Living in the Land of the Free as
we do in the United States, it’s tragically easy to take our historically
unprecedented freedoms for granted. It’s also easy to lose perspective and be
unaware of just how significant an impact our culture has on people in less
free societies around the world.
Recently The Guardian reported
on a 20-year-old woman now living in Seoul who had managed as a teenager to escape
from the totalitarian nightmare of her native North Korea. One example in
particular from her tale should serve as a stark lesson for those Americans who
have become jaded by the ubiquity of pop culture in our lives, who see its value
as limited to mere entertainment.
Park Yeon-mi was nine years old
when she and the rest of her school were forced to attend the execution of a
classmate’s mother. The poor woman’s capital crime was that she had lent a smuggled
South Korean movie to a friend.
Under the brutally repressive
regime of the insane Kim Jong-Il (now succeeded by his son, the insane Kim
Jong-Un), “there were different levels of punishment” for such a crime, says
Park. “If you were caught with a Bollywood or Russian movie you were sent to
prison for three years but if it was South Korean or American you were
executed.”
And yet Park risked, and others still
there continue to risk, their very lives to watch international movies and TV shows
smuggled into North Korea and sold on the black market. This contraband – the
kind of entertainment to which nearly every American has cheap, casual access
24/7 via YouTube or Redbox or Netflix or iTunes or Amazon or TV with hundreds
of cable channels – provided the culturally brainwashed North Koreans with “a
window for us to see the outside world.” And that window also gave them insight
into their own colorless world.
A single DVD cost about the same as
2 kilos of rice, so her family and her neighbors had to share. “Everyone was
hungry so they couldn’t afford to buy many DVDs,” she said. “So if I had Snow White and my friend had James Bond,
we would swap.” Getting caught could have meant death, but Park “couldn’t stop
watching the movies because there was no fun in North Korea. Everything was so
mundane and when I watched them I saw something new and felt hope. Fear didn’t
stop me, nor will it stop others.”
As a teenager, it was Hollywood
love stories that opened Park’s eyes to the literal and spiritual
impoverishment of her native country, she told the Guardian. Among her favorite movies were Titanic and Pretty Woman.
“Everything in North Korea was about the leader, all the books, music and TV,”
she said. “So what was shocking to me about Titanic
was that the guy gave his life for the woman and not for his country – I just
couldn’t understand that mindset”:
In North Korean
culture, love is a shameful thing and nobody talked about it in public. The
regime was not interested in human desires and love stories were banned… That’s
when I knew something was wrong. All people, it didn’t matter their color,
culture or language, seemed to care about love apart from us – why did the regime
not allow us to express it?
“All the foreign movies we saw
about love affected me and my generation,” said Park. “Now we no longer want to
die for the regime, we want to die for love.” How many of us can grasp the
transforming power of such an awakening?
“The other shocking thing about
that movie,” she said, “was that it was set 100 years ago, and I realized that
our country is in the 21st century and we still haven’t reached
that level of development.” That was a life-changing epiphany for the victims
of Kim’s culture of propaganda, which insisted that North Korea was a communist
utopia.
Park Yeon-mi’s story should be a
sobering revelation for all Americans, but especially conservatives, who too
often dismiss pop culture as shallow and decadent, with little if any redeeming
qualities. There is a good deal of truth to such criticism, but our TV and
movies and music also have the power to inspire hope and a yearning for freedom
among people in less fortunate societies. Her tale also highlights the
importance of what kinds of messages our pop culture sends abroad – about
freedom, morality, prosperity, love, and life.
If only we took our pop culture as
seriously as do Park’s compatriots still in North Korea, risking their lives to
swap smuggled copies of Titanic and Pretty Woman.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 9/12/14)
