It’s the wrong time for ugly truths

Liam Neeson has done it now. He can never be friended in future other than by scummy racists and white supremacists. He can never be forgiven, because what he has done is way up there with murder. Which he says he contemplated. For a week, 40 years ago. And didn’t do.

The only person who’ll see good in him now may be Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, who also strayed into the fire pit this past week, lamenting how hard it is to clean blackface off your skin.

There was a crazy courage in Neeson’s admission of a past violent revenge fantasy about an imaginary black rapist.

Note that maniacal revenge is probably the theme of half the films made in the world each year. It’s just that Neeson’s storyline concerned an imaginary black man who raped a woman friend of his, and whom he described, speaking as his younger self, as a ‘‘black bastard’’.

These are not times for telling such truths or recalling such language. That guilty memory should only have been revealed in the confessional, if at all. Race relations are too volatile, especially in America.

As for Northam, he was all craziness and embarrassment for the onlooker as he writhed about in search of an exonerating angle. He was either the blackface whitey in his medical school yearbook page of 1984, or the whitey in Klansman robes. Denial is futile. Either way he was an idiot.

And the medical school that published the page? What possible excuse?

It must get confusing for an actor who spends his life acting the violent avenger for the entertainment of a world that gets vicarious pleasure from watching actors do what few people do in real life, but many wish they could.

Clint Eastwood does it for octogenarians who deep down believe they’re still babe magnets. Tom Cruise does it for short people. And Neeson does it for angry guys who’d love to resort to violence but have more sense.

Action movies are a social safety valve, putting an unjust world to imaginary rights. It’s a mistake to bring reality into play, as Neeson did when he felt the urge to explain himself.

Actors are always asked where they summon up the acted emotions that make movies seem like truth. They usually burble about using their imagination, and Neeson would still be on the A-lists if he’d done that. He told a true story. Foolish. Fiction is his territory.

The red carpet event for Neeson’s new release, Cold Pursuit, has now been cancelled, as I write, but not the premiere. I expect movie theatres that dare to screen it will be picketed at the very least.

‘‘It was horrible, horrible that I did that,’’ Neeson said of his past.

But who cares? To make matters worse, he has spoken about #MeToo as a ‘‘witch hunt’’, and referred to ‘‘primal urges’’ in the context of revenge.

Who hasn’t had revenge fantasies? Revenge is the stuff of tragedies – and action movies – for a reason. Who imagines that human beings don’t have ‘‘primal urges’’ that include aggression in defence of ourselves, or people we care about?

The language Neeson used was ugly, but so was the rape, which was real.

We are heading in an odd direction when we deplore violent language more than the violence that provoked it.

Neeson grew up amid sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, a context rather than an excuse for the young man he was.

Few of us made no mistakes when we were young. I’d like to hear from that very pure few about how they came by their perfection.