Kim Jong-un and the Auteur School

Reading about the North Korean hacking scandal, and the role the persona of  country’s leader plays in the controversial film about his own assassination, one is reminded of the internecine battles that flared up amongst auteur critics like Truffaut and Godard, whose careers began as writers for Andre Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema back in the 50’s. Significantly, of course, this was a around the time that Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) who would be an instrumental force in China’s cultural revolution, was refining her own interest in film. One thing that leaders in both China’s and North Korea’s totalitarian regimes and the auteurs shared was an infatuation with Hollywood and the stamp that one sensibility can have on an oeuvre or country. Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il was reputedly a great lover of Hollywood cinema (“Kim Jong-il: The cinephile despot," BBC News, 12/19/11)and what father and son would eventually share was an unwanted casting in films about their own demise (in Team America: World Police, 2004, Kim Jong-il is vanquished)—which when you think about it is a really auteur idea. Kim Jong-il’s tastes apparently ran to Liz Taylor and Sean Connery while Kim Jong-un's love of film has taken the form of an inurement in Disney characters with whom he has cavorted on North Korean television. Many commentators have been taken aback by Kim Jong-un’s heavy-handed tactics in creating a cyber attack on Sony in revenge against The Interview. But his behavior becomes more understandable when it’s considered in the light of his family’s generational interest in film and the generally competitive atmosphere that has always existed amongst film critics. While neither Godard nor Truffaut ever threatened viewers of films they disapproved of, as Kim Jong-un, did when his proxies warned of a 9/11 type response against chains which exhibited the movie, there were always heated battles about film. And one wonders if Kim Jong-un’s current tactics are not ultimately aimed at achieving cultural hegemony for his people, in a world dominated by eurocentric critics like Manohola Dargis and A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Whatever the result of the strategy, it’s plain that Kim Jong-un is positioning himself to be a major kingmaker (like the late Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice) in those precincts where auteur criticism still holds sway.

The Once and a Future Supreme Leader

Tapestry of King Arthur 

Is taking foreign visitors captive the way that Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of North Korea, earns his battle stripes (“Another American Citizen Is Arrested in North Korea,” NYT, 11/20/13)? Is it the way he carries on the divine right of Kings, North Korean style. Is it the way he claims his throne and his position as the rightful heir to the glory of his father Kim Jong-il and grandfather Kim Il-sung? Is taking foreign visitors hostage and ignoring the pleas of major powers the way the reputations of the Eisenhowers and MacArthurs of North Korea are created? Maybe this David versus Goliath strategy is how Kim Jong-un attained the credibility to oust the uncle, (“North Korea’s Leader Is Said to Oust Uncle in Power Play,” NYT, 12/3/13), Jang Song thaek, who was appointed to look after him, when he took over in he wake of his father’s death, only two years ago. Jang Song-thaek according to the Times report is the husband of Kim Kyong-hee who was the sister of Kim Jong-il and the Kim Jong-un’s aunt. Whether he called her Auntie Kyong was not reported in the Times piece, though the piece did speculate on the fact that the fall of Jang Song-thaek rather than bolstering Kim Jong-un’s power could destabilize him further and cause him to have to up the ante to maintain his power.  “Some analysts…worry that Mr. Kim might resort to militaristic provocations to divert attention from domestic instability.” The most interesting thing about the whole matter is that it conforms to Santayana’s famous saying, “those whose cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As the Times commented, “Mr. Jang would not be the first No. 2 or the first uncle of the Northern Korean leader to lose power. Kim Jong-il plotted a purge of his own powerful uncle to solidify control after the death of his father, the North’s founding president, Kim Il-sung.”

