At some point as a teenager at school we saw Polanski’s Macbeth and I thought it was fucking brilliant. I was vaguely aware of Roman Polanski due to Radio Four, I knew he was banned from America and had fled to Europe, obviously my automatic thought was that he was clearly fine and America was being weird. After all America couldn’t tell the difference between socialism and communism so you clearly couldn’t trust American judgement. So when I heard it was for raping a minor I rather assumed he’d had sex with a seventeen year old and some US state had overreacted. I’d seen Chinatown and Ninth Gate by the time I discovered he’d drugged and raped a thirteen year old.
Whilst he absolutely did the heinous thing of raping a child, I do find some of the current hand wringing over what her parents were doing utterly ridiculous. The girl had a job and was making her way in the world of work which wasn’t uncommon for her age at the time (my grandma had a job at fourteen). That doesn’t mean she should have expected to be drugged and raped, but I should imagine her parents thought they could leave her to work assuming a level of respect. Sure she was naive to go to a guys hotel room and take pills – but she should be able to do that, any of us should without being assaulted. Anyway, I don’t particularly think that her parents failed her by letting her pursue a modelling career. Polanski did. I’m also fairly sure she views herself as having been more adult than we would view a thirteen year old today. I do wonder if it was interviews with her that led me to think that she had been older at the time of the offence.
So. Death of the Author and Polanski. It occurs to me that I was probably the age that Samantha Geimer was assaulted by him when I was watching Macbeth. He’s absolutely still making money from his pieces and it’s harder to look at such a group project as a film with the ease of a single person piece like a book and see the one person making money from it so boycotting. I suppose people who have enjoyed Woody Allen movies think similar things; Soon-Yi doesn’t think she was groomed by her former father figure anymore than Geimer thinks she was groomed by a system.
I’m sure in my teens I would have said there are few limits that should apply to artists but even then I’m pretty sure murder and rape would have been off the table. What I’d have struggled with I suspect was understanding that it was rape, certainly the European papers have never really reported it as such. And the thing is that extradition charge is denied because of the weird ass legal circumstances it’s not because the sodding rape is being debated legally. He’s not returning because a judge wanted to rescind a deal that had been signed and as far as I can see it’s the right to rescind a deal that gets debated by the lawyers when it comes up whereas the newspapers talk about child rape. Honestly I don’t believe the newspapers talk about that from any genuine place but because it’s sensational.
Why am I swearing about Polanski? Because David Lynch signed the damn letter and it’s the thing that marrs Lynch for me and I bloody adore his surreality.
The thing is, that I am belabouring around and around to try and understand my own mind, that if you assume people were responding to what was public knowledge then I think it makes sense to sign it. Especially when you look at Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein pushing people to sign. It’s a lot of the directors over on the fringes of the weird that have signed it too which is surely yet more explanation. The instinct of the tribe which I hate as much as anything else.
David Lynch is dead and I hate that I am sticking on this. Is this going to happen everytime?