When a song from the film KD: The Devil surfaced and triggered a wave of outrage over its lyrics and choreography, the name that travelled fastest through the outrage cycle was Nora Fatehi’s. She was visible. She was the one on screen. She was, in the public imagination, the song. The notices followed, the platforms responded, and the conversation folded itself neatly around the face that had performed the material.
Fatehi’s own account, offered in the aftermath, was layered in ways that the outrage had little patience for. She had shot the material years earlier. She had performed to a Kannada version. The Hindi version, which attracted the scrutiny, was not a version she had fully understood, nor one whose final framing she had approved or perhaps even reviewed. Whether one finds this account fully satisfying or merely convenient is, for now, beside the point. What is worth pausing on is how quickly the public instinct located her as the primary locus of responsibility, and how little that instinct interrogated itself before arriving there.
That instinct is not unreasonable. It has a logic to it. You performed it; therefore you own it. Your body, your face, your name. If you did not wish to be associated with the material, you should not have performed it. This is a position that carries real moral weight, and it is not wrong to expect performers to exercise judgement about what they lend their bodies and names to. That expectation will not be abandoned here.
But the instinct also conflates two things that deserve to be kept apart: performance and authorship. To perform something is to contribute to it. It is not, automatically, to have created it, shaped it, approved it, or controlled what becomes of it. These are different acts, carrying different moral loads. The failure to distinguish them is not merely an intellectual error; it is a structural one, and it has consequences for how accountability is actually distributed in creative industries.
The question, then, is straightforward: does performing something make you its author?
To answer that, it helps to be precise about what a film performance actually is, because popular discourse tends to treat it as a kind of total creative act, which it almost never is.
A performance in a commercial film arrives at the audience after passing through a chain of hands: the writer who conceived the scene, the lyricist who wrote the words, the translator who rendered them in another language, the choreographer who designed the movement, the director who framed the shot, the editor who assembled the sequence, the producer who approved the release, and the distributor who placed it on platforms. Each of these individuals made creative decisions. Each of those decisions shaped the meaning of what the audience finally sees. The performer is one node in this chain, not the whole of it.
This is not a radical position; it is simply a description of how films are made. The auteur theory, for all its romance, was always a critical convenience rather than an industrial reality, and even its most devoted practitioners acknowledged that it applied cleanly only at the director’s level, and imperfectly even there. Cinema is, at its structural core, a collaborative form. Its meanings are assembled, not delivered whole by a single consciousness.
And yet, audiences routinely collapse the entire chain into the face. When PK attracted fury for its treatment of religious practice, a substantial portion of that fury was directed at Aamir Khan, who played a role written by Abhijat Joshi, directed by Rajkumar Hirani, and produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Khan’s performance was the visible surface of a set of authorial decisions made largely by others. He may have been complicit in those decisions; he may have endorsed them; he may even have influenced them. These are separate questions, and they were rarely asked with any precision. The face absorbed the charge.
The same public economy of blame operates, rather more instructively, in the case of Vivek Agnihotri. Here, however, the variables are arranged differently. Agnihotri functions simultaneously as writer, director, and ideological architect of his films; he is not a node in someone else’s chain but the person who built the chain, chose every link, and then stood in front of it to take his bow. The outrage he attracts, and the adulation equally, is therefore more accurately assigned than most. When the content of The Kashmir Files or The Vaccine War is disputed, the argument is, correctly, with him. What is instructive is how rarely the public pauses to note this distinction: that their fury at Fatehi and their fury at Agnihotri are two entirely different moral transactions, even when described using the same vocabulary of offence.
This is what star persona does to the interpretive process. The audience has invested emotional and cultural meaning in a face over years, sometimes decades. That face becomes a symbol, a shorthand, a site of projection. When the symbol appears in something controversial, the controversy attaches to the symbol rather than travelling back along the chain to wherever it originated. It is cognitively efficient and morally sloppy. The face is the only thing the audience can see, and so the face becomes the thing the audience holds responsible.
But the face is not always a person. Sometimes it is an entire national cinema. And when you pull that thread, the question of who is responsible for what a film does in the world becomes considerably more vertiginous.
Leni Riefenstahl spent the better part of her long life, she died at 101, insisting that she was an artist, not a propagandist; that Triumph of the Will and Olympia were exercises in aesthetic form, not instruments of political violence. She had, she maintained, merely pointed a camera. The marching thousands, the cathedral of light, the Führer framed like a descending god: these were compositions, not endorsements. She performed, in her own account, the role of the pure filmmaker, and she never ceased performing it.
The argument is not entirely without merit, which is precisely what makes it so troubling. She was a filmmaker of genuine technical brilliance. The grammar of the rally film, the close-up as instrument of deification, the use of music and movement to dissolve individual consciousness into collective ecstasy: these were her inventions, or at least her refinements. They were also the aesthetic machinery of one of history’s most methodical programmes of extermination. The hand that made it and the system that used it were not identical. But they were not separable either. Riefenstahl’s framework, applied to her own case, produces a result she would not have welcomed: high authorship, full comprehension, complete agency, and a control over the final product that most directors never achieve. By every criterion that matters, the film was hers. The consequences were not hers alone. But the responsibility was.