Kwangmyongsong-3 Unit 2

The question is, was the launching of the satellite by the North Koreans, a stillbirth? The Times   interviewed a Harvard astronomer named Jonathan McDowell who said, “It’s spinning or tumbling and we haven’t picked up any transmissions. Those two things are most consistent with the satellite being entirely inactive at this point.” (“Astonomers Say North Korean Satellitge is Mostly Likely Dead,” NYT, 12/17/12) Meanwhile the Times also reported that the North Korean “state media” have been portraying the launch as a resounding success, claiming that the satellite is broadcasting such hot songs as “Song of Gen. Kim Il-sung” and “Song of Gen. Kim Jong-il” while “South Korean media detected what they considered a visibly swollen belly” on Ri Sol-ju, the wife of the new North Korean leader.  Schadenfreude is a German word that is used by psychoanalysts to describe the enjoyment of another person’s suffering. If we take pleasure in hearing that something bad has happened to an enemy, we suffer from Schadenfreude. Being able to enjoy the success of someone we hate or who threatens us might be the equivalent of turning the other cheek. Ri Sol-ju’s miscarrying would be a great triumph for the Schadenfreudians, but the birth of a healthy baby and the satellite launch proving such a success that Song of Gen. Kim Jong-il becomes a phenomenon on You Tube would at the very least be a challenge to those turn the other cheekers who might not like Kim Jong-un’s militaristic politics. Meanwhile get the name of the satellite, Kwangmyongsong-3 Unit 2.  A moniker like that poses a communications problem all its own.

Burke’s Peerage Pyongyang Edition

Korean Central News Agency, via Reuters

Kim Jong-un the son of Kim Jong-il and grandson of Kim Il-sung and newly appointed successor to the North Korean leadership (his stepbrother Kim Jong-nam was passed over when he was caught trying to visit Tokyo’s Disney World), may have learned some lessons from Fiorello Laguardia, the legendary mayor of New York who read comics to children over the radio during a time when his country, like North Korea, was under fire (and to whom Kim Jong-un, also pudgy and diminutive bears a slight resemblance). Like his ill-fated stepbrother, Kim Jong-un also likes Disney, but he expropriated Disney characters to curry popular support and also undoubtedly to cheer up Pyongyangians the way Laguardia once lifted the spirits of New Yorkers. Jong-un also got hooked up according to a front page piece in the Times (“That Mystery Woman in North Korea? Turns Out She’s First Lady,” NYT, 7/25/12).  Ri Sol-ju is the lucky young lady and what better morale builder could the young leader have, particularly in the light of his last failed rocket launch, which has caused some commentators to question his virility (“North Korea’s Performance Anxiety,” NYT, 5/5/12)? Sol-ju according to the Times was spotted wearing “a trim black suit in the Chanel tradition” and she showed up at “the inauguration of an amusement park” in a “fashionable polka-dot jacket.” The Times piece cites “analysts” who claim that “Ms. Ri’s fashion sense…appears to be part of the building of a youthful new image; for years North Korean women were pictured only in traditional billowing dresses or Mao-style work clothes.” Sound like the difference between Mamie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy? In any case, the marriage naturally makes one think about the next heir to the dynasty and what his name will be. First name has to be Kim, but after that all bets are off. If you take the “un” literally, the dauphin could be Kim Jong-deux. There is no doubt that the prospect of a new heir is a naming opportunity which could bring needed revenue into coffers of the impoverished country. For instance someone like the hedge fund operator Boaz Weinstein, who held the profitable side of the infamous London Whale, might prefer to have a child named after him rather than a hospital wing. Kim Jong-Weinstein? It’s sonorous enough, but might be too Jewish sounding for a future leader of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea).

