Kim Jong-il: The Cinephile in the Hermit Kingdom

He was a master of the illusion.

I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of who he was. People often assume he was a victim of his own echo chamber. But the tapes from nineteen eighty-six tell a completely different story. They were smuggled out by the filmmaker Shin Sang-ok and the actress Choi Eun-hee.

It was a massive intelligence breakthrough. Before those tapes, Western agencies like the CIA had never even heard the man's actual voice. And what they heard wasn't a stoic, confident leader. He sounded frantic. He was high-pitched and incredibly candid about how much he hated the cultural output of his own country.

He was brutal about it. On those recordings, you can hear him complaining that North Korean films were shallow and repetitive. He would ask Shin, "Why are our movies always full of these crying scenes?" He knew the propaganda was bad art. He was comparing it to his private, climate-controlled library of fifteen thousand banned films. That collection included everything from the James Bond series to Friday the thirteenth.

It's deeper than that. He was obsessed with the emotional depth of international cinema. He felt a genuine sense of cultural inferiority. He was trying to figure out why he couldn't make his people feel the way a Hollywood director could.

I think the two were completely intertwined in his mind.

It was a genuine passion. He spent hours every day in that library. But that's the chilling part. He was a man who understood the "magic" of cinema perfectly, yet he used that knowledge to trap an entire nation in a script of his own making.

I honestly don't know if we can ever fully map the internal logic of a man like that. It is a question that really haunts the research. We know that during the height of the famine in the nineteen-nineties, when hundreds of thousands were dying, internal records from Hennessy showed Kim was their largest individual customer in the world. He was spending up to eight hundred thousand dollars every single year on Paradis cognac.

The money was only part of it. There was also the sheer, meticulous labor. His personal sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, described a specialized rice team made up entirely of women. Their sole job—twenty-four hours a day—was to inspect every single grain of rice destined for Kim’s plate. If a grain had a tiny chip or a microscopic crack, they threw it out. It’s a level of perfectionism that borders on the pathological.

I don't think so. Konstantin Pulikovsky, the Russian diplomat who traveled with Kim in two-thousand-one, was a high-level official, not a tabloid journalist. He reported that during their train trip across Russia, Kim had live lobsters flown in daily to these tiny, rural stops. He would eat them with silver chopsticks while the train sat in some of the poorest regions of Siberia. These weren't rumors. They were the logistical realities of a traveling court.

That was the two-thousand-two summit with Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi. It was truly unsettling for the diplomats in the room. Kim went completely off-script and admitted that North Korea had kidnapped thirteen Japanese citizens in the nineteen-seventies to train his spies. He just gave it up.

I suspect he thought the truth would buy him a clean slate. He thought he could direct the diplomacy just like he directed his movies. But he miscalculated. The admission didn't bring investment. Instead, it brought international outrage. It was the one moment where the director lost control of the audience.

We often mistake his performance for a delusion. Those smuggled micro-cassette tapes prove he was actually quite self-aware. He admitted his films were shallow because he saw the system was failing. He didn't believe the lie. He just kept up the facade to survive.