Remember when Seth Rogen was a hero of free speech and the American way?
It seems like just a couple of weeks ago that THE INTERVIEW, written and directed by Rogen and his partner Evan Goldberg and co-starring James Franco, was the talk of the nation.
THE INTERVIEW, in case you spent the Christmas holiday on the moon, features Rogen and Franco as an entertainment reporter and his producer who get invited to North Korea by Kim Jong-un for an exclusive interview; the pair is then recruited by the CIA to use the opportunity to kill the crazed leader.
The North Korean government, oddly enough, took umbrage at the premise of the film, and promised grave repercussions if Sony Pictures went forward with the release; soon after that Sony’s computer systems were hacked, embarrassing private emails were released, theatrical releases were leaked to the Internet before they could be released, and the party claiming responsibility (the Guardians of Peace, or #GOP) promised more mayhem if the film was released.
Suitably intimidated by the threat of more embarrassing private information — or worse, confidential business information — being leaked to the public, as well as threats of violent action against any U.S. theaters that showed the movie, Sony blinked and canceled the release. Suddenly a stupid 90-minute comedy from the dudes who wrote SUPERBAD turned into a matter of patriotism: Who are these assholes to tell us what movie we can and can’t see?
George Clooney weighed in, calling Sony’s actions cowardly; President Obama called canceling the release a mistake; and soon enough the movie got a limited theatrical release and wound up on YouTube, so people could watch it at home.
Suddenly everyone’s social feeds were filling up with people proclaiming that they were going to watch this movie solely because Kim Jong-un said they couldn’t. Even my mother, who probably couldn’t have picked Seth Rogen out of a police lineup before this, mentioned soon after we arrived home for Christmas that we had to watch THE INTERVIEW. It was a matter of principle, of protecting the First Amendment. Because in AMERICA, people are FREE to say WHATEVER THEY WANT about WHOEVER THEY WANT, including depicting the (hilarious) assassination of a world leader, and if you try to tell us otherwise, well FUCK YOU BUDDY, we’ll run right out and PROVE YOU WRONG.
Was this movie any good? I dunno, we never got around to watching it over Christmas (it never came up again after my mom mentioned it) and I was never all that interested to begin with. I perked up a little when I saw Lizzy Caplan in the trailer, but to me it looked like a B-/C+ comedy before Kim Jong-un heard about it and it looked like a B-/C+ comedy after. But that wound up being beside the point. Nobody cared if it was a good movie or not, all they cared about was STANDING UP FOR FREE SPEECH.
Cut to six weeks later, suddenly all those same people are sending Rogen death threats for making a joke:
American Sniper kind of reminds me of the movie that’s showing in the third act of Inglorious Basterds.
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) January 18, 2015
AMERICAN SNIPER, in case you leave the room during the commercial breaks in NFL games, stars Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, a real person who served in Iraq shooting Iraqis from long distances. At least that’s what I get from the trailers; I haven’t seen this movie either, so I can’t comment on its quality, but when I saw Rogen’s tweet (I follow him) I laughed and retweeted it because I thought much the same thing — that it’s very odd to make a movie highlighting the very darkest part of warfare, the part where you hide on a roof and wait for a target to show their face so you can kill them without them ever knowing what happened. I hadn’t made the connection to INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, but I found it very apt and I got a chuckle out of it.
That is not to say that snipers aren’t necessary, or that the people they kill don’t (necessarily) have it coming; just that shooting people when they’re not looking is, to me, the ickiest part of combat, and it’s hard to imagine how this movie (or any movie) could depict that without venturing into jingoism, a notion only reinforced by calling it AMERICAN SNIPER as opposed to just SNIPER or DEAD EYE or whatever. But then again, it was directed by Clint Eastwood, who made UNFORGIVEN, one of the most thoughtful meditations on violence ever put on screen, so maybe it does exactly that. I dunno, I haven’t seen the movie or read the book it’s based upon. My reaction to Rogen’s tweet is based solely on the trailer and the title.
The wider reaction to Rogen’s tweet was enormous, and enormously negative, with people on the right — the same people who so enthusiastically cheered on the release of THE INTERVIEW — calling him anti-American and threatening him with violence, as though making fun of a movie about a soldier is the exact same thing as making fun of the soldier.
I wrote a post once making fun of the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s LINCOLN — does that mean I hate Abraham Lincoln? If I didn’t like ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, does that mean I hate football? If I thought Joaquin Phoenix did an unconvincing “Folsom Prison Blues” in WALK THE LINE (and I did) does that mean I hate Johnny Cash?
Anyway, that’s all beside the point. Even if Rogen was directly comparing the movie to Nazi propaganda, why is that a problem when pretending to assassinate another world leader isn’t? We’re free to say anything we want in this country, as long as it’s about another country? It’s like the people who got so pissed at Rogen were saying, “If you don’t like the way we protect your freedom of speech in this country you can just SHUT THE FUCK UP.”
