the slavish devotion to Kim might only come into view in public, but Koreans have learned to mask their true feelings, according to Jean H. Lee, a Korean-American journalist who headed the Associated Press’ Pyongyang bureau.
“It’s highly illegal to criticize or deface anything related to the leader,” she told Vanity Fair.
I’m not talking about how people feel. I’m talking about how they’re required to behave. There are a lot of times when you can see those kinds of flickers in people’s faces where they want you to know that they have to say certain things, but very few North Koreans would be unwise enough to say anything openly critical about the leadership.
Aside from the restrictions on criticizing Kim is a cult of personality around him and his family which the The Interview shatters.
While it’s unclear just how many North Koreans have seen the movie — either from retrieving DVDs that Lee Min-bok sent across the border or if they’ve been able to obtain it elsewhere — the movie has been at the center of a geopolitical scandal. So much so that North Korea considered its release an “act of war” and even President Barack Obama weighed in on the controversy, and said that Sony “made a mistake” by pulling the movie from theaters in the U.S.
North Korea may be responding with its own efforts to counter the damning (albeit fictionalized) depiction of its Dear Leader.
A new teacher’s manual sent to school across North Korea sings the praises of Kim, and claims that he learned to drive at the age of three. Apparently, he mastered sailing a yacht soon after.
“At the age of 9, Kim Jong Un raced the chief executive of a foreign yacht company, who was visiting North Korea at the time,” the manual stated — and added that Kim won the race despite the odds.
According to UPI, “The book is a sign middle and high schoolteachers around the country have been tasked with glorifying Kim — so he may be idolized like his father, the late Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather and North Korea founder Kim Il Sung.”