Capitulating to a massive cyberattack on its systems and violent threats that apparently came from North Korea, Sony Pictures has decided not to release its movie, “The Interview,” as scheduled on Christmas Day — and perhaps ever.
The film, a fictional farce about a goofball CIA assassination of North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un, was withdrawn after Sony and news outlets received terrorist threats against American movie theaters that showed it. “Remember the 11th of September 2001,” one poorly written threat warned, adding, “We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.”
Paramount Pictures then followed suit. It forbade theaters from screening its own 2004 North Korea spoof, “Team America,” in place of the Sony comedy, as some had planned to do.
Sony and Paramount are entitled to conduct their business as they please. Still, it is disheartening to see established and respected companies cave to threats that the U.S. government does not even deem credible. No matter how bad this film is — and it looks pretty awful — it would be a good idea for it to be shown so as to buttress free expression. Novelist Stephen King said it well when he noted on Twitter, “Sony’s decision to pull The Interview is unsettling in so many ways. Good thing they didn’t publish The Satanic Verses.”
Kim has been in power only a short time, but he has wavered not a jot from the totalitarian socialism imposed by his father and grandfather. For six decades it has delivered for North Koreans nothing better than poverty, ignorance, repression, arrogant xenophobia and fear.
The dictator and his collaborators, who have violently stolen from their countrymen all the legitimate comforts and aspirations of humanity, have no business influencing America’s entertainment culture. That this culture is often ugly and insubstantial is irrelevant. It can only be made worse if it is made subject to the whims of North Korea’s ruling class.
Sony’s withdrawal of its movie establishes a means and a precedent by which some of the world’s worst people can extort powerful Western media companies in an effort to censor their output.
It is not Sony’s fault that North Korea is what it is. But the company is surely at fault for failing to meet even basic standards of computer security. The immediate lesson here is that every company, whether it makes movies or anything else, must start taking cybersecurity more seriously. Americans’ right to express themselves, and to do much else, depends ultimately on the media and other large institutions staying safe from the clutches of Kim and others like him.
