By now, there's a good chance that you've seen "The Interview," the Sony Pictures comedy about an attempt to assassinate the president of North Korea. It says a great deal about the times we live in that it's possible to use the words "comedy" and "assassinate" in describing the same movie in a single sentence. But what's far more remarkable is the fact that, for the first time in American history, your right to see that movie has been compromised.
Or has it?
As we all know by now, threats were made by way of the Internet, and allegedly from North Korean sources, that terrorist attacks would be made against theaters that showed "The Interview" on its scheduled release date. Theaters began to abandon their plans to show the movie and, as a consequence, Sony cancelled the release. Subsequently, people protested the cancellation as cowardly, and the protests reached the point at which Sony capitulated in the other direction, releasing the film on a limited basis in theaters, and also on selected Internet platforms.
But was there ever really a threat in the first place? Here's one skeptic's view on the subject. He outlines a number of plausible possibilities, but overlooks a rather important one, especially considering the fact that we're talking about Hollywood.
Sony got a lot of publicity out of the story. And, perhaps, an even larger audience for "The Interview" than it might otherwise have had, especially at Christmas time with competition from a number of other releases. Not only that, but it got an opportunity to immediately send the movie onto the Internet, which is rapidly replacing theatrical release as the primary mode of film distribution. And, by ultimately refusing to cave to the North Korean "threats," the studio gets the goodwill derived from being perceived as a defender of First Amendment rights, here and around the world. All the sort of things that, in Hollywood, studios and artists hope to derive from a truly great publicity stunt.
Well what if this was one?
I mean, why is that so unlikely? Thirteen years down the road from 9/11, we've largely incorporated into our day-to-day affairs the possibility that, at any moment, we may be wiped out. And while we're not crazy about the idea of being wiped out, we've pretty much resolved to go on living the lives we want to live, in spite of it. That attitude is reflected in the poll numbers showing large-scale opposition to Sony's initial cancellation of "The Interview"'s release. Who's to say that Sony didn't have access to research showing that that opposition would be the majority reaction to cancellation of a film due to terrorist threats? Or even conducted its own research on the subject? Here's my point: once you know how people will respond to a given set of circumstances, the next logical step is to generate publicity connected to those circumstances that will benefit you.
At the same time, all of the foregoing doesn't rule out the possibility of a threat, from either an overseas or a domestic source. Which begs the question: what is particularly threatening about "The Interview"? It's a movie, right? Movies come and go all the time, especially comedies. Empires don't rise or crumble on the strength of a single film: "The Great Dictator" didn't stop Hitler from nearly conquering Europe. But North Korea and its president, Kim Jong-un, might conceivably feel threatened by its premise to try to prevent the film's release. They might feel that threatened by its premise--in other words, by an idea--because that is the nature of the age in which we now live.
We all share a planet of rapidly depleting resources, with few palatable options for the future. War, the conventional historical means of obtaining those resources, no longer makes sense, in that it would do little more than use up the remaining resources at an even faster pace. Information is the one resource that continues to grow at an exponential pace. And it is the one resource that holds the key to whatever future awaits the human race. Which means that future disputes between nations are more likely to be conducted, and resolved, along channels of information. Which also makes it more likely that their really was a North Korean threat; after all, who is to say that North Korea shouldn't have seen "The Interview"'s premise as a form of potential aggression? By the same token, who is to say that North Korea's subsequent Internet problems weren't a cyberattack by our government?
We may never know the answers to any of these questions. But we can expect more and more confrontations like this one across cyberspace, whether real or staged. And we should, for the sake not only of our individual lives but also of our collective interest, remember one thing about the cyber-age: the only privacy you have is the privacy you refuse to surrender to the Web.
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