Stalin’s cinema is a different and, in some ways, darker illustration. Where Riefenstahl’s collaboration with power was at least chosen, the directors who worked under Soviet cultural doctrine operated inside a system where the alternative to compliance was not obscurity but, rather frequently, death. Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin remains one of the most influential films ever made and one of the most effective pieces of political cinema ever assembled, spent his later career in a state of sustained terror, making films that satisfied the apparatchiks sufficiently to keep him alive whilst smuggling into them enough formal ambiguity to retain something of his own conscience. His Ivan the Terrible, commissioned by Stalin as a celebration of autocratic power, was read by Stalin as a criticism of it; the second part was suppressed, and Eisenstein suffered a heart attack shortly after being summoned to account for himself. The question of his moral responsibility is not simple. He was, in some measure, an instrument. He was also, in some measure, a willing one, at least in the early years, when the revolution still seemed to him to promise something worth celebrating.
The Allied propagandists of the Second World War present a third configuration, one that is rarely examined with the same rigour applied to their opponents, which is itself instructive. Frank Capra‘s Why We Fight series, commissioned by the United States War Department, was designed, explicitly and without apology, to manufacture consent for a war amongst a population that was, at the outset, substantially reluctant to fight one. John Ford filmed the Battle of Midway and shaped the footage into a narrative of heroism that served recruitment as much as it served history. Humphrey Jennings in Britain made films of such lyrical patriotism that audiences wept in cinemas and then went to enlist (remember Lata‘s, Kavi Pradeep, and C Ramachandra’s famous Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon? Yes, similar). These were gifted filmmakers doing, with full comprehension and considerable agency, exactly what their governments needed them to do. The cause, most would agree, was just. The method was identical to Riefenstahl’s. The aesthetic was more humane; the machinery was the same.
We do not hold Capra responsible for the firebombing of Dresden. We do not assign Jennings moral culpability for the decisions made at Yalta. We extend to them the understanding that the context of a just war, and the distance between making a film and dropping a bomb, reduces though does not eliminate the moral charge. Which is, of course, exactly the kind of nuanced, criteria-based thinking we consistently refuse to apply to a dancer in a Kannada film.
And then there is Hollywood itself, which is the largest and most consequential case of all, and the one we are least inclined to examine, because its influence is so total that it has become invisible to us, like the air.
Hollywood did not merely make films. It made the world’s imagination. It exported, across a century, a particular image of what heroism looks like, what beauty looks like, what justice looks like, who the hero is and who the villain is, what an American is and, by implication, what everyone else is. It did this with the full collaboration of the United States government, which understood from very early on that a projector was a more efficient instrument of soft power than almost any weapon in its arsenal. The Motion Picture Export Association was, amongst other things, a diplomatic operation. The casting of non-white actors in subordinate, comedic, or villainous roles across decades of studio output was not a series of individual aesthetic decisions; it was a structural argument about the hierarchy of humanity, made to billions of people who received it as entertainment. Nobody was served a notice. No platform removed it. The faces that carried this argument are largely forgotten; the argument itself is still doing its work.
The performers in those films did not write the scripts. The directors did not set the foreign policy. The producers were responding to market conditions that they also helped to create. Everyone was a node in the chain. And the chain, taken in its entirety, shaped how the world sees itself, in ways we are still, haltingly, trying to unpick.
If we are serious about distributing responsibility accurately rather than efficiently, we need a framework more granular than
“You performed it; therefore you own it.”
Let me propose six criteria against which any actor’s responsibility in a controversy ought to be assessed.
Authorship
Did the actor create the element under dispute? A writer-director-producer who writes vulgarity into a script, directs it with intent, and produces the film owns that decision completely. An actor who performs someone else’s words, in someone else’s framing, does not.
Comprehension
Did the actor understand the meaning, tone, and implication of what they were performing? Comprehension matters enormously. To perform something you fully understand is categorically different from performing something in a language you do not speak, or in a version you were not shown. Ignorance is not full innocence; a reasonable person takes steps to understand what they are contributing to. But comprehension, where genuinely absent, reduces responsibility, even if it does not extinguish it.
Agency
Could the actor refuse, modify, or negotiate the material? Agency varies enormously across the industry. A star with contractual leverage and institutional power can say no, and frequently does. A performer hired for a specific sequence, under existing contracts, working in a second language, has considerably less room to manoeuvre. The moral expectation of refusal must be calibrated to the realistic possibility of it.
Control
Did the actor influence the final edit, framing, or release? Post-production decisions, particularly in songs and promotional material, often produce a finished product that bears only partial resemblance to what was shot. A performer who signed off on a Kannada-language sequence cannot be said to have controlled what a Hindi overdub, assembled months later by other hands, ultimately communicates.
Commercial compulsion
Were there industry realities, contractual obligations, or financial pressures that constrained the actor’s choices? This is the most uncomfortable criterion, because it risks becoming a blanket excuse, which it must not. But it is real. Industry hierarchies, power differentials, and economic dependency shape what is practically possible for many performers, and moral judgement that ignores those structures is merely punitive.
