"The Interview" was only ever supposed to be a silly James Franco-Seth Rogen comedy about a pair of American journalists who are asked to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. But the movie became the subject of an international incident after hackers who had targeted Sony Pictures threatened violence against theaters who screened it and the North Korean regime used the film as an opportunity to posture about American arrogance.
In the weeks that followed, it's become conventional wisdom that Sony Pictures overreacted in pulling the movie from theaters. But "The Interview" incident actually has a lot to teach the American pop culture industry about how to respond to totalitarian regimes, and how to stay ahead of the pack in a much more competitive global cultural marketplace.
If South Korea's role as a pop culture phenomenon grew in part out of competition with North Korea after the countries were partitioned after World War II, the country's approach to mass media also was the result of a strategic search for an inexpensive export. Discussing the South Korean government's significant investments in the country's culture industries in "The Birth of Korean Cool," her memoir and cultural history, Euny Hong suggests that her country has had to be strategic in its ambitions and realistic about the quality of some of its cultural exports, even as events like the Busan International Film Festival have put South Korean movies in contention with the best of world cinema.
Rather than trying to break into saturated markets like the United States, "It's about getting the crucial but still dormant third-world market hooked on Korean pop culture — Eastern Europe, the Arab nations, and soon, Africa," she argues. "Many K-pop bands release songs in Chinese or Japanese, like Girls' Generation's 'Paparazzi' (nothing to do with Lady Gaga), recorded in Japanese. TVXQ!'s entire marketing strategy is based on appealing to Japan. Boy band Super Junior has a Chinese subunit, called Super Junior M, featuring two Chinese members. Many bands ... have Korean-Americans so that the English sounds authentic."
I've seen the impact of this hallyu, or Korean Wave, myself: On a 2013 trip to Burma, rural rice farmers in the Irrawaddy Delta told me and my father that they hoped to purchase solar units large enough to power televisions that could receive South Korean soap operas.
The South Korean cultural boom is in part the product of government interventions less eccentric but far more comprehensive than Kim Jong Il's kidnapping scheme. Hong points to the South Korean government's decision to prop up the K-pop industry with more than $90 million in subsidies and investments and heavy regulation of karaoke parlors to make sure operators were licensing the music and lyrics they used. There is a government investment fund targeted just at pop culture, and laws that promote independent domestic television studios.
The United States isn't likely to focus this intensely on promoting the culture industry (though we have plenty of tax credit programs of our own) as vigorously as South Korea has and it doesn't need to. And we shouldn't respond to North Korea's posturing by adding that country to the list of those to whom we're terrified to give offense. But America's inadvertent entry into the Korean culture wars ought to have exposed us to some useful new ideas.
While we've been taking international audiences for granted, countries like South Korea are explicitly and aggressively targeting what they see as underserved markets. Much of the discussion of diversity in American popular culture focuses on domestic audiences, and for good reason. American film dramatically under-represents black and Latino people, despite the fact that Latinos in particular buy the highest per-capita number of movie tickets. The success of Shonda Rhimes' series and breakout hits like "Empire" and "Black-ish" show that television is adapting a bit faster, responding to the tremendous power viewers of color have to drive live TV viewing.
These moderate successes suggest ways the American pop culture industry could simultaneously address its problems at home and abroad with projects that put African, African-American and Latino actors front and center. A forthcoming adaptation of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel "Americanah," starring Mexican-Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong'o and British actor David Oyelowo, is exactly the sort of project that has the potential to serve many different potential audiences, both domestically and internationally, all at once.
And while it's a more modest experiment in cultural adaptation than multi-lingual K-pop groups, we've seen a small boom in television shows that make regular use of Spanish-language dialogue, including FX drama "The Bridge" and the CW's marvelous telenovela adaptation "Jane the Virgin." Series like these both reflect changes in American demographics and language and provide potential hooks for audiences in other countries. It's one thing to watch a story about immigrants from your own country in the United States, and another entirely to hear that story told in your own language.
And part of thinking more globally about your audience involves thinking about other customs and norms — and about how to navigate the restrictions autocratic governments place on cultural imports. In that sense, "The Interview" might have taught us the wrong lessons. Despite hiccups and embarrassments, "The Interview" ultimately found both streaming and theatrical distribution. That might embolden American filmmakers and television creators to keep lazily teeing up on North Korea, where their work was never going to be screened in the first place.
Plenty of other governments will behave foolishly, and there will always be tensions between what American audiences take for granted and pop culture tropes that make audiences in other countries deeply uncomfortable. If America's culture industries fancy themselves in the business of exporting U.S. values and ideals, though, they'll have to think about how to make those messages play in very different environments.
And other, more open governments will be able to do something that North Korea can't: make American artists and culture companies change their behavior to get access to burgeoning audiences. China, for instance, just instituted a new rule that requires TV shows that want to stream in Chinese markets to submit entire seasons for review and approval by the country's censors. The desire to appease that body is one of the reasons movies so often cast North Koreans as villains already.
It's no great sacrifice to stage a rollicking "Transformers" fight in Shanghai to win that franchise entrance to the large and growing Chinese movie market. But moves like this are unlikely to stave off more serious challenges to American artistic integrity, especially as countries like China try to gear up to export their own pop culture. Treating the international market as an opportunity to be creative is one thing. Shrinking down what American pop culture is to try to appease every dictatorial or protectionist government that might try to bar it is quite another.
The botched release of "The Interview" might have seemed like an annoyance. But it should have been an unmistakable warning sign. In both foreign policy and mass culture, America is no longer the sole great power in a uni-polar world. And if we want our pop culture to remain a dominant cultural export and a viable means of promoting our values, we'd be wise to look to conflicts like the Korean culture war to figure out how to fight for our own continued influence.
