Think twice before cancelling Liam Neeson
When the actor Liam Neeson told The Independent on a press junket for the promotion of his new revenge flick Cold Pursuit that, after a friend of his had been raped by a black man, he had walked the streets with a cosh hoping to encounter some “black bastard” so that he could kill him, social media went – unsurprisingly – into meltdown.
Neeson, 66, said that his “primal” urge to enact revenge on *any* black man had been informed by his childhood in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. “We all pretend we’re all politically correct,” he added.
He has cancelled an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Friday night as the controversy continues.
On Tuesday, the ex-England footballer and anti-racism campaigner John Barnes defended Neeson: “What he’s done is he’s come out and he’s told the truth.”
Listen into the recording here and make up your own mind.
What Neeson planned to do was evil – no better than the neo-Nazi Robert Bowers who felt that he had to make the congregation of The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh pay for being Jewish.
But he didn’t do it – and his story remains just that, an unpleasant and insane dream of revenge and hatred. He seemed to be groping clumsily towards two uncomfortable truths – revenge is a superficially attractive impulse, and racism is much more ingrained than most of us would care to admit.
In any case, I wonder what contemporary social media would have made of the celebrities or artists of the past with dubious views. They would not have lasted two minutes on Twitter without having to resign from the human race.
I find the scale of the global reaction unsurprising given that our postmodern culture (on both sides of the Atlantic) can tolerate almost any excess as long as it’s given an ironical twist – take the extraordinary popular success of Martin McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri”, a film that operates in an atmosphere of absurd happenstance, in which the question of evil (how to comprehend the rape and murder of a teenage girl?) is replaced by a far stupider question – how much violence can you take before you walk out of the cinema? Bloodied hands, bashed in faces, burnt bodies, even a cruel caricature of a dwarf get a look in before the curtain falls.
Look at the critical acclaim directed towards French filmmaker Gaspar Noé and his much fêted latest, “Climax”, released in August. The film follows an ethnically diverse dance troupe who find that they have all been spiked with LSD. As the LSD takes full effect, everyone behaves execrably in all kinds of mad ways (stabbing, screams, paranoiac violence). But it is only the black men who act in concert. In the film Noé reserves a special disgust for black characters. Everyone talks about sex all the time; only the black men fantasise about rape.
The film glosses itself as a spoof. “DEATH IS AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIENCE” flashes up onto the screen as the film comes to an end. The opening credits roll over Noé’s DVD and book collection, featuring all the enfant terrible classics of French literature including Rimbaud’s A season in hell. Compare me to Rimbaud? I dare you! Take me seriously – go on, walk out, because the joke is on you.
Given the flippancy with which our popular culture treats the problem of evil, we should perhaps think twice before “cancelling” Neeson from the stage.