Due diligence
Did the actor take reasonable steps to understand what they were contributing to? This is where residual responsibility survives even when other criteria reduce culpability. One may not have full comprehension, full agency, or full control; but one does have the capacity to ask questions, to request clarifications, to read contracts carefully, and to insist on transparency about final usage. Where that diligence was not exercised, responsibility does not vanish.
Apply this framework honestly and the distribution of responsibility becomes considerably less flat. The writer-director-producer sits at the highest point on the scale, having exercised authorship, comprehension, agency, and control throughout. The star actor with script approval sits close behind. The hired actor in a known language, performing material they understood, occupies a mid-point: they knew what they were doing, even if they did not control what became of it. The hired actor in an unknown language, working from a version materially different from what was finally released, sits lower still; not innocent, but considerably less culpable than those who made the creative decisions.
The case of Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris remains the most vivid illustration of what it looks like when this framework is violated entirely. Schneider was manipulated into a scene whose nature was not disclosed to her; her distress was real, not performed; and the authorial decisions were made entirely by Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando, without her comprehension or agency. She bore the cultural weight of that scene for the rest of her life. The responsibility had been entirely misassigned, and the cost was borne by the person least responsible for it.
Harvey Weinstein represents the obverse of Schneider’s tragedy, and in some ways the more clarifying case. Here was a man who held no place in the credits at all, who never appeared on screen, who could not be pointed to in a frame or a song or a scene, and yet who exercised more authorial power over what was made, who was cast, what was demanded, and what was silenced than almost anyone else in the industry for three decades. He was the invisible hand that the visible face never was. The outrage, when it finally arrived, was precisely calibrated: it landed on the person who had actually made the decisions, who had exercised the authorship, the control, the compulsion. It arrived late, and at tremendous cost to countless women. But it arrived in the right place. That, in the entire sorry history of how the industry assigns and evades responsibility, is rarer than it ought to be.
I find myself returning, over and again, to Schneider: that she bore the cultural weight for the rest of her life. And I find myself wondering whether we have moved at all in the decades since, or whether we have simply found faster, louder, more democratised instruments to perform the same misassignment.
I wonder, too, about my own reflexes. I am as guilty as the next person of the cognitive shortcut, of looking at the face and making my moral settlement there, without bothering to trace the thread back to the hands that actually pulled it. It is easier, of course. The face is there. The director’s name is in the credits, if one bothers to scroll. Most people do not scroll.
And this is where the audience’s own complicity becomes uncomfortable to examine. The demand for provocative content is not manufactured entirely by producers; it responds to what audiences consume, stream, share, and reward commercially. The outrage that follows a song’s release and the engagement that preceded it are not unrelated phenomena. We watched. We clicked. We shared. We sent it to our friends with a raised-eyebrow emoji. And then, when the conversation shifted from enjoyment to scrutiny, we redirected our gaze at the face on the screen, wiped our hands, and declared ourselves appalled.
That is a very convenient arrangement. It deserves considerably more scrutiny than it typically receives.
There is also the matter of selective outrage, which follows patterns too consistent to be coincidental. The fury that attaches to certain performers, certain languages, certain kinds of content, whilst leaving comparable material in adjacent contexts entirely undisturbed, suggests that the stated concern for cultural standards is doing a great deal of cover work for unstated concerns of a different kind. Criticism that applies its framework selectively is not criticism; it is targeting wearing criticism’s clothes.
And yet, I cannot entirely dismiss the expectation that a performer, particularly one with a large platform and commercial power, carries some responsibility for what they lend themselves to. That expectation is not unreasonable. The responsibility that follows from visibility is real, even if it is distinct from the responsibility that follows from authorship. These are not the same thing, but they are also not entirely separable.
So where does that leave us?
Perhaps with a discomfort that ought not to be resolved too quickly. The question of responsibility in art is not difficult merely because many people are involved in its making. It is difficult because art passes through so many layers of intention, labour, compromise, misunderstanding, vanity, commerce, and projection before it reaches us; and by the time it does, what we are responding to is often not a single act of creation at all, but a dense knot of decisions made by different people with different degrees of knowledge and power.
That is why I resist clean verdicts here. Not because nobody is responsible, and certainly not because responsibility does not matter, but because moral judgement becomes crude the moment it refuses to distinguish between making, performing, permitting, profiting from, consuming, and amplifying. These are not identical acts, even when they converge in the same cultural object.
And perhaps that is the more unsettling question beneath all of this. When a work disturbs us, what exactly are we judging? The hand that made it, the body that carried it, the system that rewarded it, or the appetite that received it?
Because all of us, at some point, have been the appetite.
At what point does participation become endorsement? At what point does performance become authorship? And at what point does our own consumption enter the moral frame, quietly, uninvited, and absolutely impossible to ignore?
I do not think these questions have tidy answers. I am not sure they are supposed to. But if we are unwilling to ask them with any real care, then our ethics of art will always remain shallower than the art itself, and our moral confidence will always arrive, breathless and certain, long before our moral understanding.
Which, when you think about it, is precisely how outrage works.
Caveat lector: Some AI was used to assist me in the researching for and structuring & composing of this article.
