"The Interview," pop culture, and the vagaries of our contemporary lives.

ORDINARY TEACHER'S NOTES. 22 DEC 2014. MON. N2.
"The Interview," pop culture, and the vagaries of our contemporary lives. 

THE PLOT thickens. 

Either that North Korea orchestrated the cyber hacking or it did not. 

President Obama calls this cyber vandalism, this thing that happened to Sony, and he called Sony's move to pull out The Interview from being screened on Christmas Day an act of giving in to the demands of NoKor, or to its blackmailing at the cost of freedom of expression. 

President Obama, of course, is worried that a large company in the US like Sony thaws like an iceberg after being exposed to some heat. 

The attacking--okey, let us follow the lead of President Obama, 'cyber vandalism'--of the Sony Pictures' site exposed that filmmaking company's vulnerabilities: embarrassing emails, some tidbits you would rather that these remain in the emails, and some such other things that ought to remain private but are now out there for the whole world to see. 

Ah, this is a case of revelation with a revelation, an apocalypse with an apocalypse. 

But Sony explained: the cinemas, a corporate chain most of them, were threatened by the hackers, and that they decided to not screen The Interview because of that. 

In effect, there was not platform left for Sony because it did not own these cinemas in the first place. So this is division of labor, division of the means of production and consumption, and division of who to blame and who to spare from being blamed. 

Our lives are getting complicated. And so is our political life, our collective life, our life lived in earnest (or its oppisite) in this world of capital, chain of chains, and cyber world, and threats. 

So what gives in The Interview? It is a satire. 

And that satire centers on an assassination (attempt or no attempt) of the NoKor dictator pretending to be a leader of his people. 

During the Philippine dictatorship, we have these in a different form, a variety of artistic expressions that exposed the emperor, and we we saw that he did not have his clothes. 

Where all these things lead us is something.

HON/