Kim Jong-un,
who appears to be America’s newly self-appointed minister of culture,
has decided that it is not enough that “The Interview,” the Seth Rogen
film about North Korea that includes Mr. Kim’s assassination, will not
be released. On Thursday, a message
from the Guardians of Peace, the hacker group that breached the
computer systems of Sony Pictures and warned against releasing the film,
said “we want everything related to the movie, including its trailers,
as well as its full version down from any website hosting them
immediately.”
My,
that slope became mighty slippery pretty quickly. The hackers promised
that if Sony scrubbed all traces of the comedy from the Internet — an
impossible task — they would cease a campaign that has lasted almost a
month and has threatened employees and their families, embarrassed
executives and potentially unleashed 100 terabytes of private company
data into the world.
Federal
officials said Friday morning that they had extensive evidence that the
North Korean government organized the attack. A few hours later, President Obama added his voice
to the chorus of critics, including irate Hollywood actors, who say
Sony and the nation’s theater operators should not have canceled the
release. “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can
start imposing censorship here in the United States,” he said.
It
was a remarkable and disorienting turn of events: a tiny, failing state
that lacks the wherewithal to feed its own people was deciding which
movies we can and cannot see, while the industry it had attacked watched
silently from the sidelines, and the president of the United States
felt compelled to step into an international confrontation catalyzed by a
lowbrow comedy.
After weeks of embarrassing disclosures from Sony’s hacked files, the endgame for the movie began on Tuesday, when the hackers invoked the devastation
of September 11, and said that anyone who attended the opening on
Christmas Day would be risking their lives. “We recommend you to keep
yourself distant from the places at that time,” they wrote in a rambling
email to news organizations.
Theater
chains quickly let it be known that “The Interview” would not be
screened. Sony, saying it had no choice, withdrew the movie. Certainly,
there were concerns about public safety, but make no mistake, other
considerations factored in the decision, all involving dollar signs: the
box office receipts of films that would be playing alongside “The
Interview” during one of the biggest movie weeks of the year, and the
holiday shoppers at the retail chains that surround so many theaters.
Major cable players made it clear that they were unwilling to step in
with a video-on-demand alternative, so short of hanging a bedsheet and
screening the movie at its Culver City headquarters, Sony was cornered.
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