Polanski's Desolate Attic

 I haven't seen the new Roman Polanski movie about the Dreyfus affair (now finally available for the first time in the United States after being released internationally more than five years ago). But a recent review of the film in the New Yorker is not encouraging. In Richard Brody's telling—the movie pretty obviously and unsubtly wants to draw an analogy between the Dreyfus case and Polanski's own exile and criminal conviction. 

This is disappointing for at least two reasons. First of all, the comparison (if it's really what the filmmaker has in mind) is totally misplaced. Dreyfus was famously an innocent man—framed for antisemitic and political reasons by the French military hierarchy. Whereas Polanski to all appearances really did drug and rape a minor many years ago (though he only pleaded guilty to a lesser included offense). So... I'm not seeing the connection here. 

Secondly—if Polanski could see in the Dreyfus affair only an analogy to his own criminal prosecution—that is a depressingly myopic view for an admittedly great artist to take. In a world where far-right antisemitic nationalism is again on the rise in Europe and the U.S.—does Polanski not see any other way in which the Dreyfus affair might speak to our time? He's certainly not been afraid to be political in the past. Couldn't he have given us something more than navel-gazing, in a film about Alfred Dreyfus? 

What Polanski may not understand is that I'm not really interested in "canceling" and boycotting him—or in making excuses for him. My view today of Polanski remains pretty much what it's always been: on the one hand, I've loved every film by him I've ever seen—even the weird ones like Repulsion. Even Carnage. And yet—he also committed an indefensible, cruel crime against a minor half a century ago, and escaped punishment for it by running away to France. 

Both things are true.

I don't know what to say about this other than that contradictions of this sort are not entirely unprecedented among artists. "[T]here are many whose works / Are in better taste than their lives," as Auden wrote in his poem at the graveside of Henry James. Which is odd—since I never knew James's life to be in particularly bad taste. But maybe Auden was asking him to "intercede" on behalf of someone else. After all, Auden also insisted, in a separate poem, that "time [...] will pardon Paul Claudel / Pardon him for writing well." 

To which David Markson once aptly queried (in his novel This is Not a Novel): "Has time pardoned Paul Claudel?" 

Time has not pardoned Polanski, at any rate. True, his crime is a half-century old at this point. But he never faced up to the consequences of his actions or took responsibility for them. He never really apologized or even acknowledged that what he did was wrong. 

And he's apparently still making films that seek to portray himself as an innocent scapegoat—even going so far as to shamelessly appropriate the story of one of history's actual victims of unjust persecution. 

I don't say: therefore, stop watching Polanski films. That would be a loss. Despite being one of the most famous accused sex predators still at large—he has also filmed some of the most achingly empathetic and human portrayals of the impact of sexual violence (see his version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, for instance—the protagonist of which is drugged and raped (in some drafts of Hardy's novel)—in a manner eerily reminiscent of Polanski's own alleged crime). 

I don't know how to reconcile that for you. Maybe there is no way to reconcile it. Maybe human beings just really are that complex. Maybe Polanski uses art to own up to a guilt he cannot consciously or explicitly acknowledge in interviews. 

I'm not asking us, then, to stop seeing his movies; but I'm also not asking us to morally exonerate or defend him. We can separate the art from the artist. His work is in better taste than his life, to borrow Auden's phrase. 

And to the person he victimized—all one can say is that at least Polanski got nothing for his crime—except a half century of exile and disgrace. If that's what he sought for it—he has had his reward. 

And if what he sought was a momentary gratification of a criminal impulse instead—he had that too; and it has vanished with the passage of almost fifty years. I doubt he feels now it was worth it. Or that he ever thought it was worth it. 

In some sense, then—he has had his punishment. Even if it was not in a jail cell. 

I think of what Larkin imagined writing to the victim of a 19th century case of sexual violence. 

Larkin's words in this famous poem (weirdly cited by Margaret Thatcher, of all people, as one of her favorites—if Martin Amis is to be trusted on the subject) were framed as a response to a disturbing first-hand account in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor̛: from a woman who had been drugged and raped in the city's Dickensian back alleys. 

It's a centuries-old crime at this point—but one all too disturbingly similar to the one of which Polanski stands accused. 

Addressing the victim described in Mayhew's account, Larkin writes: 

 I would not dare

Console you if I could.  What can be said, [...]

For you would hardly care

That you were less deceived, out on that bed,

Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair

To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.