I didn’t want to write anymore on the Roman Polanski thing, but I feel I should, because I’ve been absolutely floored by the number of people who’ve come to his defense, and how shrill they are. And if I’m surprised, then that means something, since I’ve been someone who follows rape cases and the public reaction closely, and have seen every vile kind of rape apology out there, including those issued by the MRAs who want to make rape de facto legal.* But I cannot fucking believe how many people are willing to say upfront that famous film directors should have the full right to rape children, and if you try to stop that, you hate art or something.
Amanda Hess collected some of the most common Polanski defenses—-interestingly, it seems no one has come right out and said that 13-year-old girls aren’t human beings, but toys to be used and discarded by whatever famous men wish to do so, though of course that’s what they mean—-and I have to say that the weirdest one was (where else?) at Huffington Post. Kim Morgan claims she’s setting aside her arguments for the right to rape children, and instead does some film criticism of Repulsion in an effort to suggest that Polanski can’t be a rapist, because he understands women, and their dark desires—-hint, hint, his 13-year-old victim was asking for it when she cried and said no and begged to go home. Polanski knows women better than they know themselves, she says. He knows, apparently, that 13-year-olds are dying to be raped, even if they continue to say no after the fact by pressing charges.
Of course, if you’re going to judge what Polanski believes about rape from his movies, I’d point out that Tess in the movie titled Tess kills the man who raped her, so perhaps Polanski isn’t actually 100% on board with Morgan’s insinuation that rape is some secret desire of women everywhere, and especially of junior high school girls. (By the way, that movie has a lot of flaws, but I always thought the murder scene was an awesome scene, since you don’t know what she’s done until you see the pool of blood from the second floor seep through the ceiling on the first.)
Morgan doesn’t even note that Polanski has done a number of movies where sympathetic female characters are unjustly objectified and ruined by the world, and I’ve often thought there was a strong feminist reading of these movies. Rosemary’s Baby in particular reads as a meditation on how the patriarchy—-characterized not just as evil, but as Satanic—-wears women down, and uses their most human instincts (such as love for your children) to gain women’s compliance. That movie features a horrifying rape scene, and there’s no doubt that it’s rape, and that there’s something more than a little fucked up about the way Rosemary feels obliged to shrug it off. It’s interesting to contemplate why Polanski did Tess while on his champagne and caviar exile tour, since of course it’s based on Tess of the D’urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s story of a woman whose entire life is ruined because she’s raped by….wait for it…..a rich, powerful, older man who is therefore shielded from justice while all the blame is shoved off on Tess. Is he mining his own life for inspiration while still refusing to submit to justice? Trying to suggest that he gets the struggle of rape victims? Who knows? It was an uneven movie, and the book deserves better.
None of this changes the fact that he raped a child and has decided he should have had the right.