mostly nonfiction and bakersfield news | November 2nd, 2009
On Roman Polanski
By Sean Beaudoin
Like any other issue, the question of defending or excusing the behavior of Roman Polanski is vastly more nuanced that either Geraldine Ferraro (jail for life, how could you think otherwise?) or Debra Winger (he’s a great artist, this is an outrage) would have it. The abuse of a minor, on the surface, is a frightening and indefensible act. Perhaps even more frightening is the widespread talkshow/blogosphere slant which seems to imply that questioning a presumption of indefensibility is tantamount to approving the behavior. While certain people have been pilloried for standing by Polanski’s side, few of them have been ask to explain their position at greater length.
What I find particularly interesting is the European response, which has generally amounted to a shrug and a yawn, with barbed comments about American prurience tossed in like sprigs of parsley. While we may never live down the justified derision over our hysterical treatment of Bill Clinton’s blowjob ten years ago, the degree of Continental diffidence over Polanski’s rape has been surprisingly pointed. Without question, Americans make a game of fetishizing their celebrities prior to searching for the least excuse to damn them, even if just for being too celebrated. Europeans tend to lionize a much smaller group, and for more demonstrably intellectual talents, but also tend to support them through more dire transgressions, both sexual and violent. Polanski is an artiste of the most rarified degree in Paris, but remains the guy who made The Ninth Gate in Akron.
As far as I’m concerned, the debatable artistic merits of Polanski’s oeuvre are irrelevant to the question of whether he should be (further) punished. He committed a loathsome act, under dubious circumstances, and his artistic life changes none of the details. Knife in the Water, The Tenant, and Chinatown are three of my all-time favorite movies. Bitter Moon and Frantic were laughably awful, self-indulgent messes. Does a mediocre director deserve to do harder time than one who expressed himself with aesthetic consistency? Do we need to go down a list of revered names, from Oscar Wilde to Flaubert to Wagner to Mapplethorpe, and try to divorce their contemptible or merely shocking behaviors from the ones we deem acceptable? And then, further, apply some sort of calculus as to how we will subsequently appreciate their art?
What does matter, and what I hear almost no one mentioning, is Polanski’s background. Not his artistic background, but his background as a human being. Geraldine Ferraro ignorantly and self-righteously claimed in her recent NY Times polemic that “he’s rich and continues to lead a charmed life.” Ms. Ferraro, apparently not having done an ounce of research since vetting Walter Mondale’s chances of winning more than one state against Ronald Reagan, could not be more wrong. Polanski lived through a horrific childhood, a childhood of truly cinematic brutality and deprivation in the woods of Europe as a Jewish orphan riding out the end of World War Two. His pregnant mother was killed at Auschwitz. Jerzey Kozinski, in fact, based his epic and disturbing work, The Painted Bird, on Polanski’s early experiences. If even a tenth of Kozinski’s book is true, it’s astonishing that Polanski managed to make what he did of his life, let alone expressing a creative vision that wasn’t entirely one of dissolution and madness. Twenty years later, in a quintessentially American example of brutal irony, Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was also horribly murdered. Her death, at the hands of the Manson Family, was one of the most sensationalized and bizarre episodes in a decade ridden with war, massive cultural upheaval, and narcotic self-abasement. Should we not at least take into account these factors when determining whether Polanski is a dangerous pedophile or a thoroughly flawed person who may, due to those experiences, have lost a certain degree of rationality and judgment at the time of his crime? This is the problem with adjudicating thirty years after the fact. It is simply unfair, if not unjust, to take any behavior out of the context of its era. Is it morally relativist to think we may not be entirely capable of judging decisions made under the moral yoke of Spiro Agnew, napalm, Owsley, and monthly political assassinations? Certainly any judge or jury or editorial could have then. And they did. A deal was reached, likely in some part because of Polanski’s celebrity, that seems ludicrously lenient now. But there were also unanswered questions that made the prosecution more difficult. Like, for instance, why was this girl made up to look like an adult and then dropped off at Jack Nicholson’s house at night by her mother, who without question knew her daughter would be alone with a notorious director? We can never know the answer, just as we can never know Polanski’s mindset, but what is certain is that we were very different people then. There were no missing child photos on milk cartons. There were no gossip websites or instantaneous cellphone photography to curb public behavior. In the drug-and-libertine haze of early seventies Hollywood there were few limits on debauchery, let alone documentaries about the Jon Benet-style sexualization of young girls, or the very public Lohan and Spears censure of stage mothers who thrust their daughters into inexcusable situations in exchange for potential careers. If Polanski is to be brought to justice, why are there no similar calls for charges to be filed against the girl’s astonishingly and criminally negligent mother?
None of this excuses the fact that Polanski offered drugs to (Not “drugged” as is lazily reported, but implies shoving the pill down her throat), and then had sex with, a thirteen year-old girl. He is undoubtedly guilty of those acts. But was it an act of pedophilia, one to be followed by a lifetime of similarly abhorrent behavior, or was it a singular incident? The fact that Polanski is now seventy-six and married to a vastly younger and very attractive actress invites this sort of conjecture. Either way, he has admitted to his actions, in detail (the nauseating court records of which can be found online) and he should be punished for it. But after all this time, how should he be punished, and exactly for what? He paid the girl’s family half a million dollars to settle a civil suit. The victim has repeatedly argued against further prosecution. Polanski has been exiled for thirty years, which has likely cost him a fortune and a great deal of artistic freedom. He has also already and voluntarily served a month and a half in a California jail, as agreed to by the judge and prosecutor as part of the original plea agreement. A plea agreement the judge was, apparently, prepared to renege on. Which is why Polanski fled the country in the first place.
