The North Korean capital Pyongyang can mirror New York. At least in our minds. What both cities have in common: you don’t have to have been there to be familiar with it. The footage you’ve seen over the years is enough to make you feel at home in the cities. Strolling from Empire State Building to Brooklyn Bridge and from Central Park to MoMA. From the Juchetoren to the Kim il-Sungplein, on the way, smugly laughing at the short-skirt traffic cop (always a young woman) who steers the absent traffic in the right direction with robotic movements.
On Sunday, English TV and film personality Michael Palin – one of the famous Monty Pythons in the distant past – set out on the well-paved paths of communist propaganda. The Flemish Canvas (in part one of a diptych) showed how he behaved pre-corona in his documentary Michael Palin in North Korea broke down on the wall of totalitarianism. An army of charmingly smiling attendants showed him the way to the highlights we already know, and never lost sight of him, as befits a full-blooded dictatorship.
Like almost every Western TV personality who visits a dictatorship, Palin’, ‘beyond politics’, went in search of ‘the ordinary Korean’. After crossing the bridge connecting China to North Korea by train, he had the impression that ‘everything is different’ and that he ‘went back in time’. Duh. With quintessentially English charm, he tried to find the hairline cracks in the armor of the North Koreans, who know that those in power have no mercy for those in charge. So it’s not surprising that Palin hasn’t found a crack yet.
Twice Palin managed to elicit something of spontaneity. At a propaganda artist (one of a thousand in art school) who explained that the two huge, interlocking hands he painted symbolized the dialogue between the two Koreas. The microphones next to the hands indicated willingness to listen. No doubt the artist had been selected for the conversation, and yet his explanation seemed touchingly sincere.
The second apparently not orchestrated moment was Palin’s visit to a park where a May Day celebration was taking place and where a crowd – according to Palin – indulged in ‘uninhibited merriment’ with plenty of drink. An old man staggered toward Palin’s camera, perhaps trying to blurt something out. Just in time, he was pulled away by concerned relatives. That’s how Kim Jong-un likes it: repression also reigns in the family.
The scene raised some doubts in my mind about the festivities in the park. Who says the party hasn’t designated a thousand ‘volunteers’ to party uninhibited on May 1? North Korean gaiety, seen through the great Palin, before the eyes of the world may cost something.