Interview With The Empire

A few years back, David Letterman was the target of the threats from Islamic extremists over a joke he made. I figured that for a comedian, if you have to die before your time, that's the best way to go: murdered by the target of one of your jokes. That's something you'd always have over everyone else. George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor: none of them can claim that. Also, you'd have a kind of existential revenge over your killer: no one will ever be able to remember either of you without remembering the joke at his expense.

That is, assuming it’s a good joke. Unfortunately, in Letterman’s case, it was a laboured attempt to revive a previous gag into a running joke. It made little sense out of context, and wasn’t that funny in context. I would hope the incident was a wake-up call to all comics: put everything into each joke, because it could be your last.

Which brings me to The Interview. Obviously I haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t look like something you’d want to go down in history as the movie that started World War III. I’m not sure what you would want an act-of-war movie to be like; probably something that makes a profound statement. Even if it has to be within the genre of stoner/gross-out comedies, you’d want to go down in history for insulting the enemy leader with an American Pie-style unprecedented moment of raunch.

But now it appears that none of this matters. If they don’t release The Interview, we can just imagine it to be whatever kind of movie we want it to be. As for the question of whether it was a good move to drop the release, I find that most news stories, and all internet discussion, has missed a rather important point: Sony made the decision to cancel the release after several major American theatre chains said they wouldn’t show the film. I’m not saying that absolves Sony of the choice, but it does illustrate that this is not the decision of one isolated corporation. Several companies - when faced with the same situation - made the same choice.

Proponents of the choice to pull the movie have generally made the shockingly mature argument that we can’t just look at it from our current comfortable position, but rather we should put ourselves in the position of the alternate world where the film was shown, and the threatened attacks happened. It’s hard to look at that devastation and justify the decision to release a silly movie.

I can understand the reasoning and, as I say, admire the non-knee-jerk sophistication of that position. But what really worries me about the cancellation is that it sets a shockingly low bar for cancelling major events based on threats. The fact is, it’s pretty much an everyday event for people on the Internet to make idle threats they couldn’t possibly follow through on. They’ve let everyone know that all it takes for a major corporation to change their plans at great expense is some hacking skills and the shamelessness to threaten lives. I think we’re going to see that happen more often in the future. If it does, we’ll have to reassess the equation of how much risk we’re willing to live with.