Polanski: Guilt Reproved, Innocence Undone

Here are the facts: Roman Polanski, at the age of 43, drugged and raped a 13 year-old girl at a Hollywood party.  He admitted to the crime.  A deal was worked out with the judge, prosecution, and defense.  The judge claimed to have second thoughts about this agreement before sentencing.  Mr. Polanski, fearful that he might spend more time in jail, fled the country.  For over thirty years since he has lived in comfort in France and traveled unhindered through Europe.

That free ride may be reaching its vanishing point.  Because he was recently apprehended in Switzerland and is awaiting extradition back to the United States.

And now all manner of hell has broken loose.

Celebrities, directors, and film-world-luminaries have banded together to sign a petition requesting Mr. Polanski's freedom.  These individuals--many of whom are prodigiously talented--represent the very zenith of privileged arrogance.

The commentary has been mind-boggling: Whoopi Goldberg, from her gilded perch on The View, attempted to school her audience on the difference between Mr. Polanski's actions and what she termed, "rape rape."  Ironically, by attempting to somehow vitiate his crime, Ms. Goldberg came up with an apt description of Mr. Polanski's transgression.  It was Rape Rape.  He committed rape by forcing a non-consensual sex act upon another person.  And he committed statutory rape by having sexual contact with a minor.  There is no sidestepping the truth of law in either case.

The famed French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy has suggested that enough time has passed for we puritanical Americans to just let this one slide already.   He allowed that Mr. Polanski, "perhaps had committed a youthful error."  A youthful error at the ripe and dewy age of 43?  Comments like these bring to mind the Marquise de Merteuil's riposte in Dangerous Liasions: "Like most intellectuals, he is intensely stupid."

Do yourself a favor, take a look at the list of individuals carping for a convicted criminal's unearned freedom: here.  Or maybe you shouldn't.  Because no doubt it can be difficult to reconcile an admiration for a person's art with a disdain for their impecunious morality.

Filmmakers need conflict, trauma, misdeeds, even rape and murder.  No one wants to see a film where the world is pleasant and everyone is nice to each other for an hour and a half.  Audiences want to see this underbelly as well--in fiction and reality.  When tragedy occurs, we open our eyes and ears for every arduous detail.  But it never stops there.  We don't just want crime; we crave punishment.  There is something particular, even peculiar, in the American character that causes us to empathize with the victimized.  So we yearn for justice, desire it so deeply it goes beyond walls, living in the bloodsong beneath our flesh.

Maybe the judge was going to circumvent the deal to which he had agreed.  Maybe he was going to make an example of Mr. Polanski.  We'll never know.  What we do know is that a repulsive crime was committed.  A crime that demands--even unto the passage of decades--some true measure of justice.