Mads Mikkelsen's silence: #MeToo needs room for stupidity

opinion

"Being unimportant is a fantastic feeling," Mads Mikkelsen said recently in a conversation with the Guardian. He talked about "Arctic," a new film in which he plays a lost in the Arctic explorer. Totally alone in fields of dazzling white, dumb snow.

The film was filmed in a remote part of Iceland and the work was not just an acting challenge. "We do not give a damn about nature, there were a few shots we were a few miles apart, then a blizzard came and we knew, 'If I do not get up now, no one will find me' and that's not so bad. My closest relatives, my family, my friends, they would be sad, but the world is the shit. "

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"Being unimportant is a fantastic feeling." Now it could be argued that such a sentence is easily said, for one like Mikkelsen, who is so "important," so rich and so famous. Two things that are very often confused with "meaningfulness".

How to become "a dead man"

But with Mikkelsen there is also a longing in this movement. He also told the Guardian something else: "A wrong word and you're a dead man." It's worth taking a closer look at this sentence. Mikkelsen does not say that one is "dead" but "a dead one" - through social media, it can not easily happen to a star to become "a dead man", ie by tweet or by a thoughtless statement at least temporarily as a supergranean or Worse to apply. Ask Matt Damon.

Of course, the quote about the dead was #MeToo.

Also thanks to this hashtag long overdue debates and limits have been set in terms of emancipation and feminism with appropriate volume and intensity.

But important topics must also be discussed. To learn, we all know, it is also necessary to get in touch sometimes, in the chest tone of the conviction to say something totally Matt Damon-sticking, to see that and next time on the same topic may make a little less stupid mistake.

Room for stupid things

But every time the whole class jumps up, points fingers, laughs, rages, condemns, and never lets go of some of the spells, not only will one think carefully about what he says again, but instead the whole class. Then, the atmosphere of mutual learning becomes an atmosphere of mutual appreciation, an atmosphere of fear.

If Mads Mikkelsen says something stupid about #MeToo, then read the hundreds of thousands, if it is really stupid, millions. And poor Mads is in class, at the playground, at the birthday party (if he even gets an invitation) and will not let go of this mistake. He stands there as a "dead person". Therefore, he prefers to remain silent in the interview on the subject rather and makes some advertising for his new film.

But with everyone who remains silent, we lose perspective and aspects that may not have been seen or negotiated in sufficient detail. Of course, this does not mean the contributions of the incorrigible who, without any willingness to listen, pop into each discussion the same caustic half sentence. But the # MeToo advocates should not hide behind their arguments. We have to keep talking and keep listening. Because every time someone is silent - out of fear, misunderstood or publicly exposed for a moderate stupidity - the topic dies a bit.

At #MeToo we should not care. That's why such important debates need space, perhaps more space, where mistakes and stupidity are allowed.