Irrelevant facts about Polanski - The Globe and MailLast updated on Friday, Oct. 02, 2009 08:09PM EDT
The list of things that are not relevant to the arrest of Roman Polanski begins with the film Chinatown and really just goes on and on from there.
It includes his advanced age, 76. France, while restorative, isn't a cryogenic chamber – living comfortably on the lam there for 31 years, one still ages.
The Irrelevant List also includes the current fiscal crisis in California, his many accolades, friends and even Charles Manson. It ends, I hope, with the suggestion, earnestly blogged somewhere, that Mr. Polanski should get a free pass because Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin – for which, incidentally, Mr. Lewis was blacklisted and nearly destroyed.
Obviously, the superiority of an artist's work should not be relevant in a criminal case. Not unless it's going to work both ways. In which case, someone needs to serve serious time for the screenplay of Coco Avant Chanel , which opened this week, and Mr. Polanski arguably should get six months just for casting Nastassja Kinski in the role of Tess.
The fact that Mr. Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz is also irrelevant – by that logic, my step-grandfather was in a PoW camp, so I get to do what, exactly? Shoplift an Oh Henry?
Many have been quick to hint that the charge (Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse to avoid a trial) is a prudish hold-over from a bygone era, but the last time I checked, society was still against sex with children.
This wasn't a case of a man being tried for homosexuality or adultery or “breach of promise.” Mr. Polanski wasn't arrested for refusing to testify at the House Committee on Un-American Activities or for tippling on prohibition whisky.
Rape is not an archaic crime. So the fact that it was the seventies excuses nothing but the decor, not even the Quaalude segment (taken with champagne) that Mr. Polanski gave his 13-year-old victim. He was 42.
Debra Winger has called the arrest “Philistine.”
Which is asinine. Although I won't boycott her films any more than I will the films of the other actors and directors demanding his release – nor more than I would, say, Wagner.
The work is always separate from its creator to anyone but a fan boy – one who needs to assume some relationship with the artist to appreciate him.
The fact that the victim doesn't want the charges raised also isn't relevant. The law must act independently. I don't even approve of victim impact statements; no one should serve less time for a crime because their victim has inarticulate relatives.
The fact that she admitted to not being a virgin isn't relevant. She had had sex twice, she said in her compelling grand jury testimony, but even if we added two zeroes on there and she said “no” to Mr. Polanski, as she clearly and plausibly testified she did, it was rape.
The fact that Harvey Weinstein (who issued a statement referring to Mr. Polanski's “so-called crime”) produced a documentary portraying the director as the victim isn't relevant. Documentaries, like Rosemary's Baby , are art, which can't be cross-examined. That isn't how justice is decided.
It's irrelevant that the crime took place in Los Angeles – the place where everyone goes to play out their talent cards and cash in their pretty chips. You can hear that particular commerce going on all around you there, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, done by bad people; if there's an outmoded, prurient element to this story, it comes from Mr. Polanski's defenders, and it's in their quasi-Victorian suggestion that aspiring actresses have it coming to them.
It wasn't a crime for a girl to agree to be photographed, nor was it a crime for her mother to allow it. Young Alice Liddell was photographed by Lewis Carroll, in the service of art. Was Alice's mother a better mother, because Carroll never vaginally and anally raped her daughter, as Mr. Polanski's victim testified happened to her?
The girl testified she told Mr. Polanski that she had asthma. That's why she needed to get out of the hot tub when he, naked in the deep end, told her to come nearer.
She said she needed to go home, to take her medicine.
“Did you have asthma?” the grand jury asked.
“No,” she replied.
“Have you ever had asthma?”
“No,” she said.
You don't have to have been a young girl in a bad situation, one in which you're trying not to get hurt but are also (so self-conscious, so 13 years old) trying not to be seen to overreact, to recognize the powerlessness expressed in her words. But it helps, and this imbalance that the words express is a reminder of why prosecuting statutory rape, prosecuting all rape, is relevant.