Bad Behavior

Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images

President Obama was quoted in the Times about North Korea, “They need to understand that bad behavior will not be rewarded (“In South Korea Visit, Obama Visits Border and Warns North," NYT, 3/25/12). The Agence France-Presse photo that ran with the story showed Obama in the DMZ looking though a pair of binoculars at North Korea. “Dildo shopping, spying on neighbors, getting high and getting a facial” is the beginning of the on-line description of the 2004 movie Bad Behavior. There was a more high brow Bad Behavior with Stephen Rea and Sinead Cusak from l993 and that blurb begins, “The McAllister family house is the setting for Gerry and Ellie's grapples with work, children and how to get the bathroom fixed.” Bad Behavior means a lot of things to different people. For those of us who attended public school back in the 50’s, before educational reform changed the punitive nature of many elementary school classrooms, bad behavior meant “no recess.” Obama’s jeremiad to the North Koreans, in the light of their imminent launching of a new satellite, is reminiscent of such 50’s warnings. Kim Jong-un, his dad Kim Jong-il and his grand dad Kim Il-sung are all like those bad kids who continued to do even worse things because they had nothing to lose. Since they can’t be good like Angela, little Nick or Barack they excel by getting very good at being bad. We all know how the bad kids responded to threats of missing assembly or having to go to the principal’s office. It rarely did any good at all. The bad kids simply got so bad that they were expelled. They might not have been the sharpest tacks, but they were the ones everyone feared. They were the kids who waited for the Angelas, Nicks and Baracks to come out of school so that they could beat them up for their lunch money. Only Vladimir and that new Chinese kid were able to protect themselves, but they practiced the martial arts.

Humanistic Themes in the Art of the North Korean Succession

David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

The Associated Press’s David Guttenfelder is providing an iconography of the North Korean regime in his recent photo coverage. His photo accompanying the recent story “Shift Expected as North Korea Sets Party Meeting,”  (NYT, 2/20/12) shows Kim Jong-un, the son and successor to the recently deceased Kim Jong-il at what the caption describes as “a military review and commemoration of his late father’s 70^th birthday.” But in this case, the picture really does speak a thousand words. Guttenfelder would have done Erwin Panofsky, the German art historian, proud. Panofsky was the author of such classics as Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939), from which the study of iconography has gained its currency. Kim Jong-un is shown in a profile shot that accentuates his jowls and a sporty new haircut, buzzed at the sides. Add a gold chain and he could easily have been a character on Jersey Shore. He is bent in a meditative pose with his eyes cast down at the ground, a lone figure on the rostrum.  Only a stolid soldier, with an AK-47 strapped across his chest, stands at attention in front of him. The soldier doesn’t exist for Kim Jong-un and the potentate is not even within the soldier’s field of vision. Though near in space, the gap between the soldier and the head of state is emphasized by the way in which Guttenfelder makes it apparent both are almost ornamental figures who have no idea of each other’s existence. “On Thursday, American and North Korean officials are to meet in Beijing for the first senior level talks since October,” Choe Sang-Hun’s story Times story reads. But what really is running through the mind of the lone figure, the stout young man with the Maoist morphology, who Guttenfelder portrays?

Pyongyang Festival of the Arts

David Guttenfelder/Associated Press

Burning Man and Pyongyang are worlds apart, but both are equally hard to get into. Apparently getting tickets for Burning Man has become a real problem. A lottery system devised by the organizers  has apparently backfired according to a report in the Times (“Burning Man Festival Regulars Lose Out on Tickets,” NYT, 2/13/12) “Festivalgoers from around the country are distressed about recent problems that left thousands of veteran Burners, as festival attendees are called, without tickets to the August event and might have landed tickets in the hands of scalpers,” the Times reported. If the festival were to become a totally commercial performance event like say The Book of Mormon, then a good part of its counter-cultural constituency would be lost, with only those willing to pay the higher prices winning out. Pyongyang has always been hard to get into for other obvious reasons and its constituency, one would suppose, has remained fairly consistent, with delegations from Mainland China filling up much of the available hotel space. But there is an artistic community in Pyongyang and the “Pyongyang Festival of the Arts” is currently manifesting itself in the form of two equestrian statues of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il. The photo by David Guttenfelder of the Associated Press which appeared in the Times is a happy reminder that totalitarian art is alive and kicking in North Korea’s capital. If you miss the old busts of Lenin installed when St Petersberg was still called Leningrad, then you should try to become a member of Yukiya Amano’s entourage. He succeeded Egypt’s Mohamed ElBaradei as the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Let's hope that under North Korea's new regime, this becomes a surefire way of getting into the country.

