Consumer boycotts are one of the most powerful enforcers of producer behaviour of all time. Yet, unlike regulation, which is almost always borne of due process that allows for counter-views, consumer boycotts can spread like fire in our social media age, where what can be said in 140 characters is all that anyone wants to know.
Which took me this weekend into an empty cinema. My teenage son and friend had signed me up to see the newest film from Liam Neeson, Cold Pursuit, in which Liam plays a father whose non-drug taking son dies of a heroin overdose. Without spoilers, the kid was a sideshow in a battle among gangsters, which sees Dad go after the gangsters.
However, before the film’s release, Liam was interviewed on where he found the anger to act the father’s rage, and Liam narrated a personal trauma he lived through when someone he cared for was raped.
Now, before we go further, for every victim of murder, rape, and terrible wrongdoing, there are those that love them, and the fact is that they experience anger. To see a loved one destroyed is to be wounded to the core.
Unfortunately, Liam chose to be remarkably too candid about the intensity of that kind of anger. For anyone who has lived it, it is like a veil that falls over every perspective, as the traumatised individual battles to make sense of the world that has delivered this horror.
Some people are simply broken by it. Others commit suicide: the world seeming so ugly and empty that the point in continuing is gone. Others, again, develop long-term post-traumatic stress, in a battle with anxiety, depression, and rage, that some of you will have witnessed as you see someone grappling with the insanely random killing or life destruction of someone they loved.
In this, the US is up-to-speed on trauma and mental health. It’s everyday fare. Yet when it comes to trauma, understanding its unique messing up of people’s heads only goes so far, and not so far as allowing Liam to experience rage as trauma victims do.
Because the perpetrator of the rape was black. And Liam explained that for some time, he went into black areas literally looking for a fight as that cold anger welled up in him.
Is that racism? Well, yes and no. For many trauma victims, rage gets directed at humanity as a whole. But it infects people through multiple triggers. For sure, if a Brit killed your mother, you wouldn’t actually believe all Brits were murderers. But the accent, the culture, for some traumatised time, everything about Britishness, would be among many triggers that touched your extreme pain point. That’s how trauma works. In Liam’s case, however, the admission of such ugly rage has made him roast meat. My son, a film buff, explained that the film’s early ticket sales were down by nine-tenths on the norm.
Yet beneath the outrage at the film star’s story sits a bigger issue. It seems as if we don’t deny that people get traumatised, we study it, offer help for it. But the deal is that it be kept behind closed doors. As soon as someone famous admits to ugly and unjustified thoughts in the wake of a trauma, then we eject them as monsters?
But, that trauma is the whole subject of the movie. It effectively drives both parents mad: it is no accident that there is a phrase ‘mad with grief’.
They live it without support, the sum being a fast greeting on the street to say sorry for their loss, as their lives cave in, and the rage moves into killings.
So let’s pretend, if we want to, that mad grief brings no madness and pretend Liam is a bigot if we also want to do that.
But he isn’t. He’s just more honest, and was explaining trauma, not bigotry, trying to open eyes, not close them.
His whole point, and the whole point of the movie too, was that a loss like that can turn even the citizen of the year into a murderer. So don’t ignore trauma. Traumatised people need help. Their worlds have just collapsed.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
