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I just had a think
May. 18th, 2010 11:29 pmFive years ago (http://fpb.livejournal.com/133218.html and http://fpb.livejournal.com/135279.html) I argued that Hollywood was a major influence in the change in sexual morality across the West, and that it tended to impose and treat as natural, out of a sense of entitlement, the very peculiar sexual culture that had developed in its hothouse society where thousands of young people of both sexes, not necessarily well educated, gathered together in an intensely competitive atmosphere - something that was wholly new in the social history of the world. Put it simply, Hollywood people came to find sexual debauchery and practices that approached prostitution as natural and commonplace, and reacted with genuine indignation to any effort to impose on them rules that many of them had never known or had rejected before they were out of their teens.
More recently, I argued that there were reasons to dislike the actions of the Swiss and American authorities in the Polanski case that had nothing to do with any support for the man himself (http://fpb.livejournal.com/420091.html ). I thought that the behaviour of the Swiss authorities was dishonourable and underhanded: they had received this fugitive from US justice, given him refuge, let him buy a second house in the country. Granting that he was of course as guilty as Hell, nonetheless he had not become guiltier with the passage of time; and guilty or not, you do not surrender an exile whom you have protected for 32 years on the 33rd, let alone by a squalid piece of entrapment - not if you have the slightest bit of honour and self-respect. But then, this was Switzerland.
Now I have been thinking about the reasons for his original flight. Certainly, had he stayed and taken his medicine, by now he would be out of jail and quite possibly have restarted his career with critical applause and without the condemnation that overshadowed his life for 33 years and eventually struck him in his old age. And heaven knows that, artist though Polanski is, he would not have been alone. The world is full of artists of all kinds who have spent time in jail, justly or unjustly, and even made use of it to produce great works of art.
But perhaps that was exactly the point. Most artists of worth, other things being equal, would not find incarceration an unsurmountable obstacle to producing good art. You can still write, draw, compose - you can write music even if you cannot play it. Even a theatre actor would not find jail a wholly barren place; jailhouse theatre companies are neither unknown nor incapable of good work.
Polanski, however, was a film-maker. He had never been anything else. And decidedly, a film-maker would be condemned to barrenness for as long as he was in jail. The vast amounts of expensive technical equipment would not be more impossible to procure than the elaborate social setting of technicians, actors, collaborators of various sorts, going well beyond the needs of a theatre company. Over and above this, his ability to control and direct this vast amount of differentiated followers - that is the essence of the work of a director or a producer - would be more than impaired in a context where he always had to answer to guards and prison staff. Cinema is the only artform, other than architecture, which needs an enormous, practically industrial apparatus and some capital. It cannot be improvised, as almost any other art can, by a group of talented friends or a single obstinate individual, with a minimum of apparatus - often just a pen and paper.
Part of it, then, would be that if Polanski had been jailed, the years for him would have been intolerably barren. Even Oscar Wilde had the relief of writing De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he did. But Polanski would have been deprived of the very possibility of meaningful work. You may say, and he would have deserved it. I don't disagree; I'm just saying, look at it from his point of view. Years of barrenness and isolation. That is surely a part of the reason he fled. The rest, of course, is that he was already a Holocaust survivor - with the usual large number of close relatives butchered - as well as a refugee from Communism and the husband of Sharon Tate. Which just goes to show that just being a victim, even to some of the most atrocious crimes imaginable, does not make one a nice person. And finally, one must consider that sense of entitlement, that wholly insular attitude to sexual morality, that I argued long ago was the patrimony of all dwellers in Hollywood.
More recently, I argued that there were reasons to dislike the actions of the Swiss and American authorities in the Polanski case that had nothing to do with any support for the man himself (http://fpb.livejournal.com/420091.html ). I thought that the behaviour of the Swiss authorities was dishonourable and underhanded: they had received this fugitive from US justice, given him refuge, let him buy a second house in the country. Granting that he was of course as guilty as Hell, nonetheless he had not become guiltier with the passage of time; and guilty or not, you do not surrender an exile whom you have protected for 32 years on the 33rd, let alone by a squalid piece of entrapment - not if you have the slightest bit of honour and self-respect. But then, this was Switzerland.
Now I have been thinking about the reasons for his original flight. Certainly, had he stayed and taken his medicine, by now he would be out of jail and quite possibly have restarted his career with critical applause and without the condemnation that overshadowed his life for 33 years and eventually struck him in his old age. And heaven knows that, artist though Polanski is, he would not have been alone. The world is full of artists of all kinds who have spent time in jail, justly or unjustly, and even made use of it to produce great works of art.
But perhaps that was exactly the point. Most artists of worth, other things being equal, would not find incarceration an unsurmountable obstacle to producing good art. You can still write, draw, compose - you can write music even if you cannot play it. Even a theatre actor would not find jail a wholly barren place; jailhouse theatre companies are neither unknown nor incapable of good work.
Polanski, however, was a film-maker. He had never been anything else. And decidedly, a film-maker would be condemned to barrenness for as long as he was in jail. The vast amounts of expensive technical equipment would not be more impossible to procure than the elaborate social setting of technicians, actors, collaborators of various sorts, going well beyond the needs of a theatre company. Over and above this, his ability to control and direct this vast amount of differentiated followers - that is the essence of the work of a director or a producer - would be more than impaired in a context where he always had to answer to guards and prison staff. Cinema is the only artform, other than architecture, which needs an enormous, practically industrial apparatus and some capital. It cannot be improvised, as almost any other art can, by a group of talented friends or a single obstinate individual, with a minimum of apparatus - often just a pen and paper.
Part of it, then, would be that if Polanski had been jailed, the years for him would have been intolerably barren. Even Oscar Wilde had the relief of writing De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and he did. But Polanski would have been deprived of the very possibility of meaningful work. You may say, and he would have deserved it. I don't disagree; I'm just saying, look at it from his point of view. Years of barrenness and isolation. That is surely a part of the reason he fled. The rest, of course, is that he was already a Holocaust survivor - with the usual large number of close relatives butchered - as well as a refugee from Communism and the husband of Sharon Tate. Which just goes to show that just being a victim, even to some of the most atrocious crimes imaginable, does not make one a nice person. And finally, one must consider that sense of entitlement, that wholly insular attitude to sexual morality, that I argued long ago was the patrimony of all dwellers in Hollywood.
