Subversion done right

This stoner bromance is smarter than most people give it credit for. It tells us that the world doesn’t really care: one moment people are mourning innocent kids being shot dead; the next, they are cheering a goal or a six. One moment they are sad for a plane that’s gone down and the next they are sad that Mahendra Singh Dhoni has quit. And soon it’s Happy New Year, folks!

“What? Eminem is gay? It’s like Spike Lee just said he was white,” talk show producer Aaron Rappaport (Rogen) tells his anchor Dave Skylark (James Franco) when Eminem “admits” to be being homosexual on their show that’s completed a 1,000 episodes in 10 years. Rappaport and Skylark aren’t taken seriously by the real journalists, of course, so they figure out a way to interview Kim Jong-Un (Park) after discovering that he’s a fan of their show.

“The Interview” not just takes potshots at American and global modern day media priorities, but also portrays the U.S. as a country which is capable of turning idiots into assassins (the CIA makes one of the country’s own journalists hide a missile up his rear to secure the weapon) while the North Korean dictator, only 31-years-old, is adequately humanised. Kim Jong-un makes Skylark question everything the anchor has heard about him by charming his pants off.

When Skylark later realises he has been lied to, he wants to go ahead with the assassination plan, but Rappaport’s Korean girlfriend tells him that Kim Jong-un would just be replaced with another dictator. The problem wasn’t Kim Jong-un, she says, it was the system of dictatorship, and the only way to bring him down was to make people see him for what he was.

Later, during the interview, when Skylark believes they have the required statistics to grill Kim Jong-un about the starving people of North Korea, the dictator counters it with uncomfortable questions about the sanctions that were imposed on the country and that were driving people to the brink of despair. Unable to deal with reasoning, the American Borat, Skylark, goes back to what he’s best at: trolling.

Because trolling and

not reason, bullying and

not debate is the only form of supremacy that the world recognises today. Our prime time news shows are testimony to the fact that name-calling gets more eyeballs than arguments that intellectuals or custodians of high art care for. “The Interview” is subversion done right.