Ultimately where this conjecture brings us, as do so many insoluble arguments in this country, is to the hypocrisy and ultimate failure of the American justice system. From O.J to Enron to a guy doing fifteen years in Texas for a few joints, the inequity of sentencing and the capriciousness of public outrage affecting judgments renders any self-righteous punditry laughable, if not dangerous.
I have a young daughter. Even before her birth, but more so now, my personal feelings on child predation fall squarely in the Castrate Now/Death Penalty arena. But, when I’m done feeling both vengefully sated and intellectually dishonest, I’m forced to look at specific circumstances and ask myself unanswerable questions. Like about the fact that most pedophiles are childhood victims of abuse themselves. When does a neglected, abused child no longer become pitiable? At what point do they change their shirt and haircut and become a monster? Is there any way we will ever be able to truly assess levels of psycho-sexual sickness, for which there may be no effective therapy, let alone cure?
The Polanski decision, whatever course it takes, is emblematic of the division of right and left in this country. The right wants hard facts, the thrill of certainty, the pleasure of denouncement, the unwillingness to consider nuance in the face of slapping five and chuckling at liberal positions. The left wants petitions, excuses, an unwillingness to grapple with the ramifications of blanket leniency, and a free pass for the hypocrisy of only weighing in on social issues when they affect celebrities. Where were Debra Winger and Harrison Ford last week when the FOX hit machine was publicly dismantling ACORN? And even if one of them did get up and plea for healthcare or low-income housing, would the cable news, right or left, have bothered to cover it?
I haven’t made my mind up about what should happen to Roman Polanski. I’m not sure what would be justice for the girl, or even simply a fair outcome given the myriad exigencies. What I do know is that I could not give a shit less about Polanski’s value as an artist. It has absolutely nothing to do with the question. In the end, almost all artists in almost every artistic medium are self-indulgent, narcissistic, empathy-deficient, and subconsciously empowered to feel above certain societal constraints. And they always have been. One could make the case that some or all of those qualities are required in order to access the creativity and discipline to make truly transcendent art. But what about those of us that make mediocre art? Or really shitty art? Does the director of Transformers deserve a free pass for his (just guessing here) forays into bestiality because he shot and edited three hours of truck-bots smashing into one another? Talking heads on both sides always say “there are two sets of rules,” for people in our society, which is a lazy cliché. There are a thousand sets of rules, which means there are really no rules. What we have is a random, fluid, utterly arbitrary and rarely just media that delivers both ratings and floggings book-ended by dysfunction commercials, erectile or otherwise.
Polanski will or won’t be extradited.
He will or won’t do more jail time.
There will or won’t be a consensus as to whether justice was served.
What is virtually certain is that a few days from now some Ukrainian tennis player or B-list sit com actor will be caught doing something demonstrably worse, or at least fresh, and twenty-four hour cable artillery will be recalibrated elsewhere.
SEAN BEAUDOIN is the author of Going Nowhere Faster, Fade to Blue, and the forthcoming You Killed Wesley Payne(Little, Brown, fall 2010). His stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications including: the Onion, theSan Francisco Chronicle, Glimmer Train, Narrative, Opium, and the New Orleans Review.
www.seanbeaudoin.com
8 Responses for “On Roman Polanski”
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pedophilia /pe·do·phil·ia/ (-fil´e-ah) a paraphilia in which an adult has recurrent, intense sexual urges or sexually arousing fantasies of engaging or repeatedly engages in sexual activity with a prepubertal child.pedophil´ic [End]
The girl was 13 at the time of the rape and past the prepubertal phase of development due to menses cycling. When the media calls a child rapist a pedophile they are confusing two different types of sexual aggression and opening doors that cause great harm to those fighting against sexual abuse of all types.
Medical treatment and sentencing of rapist and pedophiles are not the same nor should they be according to those with degrees in the field of sexual studies.
Reporters really should spend time researching the difference between these two acts of sexual misconduct with professionals in the field before writing and publishing their articles.
Just my uneducated two cents worth do with it what you will.
This is one of the best articles I have read on the Polanski matter and I have probably too many articles. But one has to read a lot before one comes up with a gem. For my take on Polanski which is siliar to Beaudoin's, click http://dankprofessor.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/on-...
Not sure I agree with some of the questions raised in this article, but it was still an interesting read…
I agree that there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances in this case and that everything from the judge reneging on the sentence to Polanski fleeing the country and to his deeds since then. Even if one were to argue that Polanski's tough childhood and the tragic events around the time of his crime should grant him leniency – that still would have made it, maybe, temporary insanity.
When we strip away everything else, what we are left with is this: he raped a young woman. She said no but, he continued to force himself on her.
After 42 days in prison, Polanski then went on to live his life – leaving the young woman to face a media circus, court cases and 30 years of questions. So much attention, that his victim would rather that everything was dropped and that everyone would just shut up about it so that she can live her life in peace.
I'm not advocating for Polanski to be thrown in jail for the rest of his life or for him to be castrated but, he needs to face up to what he did (42 days in prison and not paying what he owes on the civil judgement against him doesn't cut it).
I'm with Jenny. I also think that calling his mother a monster doesn't answer the question of Polanski being a monster. And that's just speculation isn't it? We don't actually know if the mother was knowingly throwing her daughter into a lion's den. And if it were a lion's den, why were there other people hanging out with Polanski earlier that day? Are they guilty then too? So many questions… Hard to know what to do in this case. As in, what's the justifiable punishment? And, if Polanski has suffered, has it been enough?
Interesting questions you raise, Sean. Welcome to Face Stories.
People seem to forget about his sexual relationship with Natassia Kinski who was under 18 years of age. His temporary insanity must have prolonged its visit.
He didn’t pay her the money. He should have done more than 42 days for this reprehensible act. No matter his profession. This is far different from Oscar Wilde being gay and being punished for it. Girls deserve protection.