Liam Neeson weighed in on #MeToo last week, earning social media backlash for some comments he made during an interview with Ireland’s “Late Late Show” on the allegations against Dustin Hoffman.
Hoffman stands accused of groping Kathryn Rossetter during a Broadway production of “Death of a Salesman” in the early 1980s. Here’s what Neeson said:
“The Dustin Hoffman thing, I’m on the fence about that. Because when you’re doing a play and you’re with your family, other actors, technicians, you do silly things. You do silly things and it becomes kind of superstitious; if you don’t do it every night you think it’s going to jinx the show. I think Dustin Hoffman was … I’m not saying I’ve done similar things like what he did. Apparently, he touched another girl’s breast and stuff. But it’s childhood stuff what he was doing.”
Gross. Whether or not the play’s reputation was dependent upon Hoffman’s disciplined upholding of a weird superstition, groping a woman who doesn’t want to be groped is no less defensible. It was a strange and disappointing argument for Neeson to make.
In the same interview, Neeson also rightfully claimed “there is a bit of a witch hunt happening” when it comes to #MeToo’s impact on the entertainment industry.
“There’s some people, famous people, being suddenly accused of touching some girl’s knee or something, and suddenly they’re being dropped from their program or something,” he contended, pointing to how Garrison Keillor was brought down late last year.
The actor was also clear to say the movement overall was “healthy,” calling the treatment of “female laborers” in “farms, ranches,” and other sectors “chilling.”
The backlash against Neeson is a case study in the unfortunate reaction so many #MeToo responses have prompted. He said he was “on the fence” about the Hoffman allegations and explained why. His explanation was gross, but he also did not endorse the behavior nor offer a conclusive judgment on it. Further, he endorsed the larger movement and used his platform to shine a light on the plight of those with less privilege. (By the way, one can, in fact, support #MeToo while also believing certain allegations have gone too far.)
Though the movement’s success has depended on it, #MeToo is a difficult conservation to have on social media, which encourages us to subtract nuance from the discussion in favor of more easily communicated sentiments of outrage or support and often triggers people to traffic in instant, headline or excerpt-based reactions to news articles.
Back in December, Jodie Foster made a good point about #MeToo and Twitter. “I’m not a sound bite person. I’m an hours person. I like to talk about things for hours. I’m not very good at 140 characters,” she said. “I feel like it’s such a complicated issue, and it is a watershed moment.”
“In order to do it justice, I think we need a bigger dialogue and we need a much more complicated dialogue,” added Foster. To some extent, we can have a complicated dialogue about sexual misconduct on Twitter — it’s just going to be a lot harder.
