Defending Polanski: The excuse of Art in Sex

The arrest of Roman Polanski at Zürich’s airport on a 31-year-old fugitive warrant from the United States involving sex with a 13-year-old girl has generated its fair share of support for the aging director. Polanski’s move was ill-advised. Some might say the same for the zealous defenders who have amassed to defend him.

At work here is celebrity judging, or rather excusing, celebrity. Hollywood, like the medical profession, is closing ranks for one of its own. As have various cultural figures intent on leniency towards the enfant terrible of cinema. A petition by the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques has attracted weighty support, amongst them David Lynch, Michael Mann and Terry Gilliam. Another petition organised by French writer and intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, proves heavy with the desperation and drama of the persecuted artist or political dissident. ‘Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prisons’ (Huffington Post, Sep 28). The terms of this are unmistakable: an unimpeachable quality in the work; the artist above law. It is the law, after all, that must always be transgressed for there to be a vibrant, self-critical culture. And he is, after all that, a political hero, ‘a survivor of Nazism and of Stalinist persecutions in Poland’, surely not fit for a standard punishment for rape.

There is little doubt that temptations are there to locate a political rationale, or motivation for the arrest. The petition, signed by such individuals as Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera and Claude Lanzmann, drive at the sheer injustice (or so they think) of it all. Then come the habitual references to the provincial, the boorish, and those more enlightened beings who transgress the laws in order to be free. Certainly, a child of 13 would not fit into this bracket, and while there is no need to indulge the nonsense that surrounds some aspects of the cult of child protection, the offence took place, and a child was assaulted. Such an act, as Marc Laffineur put it, ‘is not something trivial, whoever the suspect is’ (NYT, Sep 29).

The choice may itself be the mad act, but here, the choice made by Polanski is considered less important the surrounding features of the political and cultural landscape that ostensibly war against him. Take the view of commentator Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post (Sep 27), who again draws out the exculpable nature of the wounded past. ‘Polanski’s mother died at Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto and later emigrated to communist Poland.’ Then, of course, came the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. The charge can’t be seen as anything else by those who feel he has become the sacrificial creature for the morally challenged and spiritually immature. To convict a survivor of political totalitarianism and genocidal policies, and imprison him within the walls of a democracy, strike his supporters as tragic and ironic. The petition again: ‘We ask the Swiss courts to free him immediately and not to turn this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio that is unworthy of two democracies like Switzerland and the United States. Good sense, as well as honour, require it.’

To assess Polanski in this case as an artist, his work being the measure of his innocence, is the reverse problem of those who refuse to play Richard Wagner’s operas on the basis of his anti-Semitism. The allegiances of an artist to his work need not affect the quality of their art as a value. But just as that prejudice or defect need not impair the work, it should not be assumed that that work will impact on a person’s moral character and behaviour. The principle here is the same in either case.

That he had been the victim of, in the words of a judge in Los Angeles, ‘substantial misconduct’ has been admitted as much. But some commentators, such as Applebaum, run a mile with this. He may not have known her real age. He was endlessly pursued by a fanatical judge for three decades. Then come the curious arguments – that Samantha Geimer, the 13 year-old in question, had effectively been thrust upon him by her money-crazed mother, a possible means for entry into the movies. Such matters as the age of consent, or the fact that Geimer never consented, are cast aside as needless distractions. Art excuses. But the evidence is there, in the victim’s grand jury testimony, which was also furnished by Polanski’s own confession of guilt.

To the accused and charged go the spoils. Even Geimer has ‘forgiven’ him. Her cousin, Adam Geimer, was reported in papers as saying that, ‘They could have arrested him at any time. I think they should just drop it’ (New York Post, Oct 5). There may well be truth in that, which does make the case all the more awful. To tinker with an expression of Jacques Derrida’s, the monster has been given a name, and has been domesticated.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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