Sony's decision to release the movie online was obviously a win-win for me. I got to see Seth Rogen and James Franco humorously take a person's life and didn't even need to leave my house. I went on a trip without a lot of Internet the weekend before the movie was released on Christmas, and when I came back Tumblr was doing its spoiling thing. They said it wasn't right to make light of such a serious topic. Usually when I come across a differing opinion on Tumblr I wind up changing my mind, but I held on strong to The Interview. I've seen Mel Brooks mock Hitler on at least two separate occasions. I haven't seen Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator but I hear good things. I really do like comedy as much, if not more than, comic book movies. I'm something of a jokester myself and when comedy is as important to you as it is to me you don't miss the comedy movie that might start World War III. You even try to enjoy it. I did both of those. I watched it, I tried to enjoy it, and then I enjoyed it.
A few of the comments opposing The Interview before and after I watched it almost got to me though. A couple of times I almost conceded that maybe it was possibly not the best idea to mock one of the world's worst tyrants and to belittle his victims. Then I realized that the problem people have with The Interview isn't that it isn't serious enough, but that it's too serious. Every late night talk show host has taken shots at Kim Jong-un without the Internet blinking an eye. But a monologue joke is small potatoes compared to a major motion picture. However, Saturday Night Live's Bobby Moynihan has impersonated Kim Jong-un dozens of times on "Weekend Update," the most beloved segment of one of the most iconic comedy franchises of all time.
SNL and the talk shows paint Kim as a giggling weirdo. The dorky half of a goofy bromance with Dennis Rodman. That Kim is funny, no doubt, but it's not the Kim Jong-un in The Interview. That Kim is deceitful and malicious. At times he's hilariously sentimental, but mostly he's one dangerous nutjob. He's someone who's worthy to be targeted for assassination by the world's governments.
In all the late night talk shows I've seen I don't recall a single mention of Kim Jong-un's concentration camps or his country's widespread starvations, but they were mentioned several times in The Interview. I never saw them mentioned at all, even from my fellow extremely worldly 20-somethings on Tumblr. Then The Interview was released and suddenly Kim's victims were all over the place, starving and suffering at the hands of a madman and I was expected to be upset at Seth Rogen for belittling their strife.
There's a flaw in this idea that any joke about a controversial topic is immediately belittling. Comedy isn't the antithesis of seriousness, even if it is the two don't cancel each other out. Laughing at the Soup Nazi has never stopped anyone from crying during Schindler's List. The implication of that idea comes from the belief that comedy is inferior to drama, which couldn't be further from the truth. Every comedian worth anything takes the business of laughter seriously or they don't make it in the business. The hard truth is that your funniest co-worker probably couldn't cut it as a stand-up.
I can't help but wonder why no one was angry about The Interview long before December. It wasn't part of the surprise album drop trend. It was announced almost two years ago with all kinds of trailers and promotions in between, but no one seemed that angry about it until a few weeks before the release, after the Sony hacks when things got real in a dangerous way. I suppose it's possible that the late reaction was due to a lack of immediacy until that point, but I think it's more likely that people got scared. It's a perfectly reasonable response. I felt afraid a few times myself at the thought of going to the theater, but ultimately Rogen isn't responsible for the actions of a tyrant, nor is Evan Goldberg, his co-director is, nor is the movie's writer Dan Sterling.
Strangely, it was only a month or so ago that a comedian was being praised for his jokes about a monstrous man with a dorky wardrobe. It hasn't been long since all these think pieces were about Hannibal Buress bringing attention to Bill Cosby's secret life as a serial rapist. No one was more upset about that revelation than me. On many occasions I've addressed my difficulty to accept it as the truth and my subsequent feelings of betrayal, but I never blamed Hannibal. He brought awareness to a bad person's acts of cruelty and he was funny doing it. I don't expect many people will read this but I imagine if they do they'll think there's a difference between the two situations. If there is feel free to let me know because I'm pretty good at comparing and contrasting things but the only difference I see here is a matter of scale. Kim Jong-Un has an army to do his bidding while Bill Cosby only has an apparently not great publicist.
It may not be the best idea for Seth Rogen to antagonize the guy with the nukes but the villain of this story is not the guy who mocked the guy who would go to war because he was mocked. In fact, I think Seth Rogen is a great guy and everyone should just laugh this whole thing off and not seek revenge on him in any way. And not just because I might look like him to, say, a deranged dictator who hasn't spent enough time around white people to realize the distinction between Jewfro and Gentile fluff.
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| More like Seth Rogen than Captain America at least. |
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