Pyongyang

North Korean politics is like a soap opera if one follows Choe Sang-Hun’s accounts in the Times. According to Choe Sang-Hun the recently deceased Kim Jong-il suffered from an inferiority complex (“To Sell a New Leader, North Korea Finds a Mirror Is Handy,” NYT, 2/1/12).“He indicated that his homely, pear-shaped looks were loathed by many North Koreans (he once called himself ‘an ugly midget’), according to South Korean who met him.” Apparently Kim Jong-il’s son and chosen successor, Kim Jong-un, bears a striking resemblance to his grandfather Kim Il-sung, a charismatic and good-looking figure who is revered by North Koreans as the liberator of their country. Looks-wise, Kim Jong-il missed the boat. But according to Sang-Hun “Kim Jong-il was a master propagandist who directed several movies. His last work may been casting Kim Jong-un as a successor who inherited his father’s policy but his grandfather’s face.” To add to the drama Kim Jong-un has an uncle, Jang Song-taek who sounds like an eminence grise and a jealous exiled step brother Kim Jong-nam, waiting for Kim Jong-un to slip up. As you can see there are Shakespearean overtones here too, if we look at Jang Song-taek as a once in a future Horatio and Kim Jong-nam is the Iago in residence at the PRSC (Pyongyang Royal Shakespeare Company). But getting back to the soap, can we wager that Kim Jong-il who had a pretty sophisticated knowledge of Western media would have named his soap
simply Pyongyang, after Dallas. Or would the executives at the network have opted for something like Succession?

Detroit's Latest Product

According to the Times the Lincoln Continentals which carried the body of Kim Jong-il and his portrait have engendered avid online dialogue on a car site called the Professional Car Society (“Deeply Hated, But Present: A U.S. Touch At Kim’s End,” NYT, 12/28/11). The Times quoted someone name Gregg D. Merksamer “who has written extensively about hearses, ambulances and other so-called professional cars” to the effect “that the inside of the limousine carrying Kim Jong-il’s body would not have been outfitted for a coffin, which may explain why the body was placed on bed of white flowers on the roof.” The Times also quoted Merksamer as speculating that “the full, rear fender skirts and the five heavy vertical bars separating the grille into six sections” indicate the Lincolns were produced in l975 or 6. Merksamer told theTimes that the car carrying the body of Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung back in l994 was actually closer to the second Lincoln in the funeral procession. “The finned-style wheel covers and oval opera windows in the D-pillars…actually correlate to the sister car that carried Kim Jong-il’s oversize portrait,” he said. The fact that we have stooped to depending on car forums and hearse experts, only points to the failure of our intelligence gathering about the nature of the North Korean regime. On the other hand there is a light at the end of the tunnel. At the heart of the financial crisis Detroit was beleaguered and the US car industry was in the dumps. However, it’s important to note that certain models of one defunct make of American car now serve a vital purpose, as a source of information about the North Korean regime.

