JEJU-DO—I was pleased when I clicked on the thumbnail cover of the new print issue of The Walrus and found John Reardon’s “Kim Jong Il: The Script Notes.” In planning posts for this blog, I’d recalled my trip to Beijing last October, when my fiancée and I visited a tiny shop above a hostel near the Sanlitun district that had recently been turned into the new home of Pyongyang Art Studios, a place to buy propaganda booklets, cigarettes, posters and various other trinkets from the DPRK. A lot of the stuff was pricey and of questionable value beyond kitsch, but I jumped at the chance to purchase a small green volume entitled Great Man and Cinema, a collection of anecdotes about Kim Jong Il’s contribution to the study and production of movies, published in 1998.

Kim’s affection for the celluloid art is well known. There is a famous story about how Kim, wanting a director who could fully realize his vision of a perfect socialist cinema, kidnapped South Korean filmmaker Sin Sang-ok and forced him to create a series of movies based entirely on his own whims.

When Mr. Sin finally escaped and returned to the South to tell his tale, he reported that Kim’s video library includes as many as 15,000 titles, and that some of his favourites are the Rambo and Friday the 13th movies. One assumes that Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police also has a place on his shelves; although it doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of the North Korean leader, my guess is anyone that egomaniacal would find it irresistible to watch himself be mocked in a major Hollywood picture. (Besides which, Parker and Stone actually sent Kim a gift reel of the film.)

Kim has his own IMDB page, where you can learn that he is 5’3”, that his birth name is Yuri Irsenovich Kim and that he is “Dictator of North Korea, 1994-present.” You can actually buy Kim’s, uh, major contribution to film studies, On the Art of Cinema, from Amazon.com for $24.75. Indeed, you can order your own copy of Great Man and Cinema from this website for the even lower price of $12.95.

However, I wouldn’t bother wasting money on either. I haven’t read the longer book, but as is the case with most propaganda, the content of Great Man and Cinema is interesting largely for its idiocy. The volume is divided into three chapters, “Intelligence,” “Energy” and “Benevolence,” which themselves are divided into subchapters with aggrandizing names like “Amazing Observation,” “Essence of Masterpieces,” “Lucid Appreciation” and “Man of Copious Tears,” plus a few more cryptic ones, such as “Towel Hung on a Wall” and “‘Literature is Humanics.’”

Each section is devoted to an anecdote about Kim, and how he managed to say something ingenious, do something heroic or generally display his unparalleled greatness and perfection with regards to cinema. For example, the first section, “Amazing Observation,” tells of how a seven-year-old Comrade Kim saw a working film called My Home Village, which featured several winter scenes. Upon seeing these scenes, Kim “shook his head dubiously and told an official of the film studio that he wondered why no snow was found on the heads and shoulders of the characters while it came down copiously.” This, of course, is presented as a piece of remarkable insight, one that causes the studio man to feel great shame at his poor special effects savvy and order the scenes reshot. Clearly, before he even started to grow pubes, Kim had begun his ascension to the very apex of film criticism.

Some sections of the book are remarkable for being unable, even as blatant, unrepentant propaganda, to keep from painting Kim as a total jerk. The anecdote entitled “Day and Night in Dubbing Room” tells of how Kim, in his unending quest to capture “realism” in cinema, “came to a dubbing room of a film studio in the teeth of an icy wind to guide the dubbing for a film.” When KJI arrives, he watches an actress doing voice work for a scene in which she delivers a speech to villagers “freed from the shackles of Japanese imperialists.” Finding her speech to be defective, Kim proceeds to make the poor woman rerecord the damn thing over and over until she’s exhausted and on the brink of tears. After umpteen tries and lots of coaching from the dictator, she makes one final effort, and is rewarded for her tireless pursuit of banality with this damning, not to mention grammatically dubious praise: “Comrade Kim Jong Il came to the dubbing room and said that she made a somewhat good job of her narration except for speaking a little feebly.”

On another occasion, when Kim is overseeing the shooting of a particular scene for the film The Sea of Blood—a fiery recreation of the immolation of a Korean village by, you guessed it, the Japanese imperialists—actors balk at “piercing old people with their bayonets and throwing children into the fire,” but Kim assures them that “they should act boldly to lend realism to the film.”

What a dick.

The book is full of tales like this, and it’s really not necessary to recount any more of them in specific detail. (There is a rich one about Kim telephoning a film studio at half past two in the morning to inquire after the health of an ailing actor, which inevitably brought to mind the asinine 3 a.m. phonecall arguments that swirled up among the sewage of the U.S. primary race earlier this year, and made me wonder whether say, Anderson Cooper’s hemorrhoids mightn’t be the most likely reason for any current-day U.S. leader to field an early morning ringy-ding, lest they prevent the man from turning out ever more witless infotainment designed to lull Americans into caring more about presidential hairstyles than foreign policy, but I digress).

