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Remember Roman Polanski, director of
Chinatown and
Rosemary's Baby? Remember that he's been living in France for the past 30 years because he raped a 13 year old girl, gave her a bunch of champagne and a Quaalude and then performed oral, vaginal and anal sex on her? Against her will?
According to this morning's New York
Times, Polanski
was arrested in Switzerland on a 31-year-old international warrant as he arrived to attend the Zurich Film Festival, the Swiss authorities said Sunday.
The director was being held in provisional detention in preparation for a possible extradition to the United States based on an arrest warrant dating to 1978.
Although Polanski was convicted of rape in a California court, his victim, Samantha Geimer, has since "forgiven him."
Film Festival Says Roman Polanski Is Arrested - NYTimes.com.
I suppose there are a lot of questions to be asked: should Polanski have been arrested? Was it a crime if the victim says drop it? Why are the French so dismayed by Polanski's arrest and Americans so gleeful?
According to an article on the CBC,
France's culture minister says he's upset and "dumbfounded" by the arrest of director Roman Polanski, a French citizen, by Swiss police.
'[I] strongly regret that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them," Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said.
The ordeals that Polanski has experienced are indeed many. Polanski escaped Nazi death camps in his native Poland, although his mother died in Auschwitz. Then, after arriving in Hollywood and marrying, Polanski's wife, the actress Sharon Tate who was pregnant at the time, was murdered by Charles Manson's followers.
And then, according to
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a documentary made by Marina Zenovich, he may have been set up for arrest and prosecution by several key players in the LA District Attorney's office, forcing him into his life in exile in France.
Zenovich's film implies that Polanski's arrest and prosecution were far more about a showboating judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, who loved high profile cases, talking to reporters, and generally making a spectacle far more than he loved justice.
Then there's the girl, now a woman, Samantha Giemer herself, who was encouraged by her mother to go with Polanski to Jack Nicholson's house (Nicholson was away) and "model" for Polanski for the French
Men's Vogue.
Sound eerily like the parenting going on with Michael Jackson's "friends"? Yes, but in the mother's defense she did call the police when she found out about the sex. And at the time Geimer said it was definitely not consensual, but it was also not the first time she had sex nor the first time she'd had alcohol. In other words, rape yes, but a "deflowering of innocence" probably not.
So why are the French dismayed and Americans gleeful? What is the nature of these acts: criminal? culturally specific and therefore difficult to ascribe a single meaning to? And should Polanski have been arrested?
The Americans are so gleeful because there are certain beliefs that are at the center of our culture: children are innocent of all sexual impulses, 13-year-olds are children, and sex with children is a crime because children cannot consent to sex.
These are not just culturally specific beliefs, but historically specific as well. As Michel Foucault makes clear in his second volume of the The History of Sexuality, before Modernity and the invention of Childhood as a category that was separate from adulthood, children were most certainly part of the sexual economy (as well as the work economy- it is not a coincidence that "age of consent" laws and "child labor protection" laws happened at the end of the 1800s). Polanski didn't just violate his victim by having sex with her without her consent, he violated American notions of childhood purity.
But why are these notions stronger here than in France? Why is "childhood" not held sacred in the same way and why is it not invested with sexual purity in the same way? The answer for that lies in the Victorian Age, of course. Part of what Victorians did in the US and in England was to create racial hierarchies based on sexual ones. White people were sexually more controlled than racial others, but white women were sexually innocent and pure BECAUSE they were childlike. The conflation of white female purity and childish sexual innocence got tangled up with notions of white superiority over "those people" whose children had sex and women were promiscuous. This was at the center of the drawing of the color line in the US, but it was also at the center of Empire in England.
But Polanski is a Polish Jew living in France. The French have their own racial hierarchies, but they're not entangled with the sexually pure child/white lady in the same way. When France industrialized (later than the US and England) and the bourgeoisie began to dominate not just the economy, but the culture as well, they did not base their claims to power on sexual discipline and purity, but rather having more "taste" and "intelligence." French panic over Polanski is more about him being a Jew and a certain collective guilty over France's role in aiding and abetting the Nazis than it is the erotic innocence of the child.
And so we wait as the authorities figure out what to do with "poor" Polanski: send him to jail in the US or name him a brilliant director and have a homecoming parade in France.