Success and Succession

Determining the order of succession in the new secretive North Korean government of Kim Jong-un, the son of the recently deceased Kim Jong-il is as difficult as discovering the elusive Higgs Boson. As you may recall the Higgs Boson is the tiny particle that scientists have been seeking out for over 40 years. Recently, teams of particle physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva discovered some very encouraging results which would as Columbia physicist Brian Greene recently said in a Times Op-Ed piece, “complete an essential chapter in our quest to understand the basic components of the universe.” (“Waiting for the Higgs Particle, NYT, 12/14/11). So little in fact is known about the North Korean leadership that like understanding the Higgs particle, it would involve in Greene’s words “a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness.” One other thing that the North Korean leadership has in common with the Higgs particle is that any sightings tend to be short-lived. “Finding this particle would be no easy task,” Greene went on to comment. “The Higgs particle would be short-lived, quickly decaying into other, more familiar particles.” Doesn’t that too seem the problem when it comes to determining the ephemeral coterie of officials surrounding around both Kim Jong-il and his anointed successor Kim Jong-un. “Identifying the mourners and absentees in the world’s most closed society is one of the few ways available to outsiders trying to solve the mystery of the unfolding succession in Pyongyang,” Choe Sang-Hun said in a recent Times piece (“Buzz Over Who’s Not in the North Korean Picture(s),” NYT, 12/22 /11). Is it too far a stretch  to think that Angela Landsbury could be brought back to reprise the evil mother she played in Manchurian Candidate to play the role of Kim Ok who Choe Sang-Hun described as “one of Jim Jong-il’s closest aides.” According to Sang-Hun, Kim Jong-un  is “the second son of Kim Jong-il’s third wife” and Kim Ok is now serving “as the North’s de facto first lady since Kim Jong-un’s mother died  in 2004.” Yes we are going from West to East from the extreme right to the extreme left (and beyond), but in our quantum universe where a particle can be in two different places at the same time, nothing is surprising. Lawrence Harvey played Landsbury’s son (Raymond Shaw) in Manchurian Candidate and if he were alive, he would have been the perfect person to play the role of the handsome but baffled looking Kim Jong-un, whose mother Ko Young-hee was a prominent North Korea Opera star. The wild card according to Sang-Hun’s story is Kim Jong-nam (no relation to Viet), the hapless oldest son of Kim Jon-il and the product of KJi's marriage to his first wife who “fell out of favor and was alone in Moscow when she died.” Sang-Hun reports that there were rumors Ko Young-hee, the opera star, had been behind a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-nam who “now lives in effective exile in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macao.” Hopefully, by the time the existence of the Higgs Boson is finally confirmed, more will be revealed about who’s who in Pyongyang.

Songun: the Musical

One wonders what Andrew Lloyd Webber is thinking now that Kim Jong-il has passed away? As you may recall ALW was the composer of the huge hit Evita, based on the life of Eva Peron and the myth of KJi has all the ingredients for a great musical. In order of importance here are the keywords one would imagine accompanying any post about the musical worth its salt: Crowds (KJi drew huge crowds willing to starve for him), Trains (he had his own luxury train similar to the one that Franklin Delano Roosevelt cruised across the country in when he was seeking his office), Platform shoes (KJi who loved film and kept a large collection of Western classics probably got the idea of wearing them from Saturday Night Fever), Shades (KJi got the idea of wearing them from another popular 70's film Superfly, which had a famous soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield), WMD’s (KJi presided over North Korea’s entrance into the nuclear arms club and dreamt of sponsoring a meeting of the club in Pyongyang as a way of sticking his tongue out at the South Korean leadership who once hosted the Olympics in Seoul), Army (got to give it to you KJi or your policy of "songun, or 'army first,'" reported in the Times; creating the "fifth largest" standing army of 1.1 million in a country of almost 30 million mostly starving people is nothing short of amazing and merits its own tune---how about “If I were a Manchurian Candidate…” to the tune of Elton John’s “Your Song.”), Hair (KJi had a legendary hairdo that was created for him by the famed salon Helena of Pyongyang but do we envision the KJi of the musical as Warren Beatty in Shampoo or as one of the cast of John Waters’ Hairspray?—probably the latter), charm (KJi was secretive and murderous, but apparently could be quite engaging; the Times obit, "Kim Jong-il, Dictator Who Turned North Korea Into a Nuclear State, Dies,” NYT, 12/18/11 quotes the State Department’s Wendy Sherman as saying, “He was smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident, sort of the master-director of all he surveyed.”), Secrets (Mike Meyers and Sacha Baron Cohen are definitely candidates for the part of KJi as KJi was obviously influenced by both Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Borat to the extent that like a lot of imaginative people he exercised a certain degree of self-invention in the creation of his own persona, based on the many of the films he saw), Bergman (apparently Kji possessed the Criterion Collection version of The Seventh Seal, but apparently was offended by the scene where the Knight plays chess with Death.) Shogun was the title of best seller by James Clavell. Why not call this musical Songun or You’re in the Army Now?

