How is it that Hollywood has made Roman Polanski into a cause célèbre?
He’s a paedo, but he’s our paedo. That’s what bricklayers say. Weird, I know, but there you go. He might have drugged and sodomised that little girl, these bricklayers will say, but he’s had a hard life, and he’s so damn good at laying bricks and doing that slathering thing with his little cake slice that surely that should outweigh the time he took that 13-year-old back to his friend’s house, plied her with booze and Quaaludes, joined her in a hot-tub and… oh no, wait. Silly me. I don’t mean bricklayers, do I? No, bricklayers are the ones who hound them off the site and threaten to go at their knackers with a pair of granite blocks, aren’t they? I mean Hollywood celebrities. Sorry. My mistake.
Can somebody explain to me why Roman Polanski has become a Hollywood cause célèbre? Can somebody spell it out to me, very slowly, maybe as though I was even younger than the girl with whom he had dogged, sedated, coercive sex? They’ll pretend to care about Darfur and HIV and saving the planet but you can tell they really care about Roman Polanski. They’ll hound poor, bonkers Mel Gibson nearly out of town for getting drunk and being a bit of a racist, and they’ll write off Winona Ryder as bonkers for nicking the odd frock, but Polanski shags an actual child and they love him. What’s that about? Is it just because he’s European? Do they think it must be an art form?
When Polanski won his Oscar for The Pianist in 2003, he got a standing ovation. He really did. Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Harvey Weinstein, all of them slamming their hands together like circus seals showing off for bit of fish. Polanski wasn’t there himself, of course, so Harrison Ford had to accept it on his behalf, nodding gravely, as though he were representing some whole other type of person who couldn’t travel, like Aung San Suu Kyi. Five months later, he met up with him in France solemnly to hand it over. In the photos, the pair of them do look terribly dignified. For a nonce and his mate, I mean.
Why do moral compasses go so awry for this man? Since the director was arrested in Switzerland last weekend, Hollywood has been almost as upset as the French. Monica Bellucci is keening, Weinstein has started a petition. They’ll all sign up. Robert Harris — currently working with Polanski on an adaption of his novel The Ghost — described his arrest as ‘monstrous’. And he isn’t even proper Hollywood. Monstrous, Robert? His arrest?
Look, I know the man hasn’t had a very happy life. A childhood in the Krakow ghetto and a mother lost to Auschwitz. A wife, eight months pregnant, horrifically murdered by lunatics, and only because they borrowed the wrong house from the wrong people. I appreciate that it doesn’t get much worse than that. I also appreciate that, at his original trial, Polanski had evidently expected to be treated with the startling leniency which was customary in California celebrity cases, and may have felt somewhat hard done by when it emerged that he wasn’t going to be. Well, fine. But you read the testimony of his victim, which is freely available online, and you tell me whether you still think Roman Polanski is Hollywood’s answer to Nelson Mandela. Three decades on, anyway, the lasting outrage isn’t so much about the man and what he did. It’s the way that Hollywood has just decided, entirely arbitrarily, that it doesn’t matter at all.
Writing in the Independent this week, Harvey Weinstein referred to Polanski’s ‘so-called crime’. So-called? A 13-year-old girl? Is he entirely mad? ‘I hope the US government acts swiftly,’ he continued, ‘because film-makers are looking for justice to be properly served.’ But they aren’t. They’re looking for justice to go away.
It’s times like this that you get a glimpse of the pure lunatic ego of these people. I mean, they only make films, right? I’m sure it’s very hard work and competitive and stressful and all that, but still. It’s not like being a Knight Templar. It’s not like being a brain surgeon. It’s not a thing with actual moral worth. But Hollywood believes, to its very core, that if you are good at doing what they do then that should matter more than anything else in the world. If you can make box-office-busting and award-winning movies — but clever ones, mind, not that populist Mel Gibson toss — then Hollywood believes your life has been as great and as worthwhile as any can be. Bricklayers probably don’t think this at all. I’m really not sure why I got them confused.
I stopped off for a sandwich the other day in a café on the way to work. It’s a fairly grisly East End place just by Shadwell tube. Normally it’s full of builders and suchlike, but this morning it was empty except for one old very bloke with slicked-back white hair. He’d taken an old picture down from the wall, and he was staring at it, fondly. ‘That’s me,’ he said, when I passed.
‘What’s you?’ I said, and he put it down on the counter and pointed. It was a faded photograph of a tank outside some official-looking building in West Ham at the end of the first world war. There was a huge crowd around it, all smiling. Lots of them were in uniform, but near the front was one young man, probably in his late teens, in his civvies. He looked a little shifty. ‘That,’ said the old bloke. ‘That’s me. I’d taken off my uniform so they didn’t spot me. Worked, too.’ And he beamed and went and sat down at his breakfast, and I stared after him, overawed to be in the presence of such living history. Then my sandwich turned up (salt beef and ketchup, slightly greasy, wouldn’t recommend it), and so I nodded at him, and he nodded back, and I left.
When I got to the office, I bumped into a colleague having a fag and I told him about it, still flushed with wonder. ‘He was really 110 years old?’ said my colleague. Oh, I said. No. I don’t think so. ‘Well then,’ said my colleague. ‘You idiot. He must have been winding you up.’ And I suppose he was. Very odd.
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