Rogen's film, in other words, takes advantage of the critique signaled by the formal conventions of political satire in order to reinforce a normative gender practice. The Interview thus deploys the genre of political satire under the guise of forwarding a cause for which liberal Americans would clamber to take a stand - freedom of speech and expressions - while actually causing them to buy into a conservative reconstruction of masculinity on whose patriarchal principles Un's dictatorship operates.
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The odd sequence of media-related events that catapulted California into the public eye parallels The Interview's own rise to popularity. In June of 2014, Stephen Colbert invited fellow Hachette author Sherman Alexie onto The Colbert Report to discuss their publisher's feud with Amazon. Colbert asked Alexie to recommend a book by a Hachette author that audiences could not access due to Amazon's distribution restrictions, and California was his choice. The segment's message was that the bullying antics of big corporate entities like Amazon hurt the little guys the most, those as-yet-unknown authors like Lepucki trying to reach broad readerships for the first time yet caught in the cross fires of corporate feuding. Colbert urged his listeners to pre-order California through the non-Amazon distributor Powell's Books, a bid that he emphasized in a second segment a few days later. With only the briefest nod to the novel's content, and without once imploring his viewers to actually read the novel, Colbert's rallying cry to "put California on the New York Times' best seller list" generated a market sensation and transformed the act of pre-ordering a book into a stand against corporate tyranny.
Lepucki's own admission of the luck she enjoyed winning Colbert's endorsement of California draws attention to a disregard for content that is generally anathema to literary production and distribution. It seems almost tautological to assert that a novel that generates unexpected profits or acclaim usually does so by virtue of its content. California's critical reception, however, often struggles to reconcile the novel's popularity with its literary value. Karolina Waclawiak's review for the L.A. Times, for example, calls the novel a "cautious dystopia" that "never quite as the right questions of us" - damning critique for a genre that exists to rip open the dark underbelly of the way we live now. Like the The Interview's mode of political satire that fails to fulfill its generic promise of critique, California is an example of near-dystopia fiction that fails to generate an innovative, or even particularly interesting, critical vision of contemporary society.
The novel reads like a thought experiment whose goal is to game out the economic and environmental consequences of extreme wealth disparity. Wife-and-husband team Frida and Cal struggle for survival in the California wilderness after fleeing Los Angeles, left in a state of chaos and disrepair after it was abandoned by the wealthy, who have fled to corporate-sponsored, segregated Communities. The eerie opening chapters are hauntingly idyllic, with Frida and Cal forming kind of hipster Adam and Eve duo, surviving off of the land in this postlapsarian Garden of Eden. We know something is off from the beginning: Frida and Cal have moved into the Miller's house, their once-friends and neighbors, who appear to have committed communal suicide. As it turns out, the Millers had ties to a survivalist community contained behind the Forms, a protective barrier constructed to keep out a band of lawless renegades - called the Pirates — who pillage the wilderness between the Communities and what is left of the cities. When Frida realizes she is pregnant, she and Cal throw their lot in with the people living behind these Forms, called collectively the Land, whose leader happens to be Frida's own brother Micah, a domestic terrorist presumed dead in a bombing back in L.A. Paranoia and distrust propel the second half of the novel as Frida decides whether or not to reveal her pregnancy to the Land, where children, for mysterious reasons slowly unveiled, are absent.
The novel's lack of intellectual substance appears most egregiously in its reliance upon a classic, racist stereotype, one noted but passed over in Jeff Vandermeer's New York Times review. August is a "junkie" who drives a cart around the wilderness peddling scavenged and traded goods and jokes that he is "the last black man on earth," perhaps unobjectionable if not for Lepucki's portrayal of him as a grab bag of black clichés: the junkie, the traveling minstrel, and the witch doctor. As modes of character formation, these stereotypes are the most pernicious example of evacuated content and the ultimate rhetorical short cut that denies subjectivity to its target.
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