In 2014’s “The Interview,” Amnesia is a Privilege
Theatrical release poster of The Interview (2014).
On Christmas Day 2014, Sony Pictures, at the urging of President Barack Obama, released The Interview. The filmic equivalent of “Back to Back World War Champs” slogan tees, the movie stars actors and ex-collaborators Seth Rogen and James Franco as two journalists tasked by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, played by Randall Park. Any script attached to Rogen and Franco was a shoo-in during the years when we lauded hypermasculine, hypersexual comedy for degeneracy. Their rise in Hollywood also paralleled our geopolitical relations: Obama, supposedly representing a peaceable pivot away from George W. Bush-era brashness, ultimately contributed to destabilizing North and South Korean relations which yielded deteriorating relations between the two countries.
The Interview captivated mainstream audiences with its equally ridiculous press cycle. At one point, while doing interviews, an uninformed Rogen said that he hopes that DVD copies of the film will find their way into North Korea and spark a revolution. With no reporters to challenge him, the film was framed as an important piece of material to show Americans the horrors of North Korean life. It even ended in Obama slapping sanctions on North Korea after a hack of Sony’s servers, which was immediately attributed to a North Korean cyber attack without thorough nor accurate confirmation by political figures and major newspapers. The past president relished this moment of publicity to abet his anti-reunification agenda.
In the movie, Kim is reduced to buffoonery, speaking with a forced pronunciation that belies actor Randall Park’s crystalline fluency in American English. The actor parodies all of Kim’s quirks and attributes that American reporters have deemed absurd and foreign: his volatility, his bemusement of American pop culture, and his love of missiles. I know myself to enjoy crude humor and love any opportunity to roast anyone who needs some humbling, so why did I feel so humiliated while watching The Interview?
Randall Park in still from The Interview (2014). Photo by Ed Araquel. © 2014 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
To date, millennials whose adulthood was punctuated by stoner comedy can quote the film’s memorable scenes—myself included (“Same same, but different” is a regular expression in my daily vernacular). But The Interview’s farcicality allowed the movie to hide behind buffoonery, while in actuality, making great strides to damage my ethnic group. Many of us recall its memorable scenes with ease, but it is not as easy to remember Obama’s daily persistence in releasing the film despite complaints from United Nations representatives and North Korea. The president made an unprecedented level of intervention to further alienate his constituents from the truth about the war that the US has repeatedly prolonged.
This changed my diasporic experience in America. The most common question I get is, “Which Korea are you from?” And while it certainly is progress since elementary school when classmates would ask if I ate dog meat, it is still a painful one to answer. I’m from all of Korea. When the U.S. military drew an arbitrary line at the 38th parallel to curb the land’s growing movement towards communism, none of my ancestors could choose where they lived. Today, Koreans have no agency over the American military that reinforces this border, nor the way that Korean families are deemed “good” or “bad” simply by where they live. No one’s way of life should be distilled down to cardinal directions, but I live in a country where Hollywood’s use of satire reinforces such borders without being informed. Does it even know that we are still at war?
The Interview calls itself satire when it really is the most infantile interpretation of the genre. Some of the best satirical writers and insult comedians often perform their material with some appreciation of the fullness of the human being or subject—for all the absurdity in their humor, they see the subjects of their gibes as a sum of their pasts and futures, sometimes even showing compassion for what makes one misunderstood. But The Interview suffers from amnesia, maintaining ignorance and indifference of damaging historical foreign policies toward people who do not have the luxury of forgetting, let alone overlooking, such a movie.
Still from The Interview (2014). Photo by Ed Araquel. © 2014 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Once again, in December 2024, Korea is on many people’s minds. The American majority might not turn to The Interview this Christmas, but the movie has already done its damage by creating a fictional, monolithic “foreign bad guy” that serves to advance U.S. dominance. On the evening of Tuesday, December 10, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, known for his ardent enthusiasm for an alliance with the U.S. and Japan to weaken North Korea, declared martial law to root out “pro-North Korean forces”—in reality, his liberal opposition and popular progressive movements—from the government. His speeches are reminiscent of the fearmongering white supremacist that will return to the Oval Office in January. Meanwhile, nearly 150,000 Koreans have been marching in Seoul every week to demand Yoon’s resignation. Koreans clearly see the damage that America has wreaked on a once-united nation, but it seems that most Americans do not. In this regard, The Interview has succeeded.
A day after Yoon’s declaration of martial law, I went to a Los Angeles Kings game with a noticeably absent turnout. Addressing my boyfriend, I openly wondered about the sparse crowd. Unprompted, the girl sitting next to me innocently joked that the Korean enactment of martial law probably made people too scared to go out. I was jealous. I wished I also suffered from the amnesia that lets me make light of the lifelong struggle of my people.
