Pulling ‘The Interview’ sends a dark message about free speech

Hostility between nations has always made a solid film plot. Whether it’s the impossibly accented Sean Connery in his Russian submarine, or Harrison Ford battling a Kazakhstan dictator from Air Force One, the cartoonish goodies v baddies narrative is good box office.

Hollywood isn’t too hot on cultural nuances. If it sells tickets and popcorn, it’s a goer.

And this is why pulling the release of The Interview – a Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy with a farcical storyline in which journalists granted an interview with Kim Jong-un are instructed to assassinate the North Korean dictator – is so bizarre.

The halting of screenings of the film follows the incredibly embarrassing leak of emails between Sony executives, actors, writers and directors, which morphed into a full-blown threat on cinemas that were set to show the film in the US from Christmas Day. Hollywood is reeling.

It's not like the American film industry is a bastion of liberalism. Women and people of colour are frequently sidelined for the dominant white, male hero who merely winces when his battle scars are cleaned by a helpless damsel. But this act of cultural conservatism is astonishing. While one might not hold up The Interview as a noble piece of art, the censoring of the film sets a dangerous precedent.

Unquestioned narrative

First of all, there's a good deal of muddiness around who these hackers actually are. Kim Zetter, a senior staff reporter at Wired, wrote an article last week saying the evidence that North Korea hacked Sony is flimsy.

The world is in a new era of hacking that stretches from government agencies spying on the public to celebrities’ naked photos being posted on message boards.

But it’s the cartoonish aspect of this hack – North Korean baddies bring a film studio to its knees – that would probably be too much of a leap for even the most preposterous of action movie writers.

Too few media outlets are actually questioning this narrative as the storyline is too good to interrogate. You can already see the trailer and hear the voiceover.

Christopher Soghoian, a privacy activist with the American Civil Liberties Union, last week tweeted the most succinct summary of what’s going on: “NSA hacks into computers of foreign companies: America, f**k yeah! Someone (North Korea?) hacks Sony: Cyber-war/terrorism, ZOMG!”

Who are the biggest hackers in the world? Who are behind the largest breaches of privacy and public trust? Who are the hackers who have engaged in the type of behaviour that at the very least is morally dubious and at most is illegal and dangerous? Well, that would be US government agencies, primarily the NSA.

Speaking to the website Deadline, George Clooney commented: “With the First Amendment, you’re never protecting Jefferson; it’s usually protecting some guy who’s burning a flag or doing something stupid. This is a silly comedy, but the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this.” Clooney is right.

Censorship tends to be selective, based on extreme gratuitous violence or inciting hatred. But censoring a “silly comedy” sets a terrible precedent.

Presumably Sony won't be optioning The Satanic Verses any time soon. Superficially, censoring The Interview might seem harmless.

But throughout history, the banning of artistic works of political merit – no matter how trivial they initially seem (Alice's Adventures In Wonderland was censored in China) – has sinister consequences.

It also tells us much about the social contexts of the time. In The Interview's case, this is one of surreal jitters over any vague threat of terrorism.

Animal Farm was banned in the USSR, and was banned in schools in the United Arab Emirates as recently as 2002. Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy was banned in Ireland at its time of publication in 1958, as were Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls and The Lonely Girl, and John McGahern's The Dark. John Milton's 1644 essay Areopagitica, an impassioned piece about freedom of speech and press freedom was banned in England.

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter,” Milton wrote, “and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Burning books

At Bebelplatz in Berlin, an inscription of a Heinrich Heine quote is placed among the cobblestones, from his play Almansor, set in Spain in the 1500s, about Christians forcibly converting Moors and burning the Koran. It translates as: "That was but a prelude, where they burn books, they ultimately burn people".

While Bebelplatz is infamous as the site of the Nazi book burnings of 1933, Heine’s quote was written more than a century earlier.

Pulling The Interview might be a panicky action in a nightmare of a scenario for Sony, but once this precedent is set, it's hard to row back on it. Instead of standing up against whoever was threatening violence over the release of a film, Hollywood has cowered.

Its stubbled, sweating action heroes now appear more ludicrous than ever. It’s not often that the bad guys win, but Sony have just rewritten that script, and now the ending is definitely: “To be continued . . .”