. . . clearly isn’t to many in Hollywood.
Some 30 years ago, the film director Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. He was charged, plead guilty, and was offered a sentencing deal that most in law enforcement and victim advocacy agreed was appropriate. But, fearing that a harsher judge might throw out the deal, Polanski high-tailed it to Europe, where he remained, free to walk the streets, make movies, and generally live his life in a most un-fugitive-like manner. Arrested last week in Switzerland, he is fighting a return to the U.S. to face trial.
Of course he would. A man who would rape a young girl isn’t likely to jump at the chance, three decades later, to face a judicial system that condemns that sort of thing — harshly and unequivocally. What’s truly astonishing is that more than two dozen of his colleagues in the cinematic world are rallying to his cause, while the inimitable Whoopi Goldberg defends him by explaining to the largely female audience of television’s “The View” that Polanski’s actions three decades ago were “rape,” but not really, you know, “RAPE rape.” Because, like, “RAPE rape” is the really BAD version of violently forcing sex on someone, not the more mild kind of “rape” that involves . . . violently forcing sex on someone.
Are we “CLEAR clear” on the distinction? Let’s move on, then.
All of this is no surprise, I guess, but the sad predictability makes it no less shocking. Any culture or institution that cranks out the cinematic feces we see oozing from the major studios and eagerly consumed by the misogynous, the puerile, and the violent who reward them with enormous profit, is not likely to rise up and condemn bad behavior and the man behind it. Still, any sane person would have to wonder why seemingly respectable people would cast their professional lot with a child rapist. Polanski is a talented director, but peer-group affirmation in this case stems from a desire to view him with a huge, qualifying “BUT,” as if his movie-making skills, while perhaps not enhanced by his violent attack on a child, somehow mitigate it.
The fact that the victim says she doesn’t want to see him prosecuted is irrelevant, although very sad. It doesn’t matter how magnaminous she feels now, and it really doesn’t matter how much that differs from the horror she must have felt then. Polanski committed a crime. The State needn’t burden itself with analyzing the feelings of the victim here. The State ought to bring him home and let the criminal chips fall where they may.
God help us if the classic “artistic temperament” with which we qualify quirky, passionate behavior expands now not to storming off a set over a fight involving scripts and scenery, but to storming violently into the precious sexual innocence of a little girl.