Roman Polanski

A reasonable person might argue that Nazi filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl deserved to be dropped down the world’s deepest, darkest hole and loathed forever. But that same reasonable person, after watching the director’s sublime Olympia, might have to fight the urge to throw a rope down into that hole and pull her back out again.

You have to make a distinction between the artist and the woman, right? For example, I love the overture from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, I recognize that D.W. Griffith pretty much invented the movies despite being a frothing racist, and I have no problem with Roman Polanski winning an Oscar for The Pianist, despite his being an admitted child rapist. But that doesn’t mean Wagner doesn’t deserve to be loathed, Griffith doesn’t deserve to be scorned, and Polanski doesn’t belong in jail.

The problem is that if we demanded rectitude from our favorite authors, composers, filmmakers, painters, dancers, and actors, we wouldn’t have any favorite authors, composers, filmmakers, painters, dancers, or actors. Not Sean Connery, who beats his wife; not William S. Burroughs, who killed his wife; not Caravaggio, who beat one of his friends to death in the street; not Arthur Rimbaud, who traded slaves; not Ghostface Killah, who was jailed for attempted robbery; not C.K. Chesterton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ezra Pound, Voltaire, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, William Shakespeare, or T.S. Eliot, who were all anti-Semites; and not Paul Gaugin or Jerry Lee Lewis, who were sleeping with 13-year-old girls long before Polanski had the idea.

So the best society can do is tolerate the degenerate tendencies of its artistic class and punish those tendencies when they spill over into felony.

Then again, according to a Free Roman Polanski petition currently making its way around Europe and Hollywood (and signed by more than 100 of the world’s greatest filmmakers, including Woody Allen, Jeanne Moreau, Martin Scorsese, Wong Kar Wai, Michael Mann, David Lynch, Tilda Swinton, Barbet Schroeder, and Steven Soderbergh), felonies aren’t really felonies if they’re perpetrated by a genius, a “renown (sic) and international artist … one of the great contemporary filmmakers,” especially if he was “on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award” when the police picked him up.

Because “[b]y their extraterritorial nature,” the petition continues, “film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely … in a neutral country … without hindrance,” even if a certain filmmaker may have once, a long, long time ago, gotten himself entangled in a “case of morals.”

Maybe they’re right. Maybe it should be left to filmmakers to decide what’s right and wrong when it comes to one of their own, what the statutes of limitations should be, what the guidelines for extradition should entail. After all, by snatching up Polanski while he was on his way to a film festival, the authorities were, technically, on the filmmakers’ turf. And cultural events are sacred things, with rules and laws and borders and systems of government all their own. Surely no cinema genius on his way to a film festival should have to worry about being held accountable for acts of pedophilia he performed 30 years ago off festival grounds – not, especially, on the occasion of his receiving an award. An award, don’t you see? A film award. What kind of fascists arrest a man when he’s on his way to pick up a trophy?

So Phil Spector sits in his cell, hearing all about Roman Polanski and his 100 influential friends and followers in the movie industry working to get him free, and he must be asking himself, “What about me? Where are all those artists I influenced? How come Brian Wilson and Brian Eno and the Jesus & Mary Chain and Timbaland and Animal Collective aren’t writing petitions on my behalf?” The answer is that Phil Spector hasn’t had a hit record in decades. If he were smart, he would have produced a Justin Timberlake song before shooting Lana Clarkson, just as Polanski made sure to win an Oscar … just in case. Had he done that, he might be free right now. For what is the law without the approbation of our artists? Nothing but words on a piece of paper.