Yet how much critical work is actually required to convince the public that North Korea's oppressive, dictatorial policies are worth denouncing? When read in context of the plot, Kim Jong-un's violent, explosive death works quite differently than Rogen claims it does. The film works through the stakes of the relationship between its regressive content and the film's larger function in the socio-political sphere by diegetically thematizing empty, evacuated spaces and containers. Rectums, for example, play a recurring bit-part in the film, primarily in terms of whether or not large objects can fit or be hidden inside of them. The characters receiving these anal penetrations are always male, so that much of the film's bromedy-style humor is based on this kind of queer play. But the most thematically relevant empty container is the film's resurrection of and riff on the plastic bag made famous in American Beauty a decade and a half earlier.
Skylark travels to North Korea under the auspice of interviewing Kim Jong-un while covertly fulfilling his role as assassin, but begins to waver in his mission after Un seduces Skylark with women and tanks, and expresses vulnerabilities stemming from his deep-rooted daddy issues. The two bond over a shared love of Katy Perry's 2010 pop hit "Firework", and in particular, its first line: "Do you ever feel like a plastic bag blowing in the wind, wanting to start again?" This line is part of the pop song's point as a whole, which is to reject in earnest what American Beauty proposed with ambivalence: that, with the right attention, our human waste, our cultural emptiness, can be unique, sublime, and even potent. It is no accident that the plastic bag scene in American Beauty is one of paternalistic seduction, where Rickie, the male auteur shows a wayward, teenaged Jane his home video of a white plastic shopping bag blowing hither and thither in the wind while narrating to her the alternative aesthetic that - to him - it portrays. As we watch them watch the plastic bag, Rickie explains to Jane that the ability to notice its mundane beauty is a mark of difference and an act of defiance against the middle-class aesthetics of their milieu. You're just like this plastic bag, Rickie implies, and then Jane's hand finds his as she leans in shyly for a kiss.
American Beauty asks whether this scene is romantic or satirical without providing a definitive answer. Perry's "Firework", in contrast, takes the equation between a young woman and a plastic bag at face value in order to reject it. In The Interview's formulation, Kim Jong-un is at first embarrassed by his own affective affinity for the lyric, but is put at ease by Skylark, who convinces Un to embrace his identification with the song that "empowered young women everywhere." Skylar genders the song's target audience here, since the lyrics themselves speak to an ungendered, second-person address ("you" and "baby'), and in doing so, he situates this particular joke (a hypermasculine dictator identifying with feminine frippery) within a sequence of cultural allusions that evacuate the satiric origins of the plastic bag as a cultural referent.
A later verse in the song, and one that plays as Skylark and Un joy ride the military tank that eventually fires the missile that kills the dictator in the gratuitous fireball explosion, explicates the meaning of its own allusion: "You don't have to feel like wasted space; you're original, can't be replaced." At stake here is a development in the popular concept of (feminine) authenticity, and whose right it is to author that authenticity. "Firework" tells its audience, in other words, not to identify with the plastic bag that once supposedly empowered them, deliberately missing or refusing the aesthetic point of the original satire. Perry's alternative to the plastic bag as a model for female authenticity is the firework itself—the chorus implores us to "ignite the light/ and let it shine/ just own the night/ like the Fourth of July/ 'cause baby you're a firework/ come on show 'em what you're worth..." The film's heavy-handed depiction of Kim Jong-un's death as a fiery helicopter explosion re-signifies Skylark's parodic assertion of the empowerment contained in Perry's revamped metaphor of women as fireworks: such code-switching might be empowering for women, but it is deadly for men.
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