Film’s ‘Culture War’

Your profile of Taiwanese film director Ang Lee (“Ang Lee Braves New Territory,” by John Clark, Sept. 18) quotes James Schamus, Lee’s producing partner, as saying that he begins every interview by asking Lee, “Ang Lee, you’re a yellow, Asian guy. How is it possible that you can make movies about white people?”

I realize that Schamus is mocking whites who would ask such a question, and that Lee’s correct response is, more or less, that while cultures may differ, personal experiences and emotions can be quite similar. My problem with Schamus’ question is that I think he’s got it backward. It’s more typically that those groups that aren’t white (or, in other subcultural contexts, those that aren’t straight or male) that are most vocal in their opinion that white directors have no business making movies about them.

An example that comes immediately to mind is Spike Lee’s insistence that Norman Jewison’s being white disqualified him from filming the life of Malcolm X. It’s one thing, and a good thing at that, for people long denied a voice to be allowed to tell their own stories. It’s quite another to insist that no one else can. The so-called “culture war” is causing us to move away from the idea of the universality of the human spirit toward an increasingly fractious Balkanization of that same spirit, and that’s not doing any of us any good.

JOHN BOOK

Huntington Beach