A Kim Jong-Il Production

By Paul Fischer

Flatiron Books, 368 pp., $27.99

Last month, Americans watched, simultaneously amused and horrified, as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea – North Korea – took offense to a trifling film by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen.

The movie proposes an unlikely premise: that the current dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, is a huge fan of an offbeat American cable television show. The show's producers, hoping to boost ratings, set up an interview with Kim. Meanwhile, the CIA has convinced the producers to attempt Kim's assassination while they are in Pyongyang. Slapstick, though generally tepid, ensues.

Seems Kim Jong-Un didn't like how his character was portrayed, and launched a cyber-attack against Sony Pictures. Dirty laundry from Sony databases, though generally tepid, was released to the world.

It all seemed bizarre, but within the DPRK's internal logic, it made sense – and it wasn't the first time that North Korea had deployed cinema as political armament. That is the story told by Paul Fischer in "A Kim Jong-Il Production" (Flatiron Books, 368 pp., $27.99).

By the mid-1970s, it was clear that the founding ruler of North Korea, Kim Il-Sung, was becoming increasingly frail. Sensing the impending power struggle, his son, Kim Jong-Il, began maneuvering to build his power base within the elite.

Hardly an intellectual, Kim "was an overprivileged, aimless young man who did not serve in the military and demonstrated no excellence in any field of bureaucracy or economics."

But what he did possess was "a sense of drama, of narrative and showmanship, of mythmaking and its power. All of which he learned not by studying politics, or religion, or history. No, what Kim Jong-Il learned, and what he then built in North Korea, he learned from the movies."

Having watched thousands of banned European films, he realized the DPRK needed a virile film industry to bolster its image – and his own. But the films to date produced within the DPRK were generally dreadful, with "the same exact theme, repeated over and over." Kim needed cinematic talent; nothing, locally, was available.

So in 1978 he looked outside his borders and kidnapped the beloved South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee. Shortly thereafter, he also kidnapped her director husband, Shin Sang-ok.

One might imagine that if Kim captured the two filmmakers and dragged them across the border to revive North Korean cinema, they might have received special treatment. Sometimes they did. But after attempting to escape, Shin was sent to a prison camp for a while (a kwanliso, literally, a "custody management center").

Choi, in the meantime, spent endless days and weeks and months waiting, forced to read tedious biographies and speeches by and about Kim. Over time, Kim and Choi "developed an odd bond, the younger man alternatively looking up to and talking down to her, she growing to like and even enjoy his company even as she cursed and loathed him for abducting her from her children and life."

Between their kidnapping and eventual escape in March of 1986, the couple lived in Pyongyang, producing seven feature movies for the government. Because they were made by professionals, and because Kim made available anything Shin and Choi needed, the films were wildly popular.

(At one point, when Shin needed funds to construct a model of a train to blow up for a crucial scene, Kim offered an actual train stuffed with explosives, and Shin accepted.)

But all the while, the couple was plotting to flee – a narrative that makes up the final third of the book, along with details of their lives after their return.

Choi and Shin were victims, but the ultimate victim here is, of course, truth. Pyongyang is not, as most Western observers already know, really a metropolis; it is a movie set, with approved inhabitants. The DPRK is not a nation; it is a crime syndicate. Its ruling ideology is not Marxism, or democratic socialism, or statism; it is patently, and basely, nothing more than patrilineal deism.

"A Kim Jong-Il Production" confirms both the regime's homicides and absurdities – which are conjoined – and the inevitability that the brutal fiction of a "Workers' Paradise" will finally come to an end, the result of its perpetual illogic, and the vast chasm between its movies about itself and daily life behind the scenes.

Pike is a critic in Cleveland Heights.