Kim Jong-il: The Cinephile Dictator’s Armored Train

That mystery was a deliberate strategy for his own survival.

I'm not totally sold on the idea that it was a failure of intelligence. It was more a failure of imagination. We wanted him to be a buffoon because that's easier to dismiss. In reality, he was a highly capable, even cosmopolitan, strategist. He understood exactly how the world perceived him.

Think about October two thousand. The U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, went in for a twelve-hour marathon session. She expected a hermit. Instead, she met a man who used no notes and had an encyclopedic knowledge of technical satellite specifications. He was a dictator, but he was also a technocrat.

He did the same thing with the South. During the two thousand Inter-Korean Summit, he spent three hours in unscripted, witty banter with President Kim Dae-jung. He intentionally dismantled the "madman" myth right there. By the time he was done, the South Korean media had completely rebranded him as polite and reasonable. It was a masterclass in public relations.

That is the paradox. Konstantin Pulikovsky, who was a Russian envoy, spent twenty-four days on Kim’s private armored train in two thousand and one. He described Kim debating global policy while having live lobsters flown in daily to the train and drinking imported Bordeaux. He was a man with incredibly refined, global tastes.

He viewed his own survival and the survival of the state as the same thing. The luxury was more than just indulgence. It was the spoils of a leader who saw himself as a king.

He believed that the purity of the Korean revolution required total isolation. He felt that sacrifice—even starvation—was the price of independence from the West. To him, the ideology justified every single death.

That contradiction is something I still struggle to wrap my head around. We have these two Kims. One demanded absolute ideological purity. The other, quite frankly, seemed bored by the whole thing.

We have the tapes to prove it. Between nineteen seventy-eight and nineteen eighty-six, the South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his wife Choi Eun-hee were held in the North. They managed to secretly record their conversations with Kim. In those recordings, he doesn't sound like a fanatic. He actually mocks the North Korean film industry. He calls the state's artistic output stagnant and unoriginal. It is incredible to hear the man at the top of the cult complaining that his own cult's marketing is uninspired.

He understood it perfectly, but he used ideology as a shield. When he gave a rare written interview to the Washington Times in nineteen ninety-two, he didn't talk about movies. He sent back a twelve-page response. He obsessively blamed the nineteen-oh-five Taft-Katsura Agreement for every modern geopolitical hurdle. He was a movie buff, but he was also a man who weaponized history. He used it to justify keeping his people in the dark while he sipped French wine and watched slasher flicks.

I don't think it was just a hobby. Those twenty thousand films were his window into the psychology of his enemies. He kept the public away from Rambo because he knew the power of that imagery. He told Shin Sang-ok that North Koreans were "closed-minded." He knew the system was failing the people's creativity, yet he chose to tighten the screws. He lived in a world of high-definition fiction while his citizens lived in a black-and-white reality he designed.

It shows that the whole performance was intentional. He wasn't some isolated fanatic who believed his own myths. He was a calculating fan of cinema. He understood how to use silence as a weapon. He knew the propaganda was a lie. He just kept up the act to make sure he survived.