Apart from Vanessa George and her fellow abusers of toddlers, there have been two other stories touching on paedophilia in the last week. One concerns Roman Polanski, picked up in Zurich after being on the lam in Europe for more than thirty years. The movie director had at the time admitted to having sex in Los Angeles with a 13 year-old girl. He has lived safe from extradition in France but the Swiss authorities had no compunction about seizing him as soon as he arrived there to receive an award. An international warrant for his arrest was opened only as recently as 2005: I have been unable to discover why it took 27 years to issue this. Now Polanski awaits transfer to California and, presumably, a prison sentence that will see him out: he is 76.
An initial outpouring of scorn from the Hollywood establishment and the French community of cinéastes, aimed at the Swiss authorities, has been countered by a resurgence of outrage among American women, inside as well as outside the movie business. Both stances, it seems to me, have merit and mischief in equal measure.
To take the anti-Polanski case first: by all accounts, Polanski’s encounter with the 13 year-old – characterised by one of his few women supporters, Whoopi Goldberg, as “not rape-rape” – was very far from consensual. The girl repeatedly rebuffed the 44 year-old’s advances; he plied her with alcohol and Quaaludes; he sodomised as well as penetrating her in the regular manner and with his tongue. He admitted his guilt to the sex charges as part of a plea bargain to avoid being tried for rape, administering a drug to a minor and other serious offences. Polanski’s lawyers understood that he would receive a probationary sentence but a loose-tongued judge let it be known that both jail and deportation were on the cards. Having been granted a stay, Polanski fled and settled in France.
I don’t doubt that Polanski is and always has been pretty much of a sleazeball. From the outset (Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, Dance of the Vampires), his work has been characterised by, to put it kindly, moral ambiguity. Soon after he settled in Europe, Polanski took up with Nastassja, the daughter of the German movie actor Klaus Kinski, whom he cast in the name role in his Hardy-based movie Tess. When their relationship began, Kinski was 15.
Polanski's knifeguy (screen grab)
Polanski launched the Hollywood phase of his career with Rosemary’s Baby and crested the wave with his masterpiece, Chinatown. His capacity to behave inordinately has always led me to suspect that there was a particular reason why the director cast himself as one of the hoods that assault the private eye JJ Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson in that succulently dark movie. I fancy that when Polanski’s hood yanked his blade through the crease where Gittes’ nose meets his face, Polanski did it for real. The act is so convincingly violent that the scene was cut when the movie was screened on ITV, rendering Nicholson’s subsequent heavily bandaged appearance impenetrable. See what you reckon: the sequence is posted on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON6UWUN9Peo
Wounded Jack (still)
Nicholson is himself no slouch at diving into low-life behaviour and assuming that women are furnished for his pleasure, of course. It was in his house that the assault on the 13 year-old took place. Do you think Jack has two-way mirrors in his guest bedrooms?
Five years ago, Polanski sued Vanity Fair for publishing a claim that he publicly groped a young woman shortly after the funeral of his wife. The court found in his favour and awarded him £50,000. The case was heard in London rather than New York, with Polanski giving his evidence by video link from Paris. I hope no one will accuse me of libel if I describe the case as in every way a very rum affair.
Director and star (publicity shot)
What are the arguments in the director’s favour? I certainly do not hold that wealth or fame ought to render anybody above the law or beyond its reach. I do feel, however, that the passage of time changes the quality of the case. Towards the end of his life, I found myself having very mixed feelings about the dogged quest of Simon Wiesenthal to bring former concentration camp officers to justice. I do not propose that the crime lessens with time. But I would submit that the criminal lessens with time. I felt much queasiness at the spectacle of ancient relics dug out of their bunkers to be expected to defend their dimly recalled actions from forty or fifty years before. Something of the same qualm attaches itself to the dwindling figure of the one-time enfant terrible of cinematic psychodrama.
Of course, I know full well (not least from close acquaintance with personal experience) that the abuse meted out to children takes time – often decades – to be assimilated and processed into a cause upon which action may be based. Polanski’s victim – I think we may regard her as such – took time to bring pressure to bear on her abuser. Her suit against him was settled out of court in 1993 and she may or may not have received half a million dollars. Her position now is that she “forgives” him and would prefer to let the matter rest. If that is genuinely her view (even if succoured or tainted by cash), it is a consideration that ought to be part of the assessment of this case. What will the Californian judicial system do if she declines to testify against him in a new hearing?
What is more, Polanski’s life and career have certainly been hobbled to a degree by his situation as a fugitive from justice. After Tess, he wasn’t able to get a movie made for seven years and that was the lamentable Pirates. In the 31 years since he fled, he has only completed nine features, as many as he made in the previous 14. In itself, this is a form of punishment. The crime deserves much harsher punishment; or it would, had it been committed in the last decade.
The other recent matter concerns another outrage perpetrated more than thirty years ago. At age ten, Brooke Shields was photographed plastered with makeup and standing naked in a bathtub. The image played its part in winning her a role in Pretty Baby, an American movie made by another European film-maker much interested in precocious sexuality, Louis Malle. Some 13 years after it was taken, the photograph was re-photographed by Richard Prince, an artist whose shtik is to revisit the images of others, and included in a book called Spiritual America. This sparked an almighty row, not about the nature of the photograph itself but about the nature of copyright.
This autumn, Tate Modern has mounted a London exhibition of various kinds of pop art, including the Prince image of Shields. Before the show opened, the Metropolitan police, having got wind of what was afoot, visited the gallery to ensure, as a spokesman put it, that the curator didn’t “inadvertently break the law or cause any offence to their visitors”. The second half of this formulation would appear to be beyond the pay grade of even a high-ranking officer in the Public Taste Squad. As a result, the Prince photocopy was removed from display but many other exhibits of a tremendously explicit kind were permitted to remain.
The US courts have ruled that neither the original photograph nor Prince’s treatment of it is pornographic and it has hence been displayed several times publicly in America with impunity. In London, however, it is evidently deemed to be liable to attract and inflame paedophiles. This contrast with the stance in the States must be rather a disappointment to those who, in attacking Polanski, made the tart remark that in Europe “they” don’t bother over much about the rights of 13 year-old girls.
I have not visited the Tate Modern show. Frankly, I wouldn’t piss on a Jeff Koons if it caught fire. I find the Brooke Shields image rather repellent but my readers will judge for themselves. Shields herself tried to buy back the rights to the image but failed.
Brooke no interference
One intriguing element unites these two cases. The original shot of Shields was commissioned by Teri Schmonn. She is none other than Brooke’s mother. Mrs Shields commissioned the work from Garry Gross who has said that “the photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be”. He was working for the Playboy group at the time. Polanski used photography as his pretext for getting his 13 year-old alone with him and then getting her to remove clothing. But he would never have got her into Nicholson’s house if he hadn’t first asked her mother, telling her that he wanted to shoot her for French Vogue. Given his history and reputation, you might think the mother would at least insist that the girl be chaperoned.
We can all climb onto very high horses when it comes to the thorny matter of paedophilia. But when it comes down to it, I blame the parents.
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