The hitherto low-profile actor Laurence Fox hit the headlines last week after he appeared on BBC’s Question Time and spoke out against identity politics and political correctness. Predictably, the woke left were outraged, but it was his comments on a subsequent podcast with James Delingpole about the cameo by a turban-wearing Sikh in Sam Mendes’ blockbuster movie 1917, set in the first world war, that really riled the wokerati. Fox questioned the motives for the inclusion of the Indian soldier, and immediately the critics piled in, asserting that it is a historical fact that Sikhs fought alongside other Allied forces in the Great War. And it is: according to records, over one million Indians served and almost 75 thousand died fighting in WWI, and tough the vast majority of them served in the Mesopotamia, some were definitely there at the Western Front, the main theatre of war, in April 1917 where the events of the film take place. So, of course, Fox highlighting the appearance of a single Sikh soldier can’t be explained by anything but xenophobia. Racist!
But amid their outrage, the eternally offended completely miss the point, which isn’t one about historical accuracy, but rather about the mission of movies. Fundamental to the movie watching experience is suspension of disbelief: the objective of avoiding that the audience engages in critical thinking or logic when watching, in order that they may fully believe the narrative. A movie about the ancient Japanese would be disturbed by a Caucasian actor unless it was explained by the narrative. It is irrelevant if Europeans had already started travelling to Japan at the time the movie was set and that some might had settled there. You may not know that – and even if you did, why should the storyteller want to distract the viewer by making them wonder what the significance of the white guy is, when there is no significance other than making a statement.
Because that is what this is about: making woke statements so the politically correct, liberal elites don’t complain about a lack of diversity, like they did when Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, about the evacuation of British forces from France in 1940, was criticised for being dominated by white actors. The BAFTA’s even have a diversity compliance policy when selecting movies eligible for awards.
So no, the issue at hand is not historical accuracy or even realism. It is that moviemakers should try not to distract the audience with things that don’t matter to the narrative, to maintain suspension of disbelief. There’s a reason people don’t go to the bathroom in movies, even though we do in real life: we’d wonder why James Bond had to excuse himself in order to use the facilities in the middle of a meeting with M and we’d spend the movie in eager anticipation for it to be explained, but, with no other explanation forthcoming than that apparently 007 had to go and see a man about a dog, it would disturb our enjoyment of the movie. Same with Europeans in 1600s Japan or Sikhs in WWI. Don’t distract the audience, even if you have what you think is a terribly important political message to convey. People don’t go to the movies to pick up woke historical trivia, but to be entertained.