The really fascinating thing about this book is how it suggests Kim’s love of cinema is inextricably tied to his fundamental confusion between reality and illusion. Film is the liar’s medium. Especially when it comes to the mass market, the trick to making successful cinema is delusion of the most complete and premeditated kind. As Godard famously said, “cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”

Kim Jong Il lives in the country that is arguably most deluded about its place in the world. I don’t mean in terms of geopolitical maneuvering, or what we think of North Korea. I mean what its own citizens know of their nation and its relationship to the realities of contemporary global culture. The whole story of North Korea is one giant movie, a fury of light, sound and spectacle projected onto a blank wall in the middle of a great, enveloping darkness: the ignorance of what has happened and is happening outside of the DPRK’s borders, beyond the walls of the cavernous, moldering old cinema that is the Juche mindset. (Throughout Great Man and Cinema, the Kim character is constantly pushing for more “realism,” by which he inevitably means a greater degree of bias, distortion, deceit.) Many younger North Koreans have never known life as anything but the fever dream of propaganda, idol worship and hunger that would seem to account for daily life there in the year 2008, and has for the last 50 years. To paraphrase the Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman, no one in North Korea knows anything.

The question that I often wonder is, does Kim? I’m not suggesting he doesn’t have an understanding of how to maintain his power over his people and among international players made nervous by his nuclear grandstanding. The man clearly knows how to wield his bizarre personality like a live wire, giving world leaders the runny rear every time he takes another step towards his still-not-dismantled nuclear program.

And yet, Kim is not the architect of his own crazed fantasy. He’s not even the official leader of his country. That would be his dear old dad Kim Il Sung, who died back in 1994. (Kim the younger is officially the head of state and “Dear Leader” of the DPRK, but his pappy is still the more impressive “Great Leader” and, constitutionally, the “Eternal President.”) Since he took over the country in ’94, Kim has been little more than the custodian of his father’s complete ideological plan. He may be the lead actor in the saga of the DPRK, but he is not the director, producer or even set designer. And I suspect that, as much as he knows the reality of the world better than every regular citizen of his country, he is also taken in by the illusion of the North Korea story. His father’s control over the national consciousness was so strong that for KJI to break it even after his father’s death would have been catastrophic for totalitarian control—once you have admitted that a man is the supreme incarnation of perfection and wisdom, once you have told your people that man is a god, how to go back and say, listen, forget him, I’m the deity now? KJI seems to have done a thorough job of maneuvering himself into a position of would-be infallibility. But he, too, has his hand in the popcorn. The deception he plays on his citizenry has also bewitched him, and although it seems he will die as the dictator of North Korea, we can hardly call victorious a life lived as a movie that has never been screened for critics, but only for those locked in the theatre, their wrists bound and their eyelids pinned open, as the monsters of Japanese, American and South Korean imperialism are exploded on screen over and over, ad infinitum.

Perhaps we should contemplate the implications of Kim’s film library. I have my doubts that Kim actually watches many North Korean films—they wouldn’t have anything new to teach him, any of Hollywood’s power to scumble reality with pyrotechnics, bone-shattering noise and moral absolutism. I suspect that Kim watches what most filmgoers in the U.S. and Canada watch every weekend, that he sees the same big-event blockbusters we do. (He may even be—horror of horrors—a downloader!) I am resolutely not one to point at art or entertainment and those whom it influences in ways I disagree with and say, “This is your fault.” A movie is a movie; there’s a difference between movies and real life, and people should be able to recognize it. Besides, I don’t think Kim sees the films as blueprints on how to carry out operations in North Korea. He’s not looking to emulate the heroes of Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich.

Rather, I think Kim sees, in Hollywood movies, a novel justification for his rule – a dream world that mirrors the monstrosity, self-importance and bloat of Kim’s own manufactured legacy, but soundtracks it with John Williams, Linkin Park or “My Heart Will Go On” and bathes it in the smooth, slick veneer of butter topping. Kim sees in Hollywood’s value system a world much like its own, and in his eyes, it validates his own oversized entertainment—makes it, like the dreams that Hollywood manufactures, glamorous, desirable, magical, beyond judgment and answerable only to the terrible beauty of the massive fraud it commits.

Hollywood’s studio executives, seven-figure celebrities and advertising overlords probably don’t care much that Kim likes their stuff. Maybe they shouldn’t (although it’d sure be nice if they stopped making such a lot of tedious, moronic shit.) As for the rest of us, it surely behooves us all not to look at the plights of North Koreans and the world’s many other suffering peoples and see, as Kim Jong Il does, nothing more than a movie.

By the way: I hope you’ve enjoyed this, because it probably means that now I’m really never getting into North Korea. Guess I’ll have to settle for this:

Tags: international, korea

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Posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 11:38 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.