Roman Polanski is one of my favourite directors; I’ve never met a movie of his that I’ve found less than interesting, and at least four of them — Repulsion, Macbeth, Rosemary’s Baby and The Fearless Vampire Killers — are among my all-time favourites. This isn’t a film column, but I heartily recommend them to anyone reading it.
I hope endorsing Polanski’s work thus won’t be taken to mean that I also endorse his statutory rape of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in 1977. Internet discussions are rarely as inflamed as they have been following the detention of the now-76-year-old director in Switzerland, decades after his initial trial, plea bargain and brief sentence. On the one hand, many people — noted Hollywood celebrities, and Salman Rushdie, among them — have signed an online petition (http://tinyurl.com/yemjl7s) demanding his release. This has led to widely expressed outrage: are the calls for leniency based only on Polanski’s artistic standing and the fact that his name is preceded by the words “Oscar-winning director”? What does Whoopi Goldberg mean by stating that what he did wasn’t “rape-rape” (thus adding an unwanted neologism to the English language)? What further confuses things is the murky history of the case and the fact that Gailey herself is now calling for the matter to be put to rest.
The need to separate a person’s artistic achievements from his actions as a citizen has never been as pressing as now. “If we demanded rectitude from our favorite authors, composers, filmmakers and painters, we wouldn’t have any favorite authors, composers, filmmakers or painters left,” observes Josh Rosenblatt on Unfit Times (http://tinyurl.com/y9s795l), and a commenter notes that “the same moral daring that we look for in our great artists can spill easily into degeneracy”.
But on the Huffington Post blog (http://tinyurl.com/ybejp82), writer Bernard Henri-Levy raises the possibility that Polanski might actually be a victim of his celebrity in this case. “Far from Polanski hiding behind his name, it is his name that is drawing attention to him. He is being made not an ordinary defendant, but a symbol.” Levi is right in one sense: as a comment on the Guardian blog (http://tinyurl.com/yk54p72) puts it, “This is no longer a discussion about rights and wrongs, it’s turned into outrage porn.” But his general argument is the dubious sort one often comes across in India when people say, for instance, that Salman Khan (a.k.a. slayer of pavement-dwellers) is being hounded merely because he’s a public figure and there’s a conspiracy to bring him down. Should other people’s ulterior motives detract from the need to make someone answerable to the law? In this context, a commenter on the Guardian recalls the joke about a motorist asking a traffic cop why he was the only one to be pulled over when other cars were speeding as well. “When I go fishing, I don’t catch every fish in the sea,” the cop replies tersely.
In a Slate article (http://tinyurl.com/ ye6jn4d), Christopher Hitchens tries to put the case in the context of the treatment of little girls in underdeveloped countries, even making a cutting reference to the “cultural sanction” given to child abuse by the story of the Prophet Mohammed taking a wife at age nine. “We do not know how lucky we are to be able to prosecute those who violate children.” Meanwhile, sarcasm is rife on Twitter. A quick glance at the Breaking Tweets website (http://tinyurl.com/y8b5w6h /) reveals this: “Polanski’s not a bad pedophile like Gary Glitter, he’s a good one like Michael Jackson”
If Sweden (sic) releases Polanski I will take all my money out of their banks”
and my favourite:
“I heard Hitler was a pretty good pianist. What’s all the hoopla about the Holocaust?”.
