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There is a good joke in Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s film The Interview which, since it was made, has taken on a new dimension of meaning that the authors could hardly have intended. The picture’s premise is that the real-life North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (played by Randall Park) forms a close bond of friendship with a fictional American talk-show host named Dave Skylark (James Franco), who specializes in celebrity gossip and adolescent pranks, because both are egregious cases of arrested development. Over their relationship, however, hang threats from both sides: a nuclear attack on America on the one hand, and on the other, a CIA assassination plot against the dictator that Skylark and his producer and sidekick, Aaron Rapaport (Seth Rogan), are supposed to carry out. Both prospects recede as Dave and Kim grow more intimate and exchange schoolgirl-like confidences about their mutual love of margaritas and the songs of Katy Perry, and their mutual pain from having been brought up by overbearing fathers. “You know what’s more destructive than a nuclear bomb, Dave?” Kim plaintively says to his new best friend. “Words.”

Messrs. Goldberg and Rogen, assisted by the screenwriter Dan Sterling, might have foreseen that the real-life Kim would not get the joke, but that he so spectacularly didn’t get it as to terrify Sony, the parent corporation under whose auspices the film was released, into withdrawing it suggests that their idea of him as essentially an adolescent