So Roman Polanski has landed himself in a Swiss jail. Expecting garlands from cineastes at the Zurich Film Festival, the celebrated director–whose working career spans nearly 50 years, from the Academy Award-nominated Knife in the Water (1962) to the Academy Award-winning The Pianist (2002) and a forthcoming picture called The Ghost to be released in 2010–was greeted instead with shackles. It is likely that Polanski will, at the time of his new film’s release, be in a jail cell either in Switzerland or in the United States, from which he has been a fugitive from justice for 32 years following his guilty plea for a sex crime involving a 13-year-old girl.
Polanski’s status as a fugitive, an offense for which there is by definition no statute of limitations, has nothing to do with the merits of the situation in which he found himself. (Supposedly he had learned that the judge in his case was going to reject the terms of the plea-bargain agreement he had reached and hit him with a far more punitive sentence–including deportation from the United States, which, oddly, he achieved anyway by fleeing.) It is, strictly and solely, because he escaped the United States after formally confessing his guilt in having engaged in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
There can be no greater violation of a nation’s civil order than a convenient escape from justice. If there ever were a crime that cannot be tolerated, it is flight, in part because it offends the conscience, but even more because of its potentially epidemic effect on the rest of the criminal population. Let one man succeed at escape and he will be followed by the efforts of thousands to follow in his footsteps.
Plea bargains of the kind to which Polanski agreed are not binding contracts, and judges are not required to obey their terms, even though such bargains contribute to the good working order of the judicial system. Claims by Polanski’s proponents and supporters that he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice owing to what they say was an improper communication between the judge and the Los Angeles district attorney’s office are overlooking the plain truth of the matter.
Similarly, the fact that the girl he raped has since said she forgives him, thinks it’s all water under the bridge, and wants to move on–after being paid a large settlement by Polanski–is actually immaterial. It’s very simple. Polanski said he did it, and he ran away when it was time for him to face the music.
There is a suggestion in the words of those who are offering Polanski their support that he is receiving unequally harsh treatment because of his celebrity status. Of course, it was his celebrity in the first place back in the 1970s–as the director of Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, two of the best films of the 1960s and ’70s respectively–that led to his ability to negotiate a plea deal far sweeter than another 44-year-old man who had supplied a Quaalude to a 13-year-old, and then engaged in anal intercourse with her, would have been likely to get.
But it was not his celebrity alone. It was his unique position as a surviving widower of one of the transformative crimes of the 20th century–the pointless, unprovoked, and random slaughter of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and two others by the psychotic hippie Charles Manson and his deranged band of followers. It is difficult, today, to recapture the horror invoked by those monstrous killings, which helped bring to an end the image of Southern California as a peaceful surfer’s paradise and ended for all time the common American practice of leaving one’s front door unlocked.
Nor had that been the only transformative crime Polanski had been compelled to survive; he spent the years of World War II as a hidden child. Both his parents were sent to concentration camps; his mother died in Auschwitz. There is, in the eyes of the older defenders of Polanski, a sense that his existential punishments in life have been so profound and horrific that he has already paid in blood for whatever crimes he may have committed. And that sense had surely played some compensating role in the terms of his plea bargain, which would have limited his time in jail to 42 days served in Chino State Prison.
Polanski the remorseless sex criminal has never effaced Polanski the tragic victim. Far from it. One of the most remarkable moments in recent American cultural history was the announcement, at the Academy Awards in 2003, that Polanski had won the Oscar as best director for The Pianist. By revisiting the horrors of his youth in a punishing film set in wartime Poland, Polanski had somehow managed to scrub himself clean and find himself the recipient, in absentia, not only of a statuette but a standing ovation.
The thing was, it was not just that he had won in spite of his criminal record; rather, it seemed apparent that he had won in some measure because of his criminal record, because he had persevered in spite of his exile from the United States. Polanski’s triumph with The Pianist was a comeback story only the present-day Hollywood community could love, just as his standing at present makes him a purported victim of injustice to whom only the corrupt and malign doyens of the Hollywood community could possibly extend their support.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
