If only Fatty were alive today

This past Sunday, Michael Richards and Larry David illustrated just how far the world of modern celebrity is from the one the rest of us are living in. On the latest episode of David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Richards, playing himself, is about to use the n-word in public when he realizes he’s surrounded by onlookers with video phones. This is, of course, a reference to Richards’ much-YouTubed 2006 on-stage rant that led to the total collapse of the previously beloved cultural icon.

Now, if you or I had done what Richards did, our only hope for expiation would have been something along the lines of a 12-step racism-expungement program — which, for the record, Richards did have to go through (let’s not forget Letterman, and those three years spent wondering in the outer darkness of industry indifference), but that’s where the similarities end. Richards also has the option to go on HBO, turn his sins into a performance piece, and move on, burden removed. Which is to say that the rise of self-referential comedies combined with the continued (and ever-deepening) obsession with celebrity gossip now allows for this kind of paid, (sort of) scripted absolution. After all, why apologize on Letterman when you can go on Extras or SNL and get yourself some laughs for playing the guy you should be apologizing for being in the first place?

This kind of ironic performative mea-culpa is both new (Fatty Arbuckle never made any one-reelers about sodomizing women to death) and available only to celebrities (if you get caught cheating on your wife, you don’t have the luxury of being able to extricate yourself from the situation by performing a one-act about a guy who cheats on his wife), and it raises an interesting issue: Are there still crimes so heinous that not even this approach will make up for them? Or, to put it into more self-reflective terms: Are we willing to let a celebrity off the hook for anything, provided he or she is clever enough to make us laugh about it?

What, for example, would Chris Brown have to do on camera to get us to forgive him for abusing Rihanna? Would it be enough for him to go on Saturday Night Live and play a kooky R&B singer who beats up any woman who makes him angry — a back-up dancer who misses a step, a back-up singer who misses a note, a waitress who brings him his eggs scrambled rather than fried, Sonia Santomayor, Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Mother Earth, his mother, your mother, and so on and so on, ad infinitum, SNL-style,  until the stage is covered in female cast members? Would we forgive him then?

Or how ’bout Michael Vick? What if he went on Conan and electrocuted Triumph the Insult Comic Dog until the puppet was ready to take a chunk out of Andy Richter? Might that be enough to get the former star quarterback a fresh multimillion dollar contact? And could Roman Polanski find redemption for both himself and Woody Allen by playing a lecherous old film director in Allen’s latest, most personal, film? If Allen could make Polanski funny, in other words, would it be enough to wipe away his sins?

Sure, art needs to imitate life — otherwise David, Richards, and everyone else connected with Seinfeld would still be working the stand-up circuit — but when art is employed as a purgative for egregious personal missteps, it forces the offendees (namely, society as a whole) into the role of unwilling, if amused, accomplices. And who needs that from television?

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.