Movies are the Best Revenge

I know it's hard to believe, but Hollywood once made good films. Even great ones. The one that the blowhards in North Korea apparently blew their tops over would not have qualified as either, but that, it seems, is about as good as it gets any more in that self-absorbed town that still fancies itself as the entertainment capital of the world.

What Hollywood still has--Sony Studios or no--is an archive, a repertoire if you will, of great films, from over the last century. And believe it or not, as I witnessed first hand and played my own small part in making it happen, it was those films that carried out the real revolution in China: the post-Maoist, post-Communist revolution that made the people (if not yet the government) of China want to join the rest of the world--really for the first time in it's 7,000 year history.

It wasn't intentional--far from it. And Hollywood moguls still fret about how the Chinese 'stole' all their movies. But the point they miss is they watched them. And loved them. On TV, in theaters, on video tapes, then CDs and DVD's, on iPads, smartphones, wherever. And by seeing these films, they saw the rest of the world through American and European eyes, and they wanted in. It was really that simple. Which is why, for my nearly three years teaching in China between '04 and '07 I showed movies. Lots of movies. Because more than perhaps any other medium movies open eyes, ears, hearts, and minds. Junk will always be junk. But the truth is, good movies affect all six senses.

And that's what needs to happen in North Korea. If the Obama Administration, or for that matter the C.I.A. really want to punish North Korea, then saturate them with Hollywood's worst films: possibly starting with 'The Interview.' Put it on all their screens. Saturate their satellites, if they have any, or park some of ours out their just out of missile range and beam them down 24/7. Do air drops. By drone. Find a way. Hire translators and dub them in Korean. For punishment, the bad ones at first. Then give them some good ones. Then some great ones. For a comedy, give them 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World.' Followed by 'The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming!" Which did more to end the Cold War than anything that Reagan could even imagine. I showed both of those to my English majors in China and they loved them.

Introduce them to Peter Sellers. And Audrey Hepburn. Introduce them to Billy Wilder. Then Gene Wilder. Then anything done by anyone, ever, from Saturday Night Live. Give them 'M.A.S.H.'

The list is endless--you could make your own list. The point is this: once the tech spies figure out how to reverse hack--preferably with Chinese help--the door to Western thinking, lifestyles, beliefs, humor, tragedy, love, and history would be open forever and as in China, once people actually saw at least a romanticized version of what life was like elsewhere they would want in. Who wouldn't love 'Sleepless in Seattle" or practically any Tom Hanks movie? And once a mind is opened, it can never be closed again.

Who knows, with a government contract, Hollywood might even make some money this time. And poor Angelina Jolie might even get a raise!

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