The Theater of Oppression

This week I finished reading A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power by Paul Fischer. The subtitle sums it up, but the full details of the story are incredible.

During Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il's over-long reigns as dictators of North Korea, they made a policy of drug trafficking, terrorism, and kidnapping foreign citizens, while starving, imprisoning, and systematically brainwashing their own. The stories of suffering in North Korea, all gained from accounts related by escapees from the secretive country, are bizarre and saddening.

Actress Choi Eun-hee was a survivor of the Korean War, and she and her director husband, Shin Sang-ok, lived in South Korea afterward making films. They divorced after Shin's public affair with a younger actress, and when Choi disappeared, there were accusations that Shin was behind it. Then Shin himself was taken, and for several years they were kept apart in North Korea as an attempt was made to reeducate them. No one knew what had happened to them, and neither Choi nor Shin knew what had happened to the other until they were reunited by Kim Jong-Il as part of his plan to use them for propaganda creation.

Choi and Shin - aren't they cute together?

Kim Jong-Il was a lover of film, and spent a large part of his country's money on creating a library of pirated films for his own personal enjoyment. He took Choi and Shin in an attempt to prop up the lackluster North Korean film industry, a propaganda machine for his father's reign, and later for his own.

I've read one other journalistic account of life behind the DMZ (the extraordinary Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea), and George Orwell's Oceania pales in comparison. North Korea is a country where for decades the Great Leader (Il-Sung) and the Dear Leader (Jong-Il) paraded their citizenry like puppets, all the while expecting them to swallow astonishing lies. For example:

[....] the Central News Agency exhorted the Korean people to celebrate [Kim Jong-Il's] fortieth birthday two years in a row, as if nothing had happened.

This wasn't out of vanity, but simply to place Kim Jong-Il's birth at the numerically significant 30 years after his father's, instead of 29 years. It's the least outrageous of the lies told by the Kim regime.

The story of Choi and Shin's lives before and after captivity is fascinating, and I highly recommend this book to anyone who has never read anything about North Korea. The author cites many news articles in his bibliography, and I suggest taking a look at those as well.

One thing this story does, more than anything, is show what value art can have in the lives of people who are oppressed and suffering:

There is an old Asian saying that 'drop by drop, the water perforates the stone.' Kim Jong-Il had kidnapped Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee to help promote his regime and tighten his control on his people's thoughts. Instead, Shin and Choi's movies were drops of water, each one slowly but surely wearing away the Kims' supremacy. (278)

I certainly hope this proves true, and that the corrupt Kim dynasty will one day face a reckoning - not from a foreign power, but from within. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and read this book!

Choi with Marilyn Monroe, 1954

Shades of Grey

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"1.1.19.02.006: Team sports are mandatory in order to build character. Character is there to give purpose to team sports." - p. 255

Sent to Chromatacia's backwaters to count chairs, ambitious Eddie Russett slowly uncovers the truth about his hue-obsessed society.

Where to begin? The world of this book is as endlessly complex and clever as Fforde's surreal Thursday Next series. Chromatacia's inhabitants are obsessed with color: the color you are able to see (red, blue, green, etc.) determines your rank in the Colortocracy. Night is a terrifying emptiness, since no one can see in the dark. Artificial color production drives village life. Everyone is expected to appreciate the "simple pleasures of relentless toil" and devote their lives to supporting the community, accepting their genetically determined places in the hierarchy.

Then there are the interminable Rules of Munsell, which must be obeyed to the letter - no matter how absurd or nit-picky they seem to be. (One notable lapse in the Rules has led to a severe spoon shortage, which makes the utensils more precious than gold.) Every year there are Leapbacks - erasures of technology and knowledge, designed to simplify society. (Much like the Ministry of Truth's Newspeak in Orwell's 1984, and  obviously named to recall Mao's Great Leap Forward) In short, it's an entire society run like an English boarding school: rigorous dress codes, mealtimes, required activities, strict standards of behavior, and punishments for infractions.

Eddie Russett knows how to navigate the Rules to his advantage. He's slightly engaged to a wealthy Oxblood from the highest echelons of the Colortocracy, and things look good for his future. But his habit of questioning tradition gets him shipped out to the boonies where he runs across a colorblind Grey named Jane, who has a charmingly retroussé nose...and Russett unwittingly begins to unravel the mysteries at the dark heart of his seemingly placid society.

Fforde excels at high-concept stories with fun characters and plenty of wit. His humor and writing style remind me of Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. There are also echoes of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Chromatacia echoes the bizarre real-life dystopia of North Korea in Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick. The humor may get dark, but it never feels cynical thanks to the likable narrator. I can't believe I have to wait until 2015 for the sequel, Painting by Numbers. That's totally beige.

Quotable:
"It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn't really what I'd planned for myself - I'd hoped to marry in the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire." - p. 1

Feed

Feed by M.T. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

Titus and his friends are products of the Feed: a never-ending stream of advertising and information implanted into their brains. During an ordinary trip to the Moon, Titus meets the smart, beautiful Violet. When a protester hacks their minds, the teens lose contact with the Feed and for the first time get an inkling that there may be a better way to live.

As unsettling and soul-scarring as Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Feed is one of those novels that will grow in your subconscious long after you've finished it. Titus is as self-absorbed as Holden Caulfield, but far less articulate. Titus's dystopia is much more Brave New World than 1984, where the affluent are lulled into lives of mindless consumption. Hairstyles change within hours, the oozing lesions everyone has developed become a fashion statement, and School is a trademark, not a place.

Stray observations:

• The pulsing red fields of filet mignon that Titus thinks are part of nature have never quite left my psyche. *Queasiness*
• TV show from the Feed: Oh? Wow! Thing!
• Song lyrics for a love song from the Feed: I like you so bad / And you like me so bad. / We are so bad / It would be bad / If we did not get together, baby, / Bad baby, / Bad, bad baby. / Meg bad.
• "That's one of the great things about the feed - that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit." - 47