“Cultural appropriation” was one of the more unfortunate ideas to take hold during the domination of mainstream pop culture by progressive identity politics over the past decade. But just as it has been proclaimed that we are entering a “post-woke” era and that Left-wing identitarianism is becoming passé, the film director Danny Boyle has demonstrated that its residues linger on.

In an interview published on Friday, Boyle claimed that he wouldn’t be able to make his 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire today because of cultural appropriation. While maintaining that he is still proud of the Best Picture Oscar-winner, which was set and filmed in India, he noted that recent cultural shifts meant he “wouldn’t even contemplate doing something like that today. It wouldn’t even get financed. Even if I was involved, I’d be looking for a young Indian filmmaker to shoot it.” And, Boyle emphasised, “that’s how it should be.”

Rather than this mea culpa providing evidence of a more enlightened Western approach towards other cultures, especially those formerly subject to European colonialism, it reveals how liberal attitudes have become increasingly provincial in the name of respecting “diversity”. Boyle’s argument does not represent cultural progress, but instead regression in the guise of progress. That a film set in Mumbai starring Indian actors and directed by an Englishman could be considered a cultural event in the West in 2008 but would at best be “controversial” in the 2020s is telling.

At the time, Slumdog Millionaire received some opprobrium from within India, especially from those espousing a middle-class nationalism, for tarnishing the country’s image. Their charge was that it was another typical instance of a Westerner gazing at India through the lens of poverty porn and Third-World squalor, rather than showcasing a different image of a modernising country with skyscrapers and a space programme. Really, it is a fallacy to think that one film can “represent” something as complex and contradictory as a national culture or the “experience” of an entire community. No film could possibly achieve that, so any such expectation will always lead to disappointment.

Boyle stated in this week’s interview that an outsider making a film from within a culture is a “flawed method”. This might sound rational. After all, the best films about the Italian-American mafia were made by Italian-American directors, in part because having been born and raised in that cultural environment they understood nuances and idiosyncrasies an outsider might miss. The Godfather and Goodfellas surely wouldn’t have had the same authenticity in the hands of a WASP director.

On the other hand, a filmmaker from outside a particular community or nation can provide a new angle which a native couldn’t. That perspective is valuable, too. If Boyle’s advice were taken seriously, then Clint Eastwood wouldn’t have made Letters from Iwo Jima and Paul Schrader wouldn’t have made his fabulous biopic of Yukio Mishima. Both are great films by any standard, treating their subjects with respect and authenticity.

What’s more, this mentality would ghettoise non-white and non-Western directors, as though their role were merely to advertise their respective “culture” for the eyes of Western audiences. This would then become the only method through which they could get their foot in the door and be taken seriously in the industry. Ang Lee wouldn’t be able to adapt Brokeback Mountain or Sense and Sensibility (talk about a very “white” film), and would have to stick to films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

When identity is the primary lens for judging a film — rather than the tried and tested is it any good? — it can only inhibit creativity and imagination. It isn’t a film’s role to demonise a culture, nor to traffic in feel-good PR or pander to racial narcissism. Movies are supposed to tell human stories, exploring themes that may be articulated within a particular cultural background but which ultimately transcend it to engage in a universal conversation. All great art deals in some way with the human condition. We shouldn’t let this be obscured.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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