In June of 2014, Stephen Colbert propelled Edan Lepucki's unassuming first novel, California, to the top of the New York Times Best-Seller list. Amazon was, at that time, in dispute with Hachette over the right to set e-book prices, and as punishment for the publisher's defiance, Amazon began preventing preorders and delaying shipments of books written by Hachette authors. To protest Amazon's scorched-earth tactics, which prevented emerging authors from breaking into the literary marketplace, Colbert mobilized his viewers to pre-order en masse a book by a Hachette-affiliated author from alternative distributors. California became the vehicle for this crowd-sourced act of defiance, which in turn caused the novel to become a literary sensation.
Seth Rogen's political satire The Interview was the second cultural artifact to be elevated to a symbol of political defiance that year, much to the surprise of its critics. Its lack of quality as a film became by and large beside the financial point when the politics of its production garnered international attention. A December 2014 article in the New York Times even went so far as to suggest that it was "obvious" that those standing in line to see the film on its delayed release date Christmas day "were there to make a political stand." This stand was presumably twofold, against both the threats of violence to moviegoers made by the Guardians of Peace, a hacker group with ties to North Korea, and against Sony Entertainment's impulses to censor the film based on those threats.
The correlation between consumption and political engagement, of course, is not a new phenomenon, though it is more commonly formulated as abstention: divestments, boycotts, sanctions. Marxist criticism in cultural and literary studies has long pointed to the impossibility of distinguishing between works of culture and "products" in the more material sense of the word. The ubiquity of Fredric Jameson's term "cultural production" in the academy has become, particularly in its vernacular reverberations, less of a critique than a neutral description of the status quo for consumers. But consumption as a metaphor that can apply both to objects and "art" (in the broadest sense of the word) obscures the fact that representation is a conceptual project in the way that other commodities are not. It has, as its modus operandi, an intellectual perspective, a cultural thesis of some kind. It is a thought of its own, however impoverished, reductive, or derivative it might be.
Social critique is inherent to the generic functions of political satire and dystopian literature, so it's not surprising that both The Interview and California provoked a degree of political and social dissent and engagement. What is surprising, however, is the degree to which the supposed acts of defiance against tyranny — political and corporate, respectively — that the consumption of each represented were disproportionate to the quality of their content. Critics and cultural writers agreed that both are, to put it bluntly, "bad," failing to produce fresh, innovative social interventions by way of their respective generic modes. Yet despite their lack of critical social positions, both successfully re-signified consumption as a civic duty. These works' brief tenures in the media spotlight ultimately suggest that we understand political satire and dystopian fiction to be critical genres without needing them to actually perform the critique their forms promise, and moreover, that this emptiness—of content, of critique—has become a socially legitimized space. What is at stake in this move away from content in favor of the consumption of mere symbols of critique?
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The Interview is a potent example of what happens when the symbolic power of satire as a critical genre becomes shorthand for critique as such, and moreover, of how this evacuation of critical content in fact works to reinforce a social status quo. The Sony hacks of December 2014 that precipitated the delayed release of The Interview made public how the film's producers, actors, distributors, and viewers disregarded its content in order to collectively embrace (and capitalize on) the film's symbolic function. The film tells the story of Dave Skylark (James Franco), the ostentatious pretty-boy host of a low-brow interview show, and Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogen), the show's producer, who are tapped by the U.S. government to be the operatives in a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, under the guise of interviewing him for Skylark's show. The film's graphic portrayal of Kim Jong-un's assassination was the subject of an email exchange between Rogen and the ex-CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Amy Pascal, regarding the precise amount of Kim Jong-un's flesh and hair that would appear to be on fire as Kim's helicopter explodes, after the scene prompted threats of violence by Guardians of Peace against moviegoers. Pascal asked Rogen to make the scene less gruesome by partially obscuring Kim's facial trauma, but Rogen responded with the argument that "if it is any more obscured, you won’t be able to tell it's exploding, and the joke won't work." Such obfuscation of humor, he went on to suggest, was distinctly un-American: "This is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy. That is a very damning story," the August 15 email read. The explosion, he argues, is the stuff of free speech; it is part and parcel of the critical operation of the satire.
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