Autumn of the Autocrat

What does the deposed strongman say to the upstart revolutionary? “My electrodes, my electrodes, my kingdom for a pair of electrodes to attach to your testicles.” Laurent Gbagbo is the latest of the recent crop of despots whose reigns have been cut short by popular unrest, foreign intervention, or both. Hopefully Qaddafi will follow. Robert Mugabe remains steadfast, as does Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and the entire Kim Jong-il Jung dynasty, whose plans for succession are a constant source of curiosity among western intelligence services. Idi Amin Dada and Papa Doc Duvalier were their forebears, along with Romania’s Ceauşescu and, long before him, Stalin, Hitler and Caligula. Gbagbo, it turns out, was a darling of the American right, with Glenn Beck, Pat Robertson and Republican James M. Inhofe, who belongs to both the powerful Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, among his fans (“A Strongman Found Support in Prominent U.S. Conservatives,” NYT, 4/12/11). The Times commented that Inoufe “visited Ivory Coast nine times and knew Mr. Gbagbo and his wife Simone.” Gbagbo, according to the Times, participated in the National Prayer Breakfast, which is run by the Fellowship, “a secretive evangelical Christian organization.” Gbagbo was apparently preferred over his rival Alassane Ouattara, who happens to be a Muslim. Still, the picture of Laurent and Simone that graced the front page of the Times on Tuesday was almost touching. One moment they lived in a luxurious villa, defying election results and international delegations, seemingly implacable in their resolve to refute the forces of progress; the next they were heavily guarded in a hotel room. Aristotle defined tragedy as the fall of a once great man. There is no doubt Gbagbo has fallen. But with genocidal murder and the repression of a population at the top of his resume, one would need a broader definition than Aristotle’s to understand the tragic path of destruction sown by Gbagbo and his ilk.

Number One Son

The Times reported that Kim Jong-il’s son, Kim Jong-un, was made a general in the army, along with his aunt, Kim Kyuong-hui, whose husband, Jang Seong-taek, is “…often regarded by outside analysts as the No.2 man in the North and a potential caretaker for the government should Kim Jong-il, 68, who is in failing health, suddenly become incapacitated.” (“Kim’s Son is Elevated Before Meeting,” NYT, 9/27/10.) The Times went on to explain that Kim Jong-nam, 39, the brother of Kim Jong-un, had been the heir apparent until he went AWOL to Disneyland in Tokyo with forged papers. What does this have to do with Temple Israel, for which the Internet lists locations in Croton-on-Hudson, New Rochelle, Minneapolis, Memphis, Boston, Hollywood, and Miami, among others? The answer is, not very much, except if one speculates about what might have happened to the Kims and the leadership of North Korea if there had been a branch of Temple Israel in Pyongyang. This is not to say that Jewish communities are exempt from conflict regarding succession. The Satmar Hasidim went through a well-publicized upheaval after the death of the Grand Rebbe Moishe Teitelbaum. Teitelbaum’s oldest son, Aaron, like Kim Jong-nam, had originally been slated to lead the sect, but instead his younger brother, Zalman, began to play a significant role. Was there any political hanky panky? Was this a Jacob/Esau type situation? With Moses Teitelbam long dead, no one will ever know, and the Satmars are unlikely to receive the scrutiny by intelligence services that’s accorded the Northern Korean Politburo. One thing is sure—it’s unlikely that either Aaron or Zalman Teitelbaum played any part in the torpedoing of a South Korean naval boat in March.