Freedom, you were a nice idea, but anonymous hackers with a strange fondness for North Korea don’t like you. So I guess you’ll have to go.
After a single random online threat from an anonymous source the Department of Homeland Security finds not particularly credible — a source that, for all we know, could be a group of basement-dwelling pranksters trying to sound like North Koreans — Sony pulled “The Interview.”
If someone purporting to be from the KKK calls the Weinstein Co. to order it to pull “Django Unchained” from any further distribution, will Harvey say, “Of course. We wouldn’t want to offend you nice people”? Can the American Nazi party stop Universal Pictures from airing “The Blues Brothers” on TV by issuing an especially forceful tweet?
As an arts and entertainment company, Sony Pictures has better reason than most to understand the importance of creative freedom, especially when that creation carries a political character. The same is true of the theater chains. Their chicken-hearted response to the threats is a warning to everyone who works in the arts that controversy is best avoided.
The heckler’s veto — the rude interruption that drowns out public discourse — has been replaced by the terrorist’s veto: Anyone with a grudge, a computer and an Internet connection can henceforth block the distribution of any form of communication it dislikes. The invitation to do so has been sumptuously embossed on rich, wood-grain card stock and signed, “Cravenly yours, Sony and America’s Theater Chains. Please don’t hurt us.”
The reason you don’t negotiate with terrorists is the same reason you don’t give your dog scraps from the dinner table: Even if it’s easy to appease them this one time, you don’t want them coming back for more. Sony and the theaters didn’t even negotiate. They simply caved.
The disgraceful cowardice of “The Interview” situation is the perfect rebuttal to George Clooney, who in his 2006 Oscar acceptance speech fantasized that The Industry is a coalition of stalwart knights for social justice, fighting for great American ideals.
“We’re the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular,” Clooney proclaimed.
“And we, you know, we bring up subjects, we are the ones — this Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I’m proud to be a part of this Academy, proud to be part of this community and proud to be out of touch,” Clooney said, oblivious to the detail that McDaniel was made to sit at the back of the room during the Oscar ceremony. He won his Oscar, naturally, for “Syriana,” which gazed upon Middle East politics and declared the bad guys to be American oilmen and the CIA.
We’re still waiting for Clooney’s brave attack on Islamist fundamentalism, or on Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un. Today Hollywood rewrites scripts to prostrate itself before China, just as in the 1930s it made zero pictures of any importance about the growing threat of Hitler. Hollywood is the Valley of Cowards. On Wednesday, reported Deadline.com, New Regency Pictures canceled a Steve Carell thriller about North Korea.
“If we can’t see Seth Rogen with a salami stuffed between his butt cheeks, the terrorists have won,” we joke.
But the terrorists haven’t won. In many cases, they haven’t even taken the field, or even arrived at the ballpark. We simply forfeited the game. And then ran away, squealing.