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CineSource Collective Narrative
Is Polanski Above the Law? With cinema the only place some of us sit in communion with each other and contemplate truth through art, our star actors and directors can seem sacred and untouchable.
Although not in films, Michael Jackson got a lot of grief for his fondness for boys, allegedly platonic, but he never did any hard time. Conversely, some had it hard. Fatty Arbuckle, the 1920s star who mentored Chaplin and discovered Keaton, was accused in San Francisco of murder, as well as rape. He was tried three times, bankrupted and ostracized before being acquitted and sent a letter of apology.
Samantha Geimer (formerly Gailey), Roman Polanski’s 13 year-old victim, now 44, has expressed what passes as something similar in this case: forgiveness and the desire to move on from the 1978 crime. But victim testimony is not the last word in a rape case, the most falsely accused AND underreported of all crimes. Rape breaks social code, violates matriarchal as well as patriarchal tradition, and breachs sexual selection, which Darwin proved is a natural law.
In the Polanski’s case, there’s little doubt he gave Ms. Gailey, then 13, a Quaalude, the standard 70s “panty-dropper,” over at Jack Nicholson’s (where else?), and cornered her naked in a hot tub – hardly the narrative you’d expect from the director of “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Chinatown” and “The Pianist.” Despite her protests, he penetrated her multiple times, including anally. There is also little doubt that Samantha’s mother was a LA-striver trying to jump-start her daughter’s career, that she drove Samantha to Nicholson’s, and that Sam posed topless there for a photo shoot, voluntarily.
“I don't believe it was rape-rape,” says Whoopy Goldberg, perhaps thinking of someone crawling in a window and grabbing a grandmother. Indeed, Goldberg is seconded by many others from the industry, from Scorcese and Wenders to Allen, Lynch, and Almodovar, although the last three may not be the most unbiased, in light of their subject matter or sexual taste. Debra Winger summarized the Hollywood zeitgeist saying, “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece."
Evidently, Polanski thought he was going to get Arbuckled: “This guy's [the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, who was also accused of judicial misbehavior in the case, as was one of the prosecuters] going to give me 100 years in jail. I'm not staying.” Getting out on bail, after 41 days, due to admission to the crime, Polanski fled for France, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US (surprise, surprise, and which is where Roman was born). Sentenced in abstentia, Polanski has been pursued by prosecutors every decade since, halfheartedly, it is said, although he decided not to go to Canada in the 80s for fear of arrest.
With thousands of men sitting prison, some for life, for a similar crime, why shouldn’t Polanski be extradited from Switzerland (which has a treaty) where he is now imprisoned? The only extenuating circumstances seem to be that Gailey’s mother delivered her daughter into Roman’s grasp, and Polanski himself suffered two extreme assaults, reducible to two words: Auschwitz and Manson.
Does one get any free passes for having their parents die in concentration camps (albeit only his mother in Auschwitz – Polanski himself went on the lamb at age 12 and survived by “Painted Bird”-ing it across the Polish countryside)? Does living in the spotlight (and adoration of many women) raise a man’s libido, self-esteem and entitlement, like Bill Clinton with Monica Lewinsky? Could having your pregnant wife and unborn child butchered by the dark minions of Charles Manson, now mixing in with the Holocaust nightmares, unhinge someone? Yes, no and maybe but it doesn’t seem to give you an automatic ”Get Out of Jail Free” card.
How about the other great artists who have committed crimes: Lord Byron (incest), Richard Wagner (zoological anti-Semitism), Arthur Rimbaud (slave dealing), Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Nazi-supporter), Ezra Pound (Mussolini-supporter), Emil Nolde (Nazi), James Brown (PCP freak and pistol whipper) or Chet Baker (scam artist/junkie)? Should we disavow their work or, better yet, burn it. Or have living artist criminals arrested to prevent the production of further work? Do we want our children to absorb culture created by troubled geniuses, like Vincent Van Gogh? Or how about Jack Abbott, the career criminal but brilliant writer, freed in a campaign led by Norman Mailer, but who killed again – within weeks of his release?
"I don't really have any hard feelings toward him, or any sympathy, either,” says Samantha about Polanski, rather astutely, when “The Pianist” was up for an Oscar a few years back. “He is a stranger to me… Mr. Polanski and his film should be honored according to the quality of the work… It has nothing to do with me or what he did to me."
Certainly, if we were to lock up every artist, musician and filmmaker that used drugs, practiced sodomy or took some things that weren’t theirs – fortunately, there hasn’t been much murder, except in the rap artist community (but we can't go there now) – we would vastly deplete our creative ranks, especially of rebels and edge-cutters. Perhaps the most telling precedent in the court of public opinion is the case of Huddle William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly.
Cursed by a violent temper, Lead Belly did his first time on a concealed weapons rap in a Texas chain gang, no picnic for a black man in 1917. Although he somehow escaped, he was back in the slammer inside of a year for smoking his cousin, Will Stafford, over a woman. But he was pardoned, after seven years, the minimum sentence, after writing and performing a song with religious motifs that appealed for his freedom to Governor Pat Neff. Indeed, the warden and guards, as well as his fellow prisoners, were already Lead Belly fans simply because he was so damn entertaining.
A pioneer of the twelve string guitar, Lead Belly also played the piano, harmonica, violin, and accordion and eventually compiled a well know songbook of folk standards, including “Midnight Special,” the famous get out of jail song, the themes of which he apparently knew well.
Alas, Belly was back in prison five years later, Louisiana this time, for knifing if not killing a white man in a fight. After recording hundreds of his songs for the Library of Congress on portable equipment in the notorious Angola Prison Farm, the musicologists John Lomax and his young son, Alan, carried his next supplication for freedom to the Louisiana governor adhered to the back of a record of Lead Belly’s signature song, the delicate and romantic "Goodnight Irene."
Although prison officials and his family claimed his singing had nothing to do with his release, it makes a good story. It illustrates that even in the brutally racist Jim Crow south, the creation of beauty can mitigate – somewhat – the creation of pain. This places Roman Polanski, if not above the law, alongside it.