Polanski And The Crux Of Art and Excess

The news of filmmaker Roman Polanski's arrest in Switzerland on an international warrant has, for me and a great many others, reignited an old dilemma, probably unresolvable, regarding art and artists: Namely, the indisputable fact that those who create work are often not great, or even good people.

There is no disputing the fact that Polanski is one of the great filmmakers of the post-war era; Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, The Tenant, Tess, Bitter Moon, Death and the Maiden, and The Pianist are testimony enough for that. There is also no disputing the fact that 31 years ago he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl and then fled the United States to France rather than face the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence. Until now, it has been mostly assumed that Polanski would live out the rest of his life in Europe, safe from American justice and free to rehabilitate himself - as he quite successfully done - as a revered elder statesman of cinema.

Polanski's unexpected arrest has occasioned consternation on both sides of the Atlantic. French government ministers are up in arms, claiming that the long arm of American jurisprudence has maliciously seized one of their national treasures. Poland, which was home to Polanski for most of his youth and early adulthood, is equally outraged. These official voices have been joined by filmmakers and artists from around the world, as well as a few media outlets, who have protested both Polanski's arrest and the manner in which it was accomplished.

Given that Polanski has long since admitted guilt (though he has never really acknowledged wrongdoing) his defenders have generally turned to mitigating circumstances in order to make their case; and it must be admitted that there are a few. Polanski has led, in many ways, a hellish life. As a child, he survived the Nazi occupation of Poland by living as a street urchin in the Krakow ghetto. Once liberated, he was nearly beaten to death by a local psychopath who wanted to steal his bicycle. He watched his family destroyed twice over by mass-murdering lunatics, first Hitler and then Charles Manson.

Any one of these psychological shocks would have been enough to send most people around the bend, or at the very least into serious therapy. It is also true that Polanski did not use physical violence to coerce his victim, that he did serve some prison time for the offense, and that there was more than a bit of misconduct on the part of the presiding judge. Even the prosecutors have admitted that the case was mishandled. And, of course, Polanski's defenders have a bit of a trump card in the fact that his victim has publicly forgiven him.

I cannot shake the suspicion, however, that lurking behind all of these various excuses is the fact that Polanski is a great artist. It is decidedly doubtful that so many in Europe and elsewhere would be outraged if a factory worker, office manager, or Catholic priest, for that matter, were finally caught after so many years evading justice for statutory rape. It is much more likely that they would be outraged at the authorities for taking so long to get around to arresting the perpetrator. The simple truth is that many people - and I freely admit to being one of them - very much wish that Polanski had not done what he did, and are sorely tempted to pretend that, somehow, he didn't. Since we cannot deny the facts, we deny, in some way, his culpability; or, we tell ourselves that, in the end, all things considered, all things being equal, etc., it really wasn't such a big deal. And we do this, I think, for one reason only: We love his movies.

It requires a great deal of effort in the face of this to remind oneself that perhaps the foremost reason people get things wrong is wishful thinking. By and large, we do not listen to what we don't want to hear. Indeed, it is not easy for lovers of cinema, and especially Polanski's cinema, to be honest with ourselves and admit that the only really important question to ask about the Polanski case is this: Did he do it? There is no question that he did.

This in turn demands that we ask ourselves whether we think that having sex with a 13-year-old girl is acceptable. And there is another question that plagues us - or, at least, it plagues me - do we really think she was the only one? Given Polanski's admitted preference for very young women and the Hollywood zeitgeist of the 1970s, it seems sadly doubtful. If we answer no to both of these questions, as most of us will, then we must also force ourselves to recall something else: That producing great work does not constitute a perpetual indulgence. Bob Dylan once said, "Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything." This is true, but it cuts both ways. The artist owes no indulgences to the public; but the public also owes no indulgences to the artist, however brilliant he may be.

In the end, however, I fear this may not be enough. I have a vague suspicion - perhaps an unprovable conviction - that those of us who feel pangs of sympathy for Polanski may be suffering from something a bit more disturbing than mere wishful thinking. I do not put myself on Polanski's level, but the truth is that most of us who write, paint, make films, or engage in some other aesthetic endeavor in order to make some kind of a living, are at least vaguely aware of the fact that great work requires some measure of evil.

This does not mean crime or vice; but rather the kind of evil French critic Georges Bataille was alluding to when he wrote, "literature must plead guilty." Great work, he claimed, requires a kind of excess - excess of passion, excess of rationality, excess of religiosity, excess of atheism, excess of morality, excess of immorality - which inevitably transgresses the golden mean that is the most basic ordering factor of society. Bataille was thinking of writers like Blake and Sade; but he could easily have been talking about Polanski, or any of us. Many artists manage to contain this tendency to their work; abiding, perhaps, by Flaubert's dictum that one should be regular and orderly in one's life so as to be violent and original in one's work. Many artists, however, and Polanski is clearly one of them, cannot.

Most of us would like to find some way to forgive him for that. Perhaps because, if only on a subconscious level, we see a bit of ourselves in him and his transgressions; and feel that, in accusing him, we are in some way also accusing ourselves. And perhaps we cover this up with all manner of various remonstrations because we are more keenly aware than most that, as one of Polanski's own characters put it in Chinatown, "Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and place, they're capable of anything." To think this way, however, would be the easy way out. It is to mistake the evil that makes for great art with the evil that violates children. They are not the same. It is possible to be violent and original in one's work and regular and orderly in one's life. This fact alone demands that the artist, any artist, live up to a responsibility that is in some ways more onerous than others. In a sense, the fact that Polanski is a great artist only indicts him further.

Those who make their living by acknowledging and exploiting their own capacities for evil ought to be the most careful in preventing it from bleeding out of their work and into their lives; if only because, when they fail to do so, there are so many in high and low places willing to forsake both reason and basic human decency in order to absolve them of it.

By Benjamin Kerstein:
Reprinted with permission from The New Ledger.