Life imitates art: Kim Jong-Un lives up to Hollywood's bad guy stereotype

If North Korea seems particularly belligerent these days, with its daily war threats against South Korea and the United States, just blame Hollywood. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Hollywood has been searching high and low for new enemies. But reliable bad guys are hard to find these days. Apparently Arab terrorists affect the Middle Eastern and North African markets. Indian villains are just not taken seriously – blame Octopussy and Temple of Doom for that. Anyway these days Ambani’s Reliance is bankrolling Hollywood films. So it might be a little awkward to churn out diabolic Indians. Producers started looking further east and settled on China. But they quickly hit a Great Wall there. The Chinese market is far too big to piss off. Quantum of Solace, the latest Bond film grossed $21 million there. So Men in Black 3 cut 13 minutes to remove all the Chinese villains. Last year Red Dawn spent a million dollars replacing all its Chinese invaders, flags and all, with North Korean ones. The video game Homefront was supposed to feature a Chinese invasion. Publisher THQ changed that to a North Korean one as well. [caption id=“attachment_682724” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Asian villain in Olympus Has Fallen. Image courtesy: Official FB page of film.[/caption] North Korea seemed to make the perfect villain – few people have been there, it has little market value for American companies and Asian actors don’t have enough work in Hollywood. But what Hollywood reaps, the world sows. Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s young supreme leader seems to have decided to live up to his country’s Hollywood image. “He’s trying to be the tough guy,” said US congressman Peter King. “He is 28, 29 years old, and he keeps going further and further out, and I don’t know if he can get himself back in. So my concern would be that he may feel to save face he has to launch some sort of attack on South Korea or some base in the Pacific." Kim has certainly been flexing his nuclear muscle. North Korea just vowed to restart its Yongbyon nuclear complex. Kim called his country’s nuclear arsenal “a treasure” not worth trading for “billions of dollars."  “Time has come to stage a do-or-die final battle” warned a government statement. Things are heating up so much, even Pope Francis in his first Easter Sunday message asked for “peace in Asia, above all on the Korean peninsula.” China backed the latest round of US sanctions against North Korea and took part in drafting the wording. “Kim lashing out at the US is part of his fury at not being supported by his Chinese backers,” says an editorial in the Gulf News. It must sting even more that Hollywood swapped Chinese villains for North Korean ones, even without any official complaints from Beijing, clearly demonstrating who was where in the pecking order. “We were initially very reluctant to make any changes,” Tripp Vinson, one of Red Dawn’s producers told The Los Angeles Times. “But after careful consideration we constructed a way to make a scarier, smarter and more dangerous ‘Red Dawn’ that we believe improves the movie.” How about a scarier, smarter and more dangerous Pyongyang as well? The satiric blog, Borowitz Report,  says Kim is tiring of the “punishing pace of sabre rattling seven days a week.” So henceforth he will be taking weekends off from his world incineration plans. “Dad always told me that you have to pace yourself in this job. The biggest danger isn’t the United States—it’s burnout,” the Supreme Leader apparently said. But Hollywood is showing no signs of burnout with its new found hate-affair with North Koreans. Olympus Has Fallen, playing in theaters now, has North Koreans attacking the White House, executing the vice president on television, and kicking the Secretary of State in her stomach. In his review David Denby writes:

The American flag, waved in freedom-loving air above the White House, is shot full of holes and tossed rudely onto the lawn in “Olympus Has Fallen,” a bullet-ridden hunk of paranoia that should stir up anyone not suitably attuned to the threat posed to the United States by North Korea. The Koreans, it seems, are coming.

What’s ridiculous about the whole hunt for a villain is that in the end as Geoffrey Macnab writes in The Independent it doesn’t matter who gets to be the bad guy.

US action movies aren’t interested in the nuances of geo-politics or understanding the psychology or problems of " the enemy" . These films could have been made with Martians or zombies without making the slightest difference to their narrative sweep. After all, all their producers want is somebody for their heroes to shoot at.

How about Reliance tell Hollywood that in the interest of world peace we just create a fictional country, immune from geopolitical currents and market pressures, which can be a permanent enemy of peace and freedom, a land of megalomaniacs, where the men all drink Vat 69 and the women are all named Mona Darling?