Polanski polarises
Firstly, I’d like to thank Swiss TV news for not featuring him last night: yesterday’s lead story was on next year’s health insurance premium hike, an autumn perennial. And then there were natural catastrophes in far-flung places to leaven the mood a bit.
Secondly, I think this is the lamest piece I’ve ever written. Truly. I mean it.
The Facts, and you’ll already know about this unless you live beneath a giant boulder in the middle of the deepest depth of the Mariana Trench: Roman Polanski, a film director with dual French-Polish nationality, is enjoying the hospitality of the Swiss prison system. Or, if we’re going to be pedantic, he’s enjoying the hospitality of the prison system of canton Zürich, where he is being held at the behest of the Swiss federal government, which is acting on a specific request by US authorities. Switzerland, like other countries such as the UK, has an extradition convention with the US. This, somehow, did not stop Mr Polanski from purchasing a chalet in Gstaad, alpine playground of the rich and famous. It’s not so strange; the last time I had to produce my passport when crossing the Swiss border is at least 15 years back. Switzerland’s entrance into the Schengen accord has reduced border controls even further.
Thirty-two years ago, Mr Polanski was a film director at his career zenith who took the casting couch (or was it a Casting Jacuzzi?) thing too literally. He jumped bail in the US in 1978, shortly before being sentenced for raping a 13-year-old girl. He has since lived in France and become a French citizen. He was safe there: France, like Switzerland, does not extradite its own citizens.
He had the good sense not to return to the US; not even in 2003 when he won an Oscar for The Pianist, a cinematic holocaust masterpiece that leaves no one who has seen it cold. I haven’t seen it, but the LDR has. (The LDR and RP have something in common: their wives were born on the same day.) The LDR watched it late one winter’s evening when the rest of the house was asleep. He later wished he hadn’t. “The onslaught of terror towards the end took me completely unaware,” he said. “It was a solid mass of atrocities that held me mesmerised, like a rabbit caught in headlights.” Staring into the abyss was made all the more terrifying by the historic veracity of the event. The Pianist gave him nightmares.
(We’re talking about my husband, the man in whom I confide my dreams. “Tell me yours,” I plead. “I never dream,” he replies.)
Just think: Roman Polanski stared his demons in the face by making a movie about them. This was exposure therapy by proxy, and the victim sat in the directing seat, controlling the full measure of the horror that unfolded on screen.
He made a mistake: he was invited to a film festival in Zürich to receive a prize for his life’s work, announced his arrival and was arrested at the airport. We know from the media camped outside the prison they think he is being held in that RP has to wear a tracksuit and is allowed to spend SFR 5 per day on sweeties phone calls. It has been reported that his fellow inmates and the prison officers are being kind to him. I’m sure the latter aren’t being paid to be unkind to him; merely to keep him from walking away.
Polanski, now 76 years old, poses no threat to society. Nevertheless, his chance of getting bail is minimal considering the precedent he has set on that score. In his heyday, he appears to have had a taste for young girls: it’s said he got his paws on the teenage Nastassja Kinski (I revered her – she was five years older than me and so beautiful I was riddled with envy), daughter of Klaus, acting genius who was madder than an entire mad hatter convention.
The apologists see RP as a genius and cultural treasure; an icon who must be judged by different standards than a mere mortal. A famous US TV celebrity has been quoted as saying it wasn’t ‘rape-rape’ (which makes it OK, then). The opposing camp sees him as ‘pure evil’ (a vilification that seems to enjoy the same hyperbolic, inflationary misuse in the media as the term “bereft” for “upset”); a paedophile who should rot in jail.
Let’s have a little perspective, please. The truth lies, as ever, somewhere in between.
So he drugged her instead of holding a knife to her throat or beating her into submission. It still sounds like coercion to me. And it’s on record that he asked her permission to perform some or all of the acts (“would you mind if I ass-raped you, sweetie?”) to which she replied “No!” Maybe it was a slurred ‘nnngg’. Maybe she shook her head. It was still a ‘no’. More importantly: she was underage. RP, unfortunately, seemed to belong, at least back then, to that category of stupendously thick male who thinks females mean ‘yes’ when they say ‘no’. And let’s not forget: he pleaded guilty to all of this. Maybe he thought fucking a young girl would make him immortal. Maybe it was just about power. Maybe he was out of his mind. He still did it.
I’m trying to get a little into his head, and I’m doing this solely for my own amusement, but, believe me, it’s been one of those weeks and this enters the ledger under the title ‘light relief’. The tragedy of his personal history stuns. How can one man be stricken by such a cluster of calamity? The man who as a child lost his mother to a violent death, escaped the Krakow ghetto, witnessed the depths of cruelty humanity can plumb and then became a feted film director and celebrity. His first wife was carrying his unborn child when she was stabbed to death. His was a life that swept in a trajectory from helplessness to the pinnacle of an industry that practices idolatry like no other. He must have felt worshipped. He must have felt omnipotent. None of this excuses his actions. I don’t understand why a 43-year-old man would find a 13-year-old (even one who looked like an 18-year-old) an object of sexual desire. Maybe he dissociated while he raped her – it wouldn’t be such a far-fetched notion given his tragic history. What does strike me is that he chose to perpetrate the helplessness he felt as a child on a child. It’s a classic case of victim-as-perpetrator syndrome.
Apparently the judge who was due to sentence him, now deceased, was a sandwich short of a picnic. But then Mr Polanski would know all about the corruptive effect of power.
He could have wrapped the whole thing up years – decades – ago. Made amends. Unnecessarily prolonging his victim’s suffering like this makes him a bastard in my book.
