Commentary: ‘Interview’ fitting end to bad year

The planned release of “The Interview,” a satirical movie about celebrity journalists who are asked to kill North Korean head of state Kim Jong Un (played by the actor Randall Park), made Sony Pictures, which produced the movie, the target of a major cybersecurity hack. In response, the New York premiere of the movie was canceled, stars James Franco and Seth Rogen pulled out of publicity appearances and, after threats to theaters that screen the movie, Sony Pictures told theater chains that it would understand if they chose not to show it. Finally, on Wednesday, Sony withdrew “The Interview” from theatrical distribution entirely.

As depressing as this all is, the controversy over “The Interview” also feels like a fitting coda to 2014, a year in culture that has been defined by actual and imagined totalitarianism.

The year kicked off with the Winter Olympics and an opportunity for Russian President Vladimir Putin to show himself and the nation he leads on the world stage. There is a long-standing tradition of un-free countries using the Olympics to grandstand, but corruption in the selection process and the rising cost of staging the games has raised the unsettling possibility that fewer democratic countries will be willing to take on the hassle and expense.

While some of the gleeful response to Sochi mishaps was probably overblown, there was something decidedly unnerving about the revisionism of the Opening Ceremonies.

Dictators don’t use culture to try to burnish their ideas and reputations just for the fun of it. After putting on a ceremony that, as Julia Ioffe wrote in the New Republic, mentioned the diversity of people under Russian rule but showed audiences “only traditional Slavic garb, with its lush brocade and big head pieces (kokoshniki), but nothing of the lezginka, the dance of the North Caucasus, or, say, the throat singing of Tuva,” Putin justified the annexation of Crimea and military incursions into Ukraine on the grounds that he was protecting ethnic Russians from persecution.

Turn to the dark side

Given Russia’s use of culture to consolidate its self-image and further its adventurism, there was something sadly hilarious about the dark tones some of our domestic debates took on this year. From the Gamergate kerfuffle to worries over the speech climate on college campuses, we spilled gallons of ink debating the influence — real or imagined — of feminist critics and campus activists, seeming to lose all sense of scale and perspective on what censorship and cultural manipulation really look like.

Gamergate, for example, was a broad cultural umbrella, including everything from consumer complaints about gaming sites that readers felt were running too few user-focused reviews to vituperative attacks on individual creators and critics. But among the narratives that emerged from Gamergate was the idea that a censorious feminist cabal that wanted, as bandwagoning conservative cultural critic Christina Hoff Sommers put it, “the male video game culture to die,” had infiltrated major gaming sites and even distributors like Steam.

This is a laughable idea. Feminist critics like Anita Sarkeesian, the founder of the Feminist Frequency video series, may be influential (not least because the threats against her have disgusted and enraged so many observers), but they don’t actually have the power to get games greenlighted or pulled. And asking a big corporate sponsor like Intel to pull its support from a gaming site for running feminist commentary is a much more aggressive move than running that commentary in the first place.

Gamergate has simmered down in the waning of the year, but it was only the most visible manifestation of rising concerns about political correctness and free speech in American culture, especially on college campuses. Whether manifested as requests for trigger warnings on college syllabuses or for exam delays in the aftermath of decisions not to indict police officers who killed black men, the supposed over-sensitivity of privileged students has been a rich target for those inclined to think that young people ought to toughen up, even as it signals the material uncertainty students might be facing in other areas of their lives.

I agree with the critic Scott Mendelson that the attacks on “The Interview” and the response to those attacks are a collective disaster, one with truly serious implications that are already starting to affect other projects.

“Make no mistake,” he writes, “If this threat has the desired effect of muting or outright preventing the theatrical release of ‘The Interview,’ the precedent might utterly destroy the ability for Hollywood to produce films about any remotely hot button topic or merely leave the biggest blockbusters as the perfect pawn in every would-be nut job’s newest quest for attention. I am terrified of the long-term implications if these schmucks win out, although you can argue that the damage done to Sony means they have already won and that studios will think twice before green-lighting anything politically challenging as a result.”

The North Korean government might not be able to handle being attacked and lampooned by Hollywood. We ought to show greater dignity and resilience in our conversations with each other.