Sony Pictures’ decision to cancel the release of The Interview, its much-trailed comedy about the assassination of Kim Jong-un, the eccentric North Korean dictator, has raised concerns ranging from the trivial to the deadly serious.
Cyber attacks on computer systems at Sony’s Hollywood studios by anonymous hackers led to publication of gossipy company e-mails about stars such as Angelina Jolie and Barack Obama’s taste in movies. This was embarrassing, but hardly earth-shattering. But when North Korea insisted the film constituted an act of war and when the hackers, styling themselves the Guardians of Peace, threatened terror attacks on American cinemas, the affair suddenly assumed a higher order of magnitude.
The ensuing confused and panicky reaction in the US has been unedifying. Major cinema chains and distributors declared they would not screen or market The Interview out of fears for customer safety, obliging Sony to cancel not just the film’s cinema, but also its home movie, release. Michael Lynton, Sony’s CEO, said it had not backed down and hoped the film would be shown.
So far, no distributors have volunteered their services. Although it has already been publicly premiered in Los Angeles, this ill-starred movie seems destined to become a collector’s item, possessed by the supposedly fortunate few.
Maybe Sony and the distributors believed they were acting altruistically, in the wider national interest. Or maybe they just got cold feet in the face of potentially large financial losses and the prospect of liability lawsuits should violent attacks result. Whatever their motivation, those in the US responsible for preventing the film being screened have, in effect, handed a significant victory to the hackers, to blackmailers, to actual and would-be terrorists of every stripe and to the North Korean regime that, despite its denials, has been identified by the FBI and South Korea as the dark force behind the hack attacks.
This victory for intimidation amounts to a defeat for America’s cherished principle of freedom of speech and expression that cannot be allowed to stand, as Obama rightly said when he finally focused on the affair on Friday. “We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States… Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended,” he said.
It should come as no surprise that isolated, insecure and paranoid North Korea, suspected of a previous cyber attack on South Korea, should also be expanding and perfecting its cyber capabilities. This development makes it more important than ever that the US and Japan, with China and Russia, work more urgently to bring this dangerous regime in from the cold.
Obama refused to say what retaliatory action he may take. But more threats, more sanctions or like-for-like cyber attacks will not work in the long run and, if attempted, may merely provoke an escalation. Mockery of North Korea’s oddball leader, however deserved, is no substitute for a thoughtful, grown-up policy of diplomatic engagement.
