“The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.” - Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Did you ever catch
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip?
It was an Aaron Sorkin show, hitting the air right after The West Wing wrapped. Starring Matthew Perry and West Wing alumnus Bradley Whitford, it centered around a Saturday Night Live-esque sketch comedy show, and all the antics and anguish that went on behind the scenes, both with it and with the parent network.
It only lasted a single season – a unique flub for Sorkin – but I liked it. And it had a moment that I always found particularly chilling. Now, with the hullabaloo over the Seth Rogen flick The Interview and the embarrassing knuckling-under by Sony and various theater chains, that moment seems particularly relevant.
Read on . . .
“The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music.” - Joni Mitchell
The moment doesn’t involve the show-within-a-show itself. It had to do with the fictional “National Broadcasting System”, the show’s parent network. The network’s news department had been doing a live interview with a soldier in Afghanistan. In the middle of the interview, they come under attack by an RPG and the soldier lets out a lot of words that, well, you can’t say on network TV. The FCC threatens an enormous (and, frankly, ludicrous) fine and – more to the point – insists on a delay on such live broadcasts in the future.
The head of NBS (played by Steven Webber) objects to the idea of ever putting a time delay on news, for any reason, and the threats escalate. Finally, the dispute ends up at the board of the media group that owns NBS – who, in a quick and off-handed vote, elect to time-delay the news to avoid hassle and expense with the government.
Just like that.
“Fear has its use but cowardice has none.” - Mahatma Gandhi
In real life, the FCC gives news broadcasts some leeway on the standards – though PBS’s
Frontline did risk a multi-million dollar fine for F-bombs in its “A Company of Soldiers” special. And like I said, the amount of the fine – and the supposed risk it entailed to the survival of the network – were both outside the bounds of reality. But the concept still chilled me – that a council of men with no greater interest than the bottom line could so readily punt on something as important as whether news should be time delayed for potential censorship.
And I naturally think of that clip, as I watch Sony Pictures cave in to hackers’ cyberbullying and yank the release of what, for people that like Seth Rogen, was probably a major motion picture, after a number of theater chains caved in on showing it. Paramount has bravely joined the retreat now, refusing to allow theaters to show the also North Korea-mocking Team America: World Police in its place, as the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Dallas had planned to do. Fox has now yanked production of an upcoming Steve Carell move that would also have featured the country. All because of some hackers.
“Every dictator is an enemy of freedom, an opponent of law.” - Demosthenes
It’s North Korea. We all know it is, because who else would go out of their way to defend the dignity of
Kim Jong-Un? He’s a cartoon character. I strongly suspect that, if another world leader ever leaned in and poked him in the stomach, he’d give the Pillsbury giggle. And in all the world, only he – and the people locked up in his jail of a country – take him seriously enough to
cross the street in his name, let alone hack multi-million dollar companies to threaten terrorism over a Seth Rogen movie.
Maybe one day his voice will finally change, and he’ll revamp his style so he’s not quite such a self-writing joke, and his military will develop a missile that can follow a steadier trajectory than the bottle rockets I lit off when I was twelve years old – and then maybe someone, somewhere who he can’t have executed will take him seriously, too. But for now, yeah, this had to be North Korea.
North Korea just beat us. Because the corporations let it.
“Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt
Corporations do not have principles. They do not have ideals. Contrary to the Hobby Lobby case, they do not have religious beliefs. A corporation is a simple creature, and all it wants is to eat. It is a poor steward of a philosophical legacy like the one that lives and breathes in the Bill of Rights.
Make one believe segregation is good for business, and they’ll back it. Tell them desegregation will be better, and they’ll go there, too. Tell them the whole goddam world will burn down if we keep using fossil fuels – but the bottom line needs it to go on – and they’ll fight tooth and nail to burn every last lump of coal.
I suspect Sony’s fear over The Interview is less about “another 9/11” than about whatever sensitive data the hackers pulled out of their cyber-vaults. But whatever the case, it’s a fact that some anonymous hackers – who we all know were working for that Cabbage Patch Doll of a dictator – just played on that simple, corporate self-interest to bully Sony and Paramount into censorship-by-proxy. And that is just sad.
“The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want.” - Keith Olbermann
Building a society – especially a free society - on corporate capitalism is like transporting goods on the backs of wild beasts instead of pack animals. It might work, but only until something either startles or tempts them – and then you’re going to tumble as they jerk out from under you. Like wild beasts, corporations are never truly domesticated, and they’ll turn on you as soon as their primitive instincts give them a reason.
As their dominion over our daily lives grows - as they more than ever control what we watch, what we buy, how we live - the security of the things that aren't commodities becomes ever more fragile. Things like liberty, privacy, dignity. This flap over a movie and a tin-pot dictator is just a reminder that tomorrow, or the next day, some board of directors somewhere, just as an aside before they break for lunch, could vote to chip away at one of any one of those things, just to avoid some fine or for a chance to squeeze out a little more for the bottom line.
Just like that.