Destroy All Monsters: THE INTERVIEW Shows We're Happiest Under Attack

Recently a friend of mine intimated that North Korea's entire persona on the worldwide stage - the "don't go near them, they're crazy!" caricature of a wino with a broken bottle and a hearing problem - of which The Interview hack and subsequent threat of Armageddon (?) is only the recent example, is all an elaborate ruse, concocted to help the North Korean government maintain their precarious toe-hold on their own people.

I don't know whether that's true or not, but it seemed to me to become more likely as America stepped up and began play-acting its own requisite series of beats in The Interview debacle, for what seems now like largely the same reason.

The Interview hack / theatrical cancellation / alternate release strategy / theatrical un-cancellation cycle has dominated the pop cultural landscape in increasing turns for the last several weeks. It gained traction in the same week that America learned the outcome of the torture report, and while protests were ongoing in major cities with regard to fatal police action against several black citizens.

The Interview grabbed the news cycles, though. Part of it was simple incredulity - "are future generations really going to remember a Seth Rogen stoner comedy alongside the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand?" - but the same WTF factor that generated that incredulity also made The Interview the perfect prop for what happened next.

It is because The Interview is the silly, flyweight, inconsequential piece of nonsense that it is, that it makes such a perfect foundation for the cultural propaganda that has followed. "America believes in FREEDOM!!" can be heard, and heard loudly, in any conversation on the subject now; and that rallying cry can be bellowed in any context without having to wonder, for a single second, about the implications of the content whose freedom is being defended.

America didn't believe much in freedom last week, when they were torturing an "intellectually challenged" man to gain leverage against his family, and executing a 12-year-old boy on a playground for daring to play with a cap gun. But of course, the image systems at play in both of those crises are part of the country's oldest cultural narrative; they just come from the wrong direction.

The Interview comes from the right direction: it's about a couple of white guys - celebrities, no less! - who go to an "other" space where the "other" is as crazy, alien, and foreign as the power holders in the United States need it to be. And then they engage in the kind of xenophobic violence that is as old as the hills, or at least the Rambo franchise.

The Interview is great cultural propaganda even before it became the greatest piece of cultural propaganda of 2014. It was already about how the other is a pack of whackos that the dominant class in America (in this case, Hollywood) must, inevitably, outman. And then the pack of "whackos" in question went ahead and lived up to their part, brilliantly. And then so did Hollywood. And then so did America.

If the past thirteen years have proven anything, it's that nothing fuels the fading American narrative better than the perception of attack. It's a requisite part of the process, and it's being rallied around to great effect here: now, the fact that the Alamo Drafthouse will play The Interview on Christmas Day is as potent a symbol of "FUCK YEAH!" as that time Dubya wandered around the aircraft carrier declaring "Mission Accomplished."

Hundreds of other independent movie theatres will play the film too, which fits the narrative perfectly: at the end of the day, it wasn't the corporations (Sony or the National Association of Theatre Owners) who stood up to North Korea, it was the little guys, the American Dreams in single-screen theatre form. The sort of starry-eyed entrepreneurs who made this country great in the first place, by pushing away the yoke of British monarchy and started up on their own.

In the meantime, another Bush is exploring his presidential options, to extend the country's unheralded monarchy for another season. But don't worry about that - go see The Interview tomorrow! It's lived through the most important metamorphosis any American document can undergo. It used to be a stoner comedy. Now it means you're free.

Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and pop culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on twitter.