THE “Dear Leader” of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, dearly departed since December 17th, was said to be a frustrated movie director. For years South Korean intelligence put about rumours of him owning a library of 20,000 movies, special preference being given to Elizabeth Taylor and Friday the 13th slasher flicks.
Something of a frustrated auteur himself, Kim even had his agents kidnap a South Korean movie director. Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife, abducted from Hong Kong in 1978, spent the next eight years making movies Kim’s behest. Shin’s oeuvre, before absconding with his wife from a Vienna film festival, included Pulgasari, a North Korean version of the Godzilla monster flicks.
The Dear Leader may be no more but his borrowings from the movies are still visible. At least that was what I was tempted to think, shivering in unheated train carriage en route from the Chinese border to the capital city of Pyongyang.
Cigarette smoke filled the air. Thickly-coated passengers chatted amongst themselves but did not engage me or any of the small group of westerners travelling with me. Some off-duty soldiers joked and played cards in an alcove, fur hats and gun holsters on show. Outside, rustic looking houses poked out of the snow; this could have been Omar Sharif’s journey across the Urals in David Lean’s adaptation of Dr Zhivago (1965).
All foreign visitors to North Korea are allotted government minders upon entering and we were no exception. Chugging away from the platform at the border town of Sinuiju, we also had their benign assurances of a roughly six-hour train journey.
Thirteen hours later we shuddered into the snowy central station in Pyongyang.
The minders ushered us across an unlit platform and into a vehicle bound for the Yanggakdo, a massive hotel located on an islet in the river Taedong.
Pyongyang’s high rise blocks were silent, unlit and caked in ice. But looming in the flaky black sky was a lurid red beacon, sculpted to resemble a flame. It was as if this time, the muse had been the Dark Tower of Sauron, as depicted onscreen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I had just spotted the Tower of the Juche Idea, built in 1982 and named for the national ideology of Juche, a word roughly meaning “self reliance”. The Yanggakdo was at least heated but bar a handful of Chinese nationals, its 47 floors were empty. The reflective faux marble and tinted glass in the huge, angular lobby seemed to accentuate the iciness outside. So did the empty corridors, silent but for the occasional distant clunk of pulleys and hoists, echoing from the elevator shafts.
Korean folklore is filled with ghost stories, and if the ethereal presence of Stanley Kubrick ever haunted the Yanggakdo’s corridors, he might have wished he’d filmed his 1980 adaptation of The Shining there.
Fans of that movie will remember the malign presence in Room 237 of the snowbound Overlook Hotel. When the young son of Jack Nicholson ignores the warnings and ventures inside, events are set in motion that unhinge the frustrated writer, eventually sending him on axe-wielding rampage.
If Room 237 had an equivalent in this hotel, it was the guest-free Fifth Floor. Ominously enough, when I stepped into the elevator, the number five was absent from the controls. Floor Five is the subject of much joking and theories amongst the few westerners who make it to Pyongyang.
Tales abound of rooms containing bugging equipment to keep tabs on the guests.
I sensed no latent evil on Floor Five but certainly felt my sanity being tested in the aftermath of attempting a quick visit. Floor Five is a corridor of propaganda posters and closed doors. Big deal, I thought to myself back in the dimly lit lobby. Alone in the coffee bar, I ordered a latte and nonchalantly skipped through my pictures from the day.
Far more interesting than the pictures of locked doors and posters from upstairs, were the ones I had taken that afternoon, aboard the only American naval vessel in captivity. Moored on the banks of the frozen Taedong River, the former spy vessel Ager-II Pueblo was a Cold War fossil. It had been grabbed by the North Korean navy in January 1968 and its crew, under the command of Capt Mark Lloyd Bucher were held captive for 11 months. They were released only after the Johnson administration and Bucher himself issued letters of apology to the North Korean government. The Pueblo itself, however, was retained as a trophy.
Puffing steam as we tramped below deck, we had been shown banks of antiquated radio surveillance equipment. We also saw images of the captured sailors and their abject handwritten confessions. This time, set was that of a Cold War thriller: The Manchurian Candidate or Ice Station Zebra.
It was shortly after nine that evening, when both minders, stern faced, sat down with me in the coffee bar. All was not well. What was I doing on the forbidden floor? I was seen snapping pictures, why? This was a serious business: the floor was strictly out of bounds. After around an hour of questioning, events took a surreal turn. Forbidden from returning to my room, I was handed a blank page of notepaper. I was now given just the tiniest taste of what Capt Bucher had gone through, four and a half decades ago. I was required to complete a “letter of apology” for my “idiotic” behaviour of which I was “deeply ashamed”. It took several drafts for they had a sufficiently grovelling screed.
Around midnight, the three of us were joined by a middle-aged man in dark glasses and a zip-up jacket. I was told he was the manager and would I please hand over my camera. Perusing the 100-plus images on the memory card, I was ordered to delete any considered “insulting” to the North Korean people, eg images of unkempt farmland or shabby buildings. I had been wrong about the Yanggakdo: it was not so much the Overlook Hotel from The Shining as the “Circus” from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where “Control” operates from the fifth floor. It was approaching two in the morning when I was finally allowed leave the coffee bar, at which the manager became all smiles and charm.
That was a small drama with a fortunate conclusion. The director may be dead but it is still action as usual on set. And woe betide those who deviate from the script.