From GI Joe to F-bombs, we've reported from the front lines of more than few cultural skirmishes. But none to date boast the impact of the firestorm surrounding Roman Polanski -- the renowned Oscar-winning filmmaker, idling in a detention cell in Zurich, battling his arrest and potential extradition based on his flight from sentencing in a sex-crime case three decades ago. The creative community has rallied in his support. The media ask why an artist should be above the law (and what the law even means in a case riven with judicial misconduct). The public demands blood, and they may get it: Considering the lengthy appeals process facing the 76-year-old, there is the very real possibility of Polanski dying in jail before justice -- however you define it -- is served. Amid all the disconnections and breakdowns, could this be any more of a disaster?
First, the news: Polanski today appealed against his arrest to the Swiss Federal Penal Court, which said it would announce a judgment in the "next few weeks." That's another "few weeks" that Polanski is locked up, signifying an unconscionable disgrace to those film-industry leaders already distressed that Swiss police (at the request of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office) rained on his Zurich Film Festival parade. Moreover, they write in a petition,
His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978 against the filmmaker, in a case of morals. [...] Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renown and international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom. Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians -- everyone involved in international filmmaking -- want him to know that he has their support and friendship. [...] If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.
The petition's signatories comprise a who's who of contemporary cinema: Martin Scorsese, Wong Kar-wai, Pedro Almodovar, Jonathan Demme, Tilda Swinton, Julian Schnabel, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and nearly 100 more luminaries (and counting). They're supplemented by Harvey Weinstein, who mines Polanski's tragic past in today's Independent: "How do you go from the Holocaust to the Manson family with any sort of dignity? In those circumstances, most people could not contribute to art and make the kind of beautiful movies he continues to make." Weinstein concludes with the Polanski defenders' standard coup de grâce, arguing that the director fled sentencing after his 1978 guilty plea for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old because the judge, Laurence Rittenband, was expected to renege on the deal.
Marina Zenovich's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired indeed lays out Rittenband's publicity-hungry strategy, which Weinstein and others have invoked as reason to dismiss Polanski's sentencing and the warrant for his arrest. But as Michael Wolff argues, the film instead motivated prosecutors to revenge. "The documentary reminded everybody that the L.A. prosecutor must be turning a blind eye to Polanski, wandering freely in Europe," Wolff adds, "hence the arrest now is the prosecutor covering his ass."
So. Let's see: We've got the artistic and commercial movie establishment going to bat for an undoubtedly tragic figure -- who, rightly or wrongly, never subjected himself to sentencing for having sex with an adolescent girl. (And anyway, we're reminded, it's all about "morals.") We've got the legal establishment swatting them away, demanding vengeful reckoning at all costs, even if it means unmooring an international film festival from its deeply anchored sense of dignity. And then we've got the media establishment swatting them away -- from Wolff to Whoopi Goldberg, whose coinage of the phrase "rape-rape" in Polanski's defense might have set feminism back at least 40 years. Really, you've just got to see it:
Even the diplomatic community has involved itself in the matter, with the irate French battling the humiliated Swiss, and both battling Hollywood.
But while madly jockeying for position in their race to rectitude, virtually all the parties exhibit an ironic detachment from the public -- the one constituency they all share, and the one that has consumed the Polanski story for decades now with a sort of prurient, insatiable bloodlust. Does it matter to them that his victim, whose family Polanski settled with out of court, forgave him years ago? No. Does it matter that Polanski is one of the most celebrated filmmakers of his time? No. Really, the only closure that seems to matter among the hoi polloi is the one defined by a cell door clinking behind him. Even Polanski's most impassioned and/or rational defenders are being shouted off their soapboxes, ill-equipped to tractably challenge the "child-raping fugitive" card. Indeed, as trumps go, it's a hard one to surmount. (Polanski culture-war completists, however, should check out David Poland's superb Cliff Notes of just such an attempt.)
Amid all the noise, no one has yet to really mention the most unthinkable consequence overshadowing all of this: that Polanski, 76, could die in jail, either fighting his extradition in Switzerland or withering in a cell in Los Angeles. Surely that couldn't be justice, could it? For a Holocaust survivor and Manson Family widower (whose wife and unborn son's killer, coincidentally, died in prison last week) to perish while battling a prosecutor's politically motivated whim, however legally sound? Naturally the "Free Polanski" crowd can't quite invoke this potential the way Polanski's lawyers can -- and believe me, they will. When they do, expect a whole new round of moral volleying to advance the story to dizzying new heights of outrage on both sides -- a kind of mass-pop Cuban Missile Crisis for our time, a stand-off for the soul of cultural sovereignty.
And, God forbid, should the worst occur, expect Media World War -- Europe vs. America, take no prisoners. Expect a destabilized D.A.'s office, maybe even some disbarments. Civil suits on behalf of everyone from Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner to the aggrieved Zurich Film Festival. Human rights-violation claims from the U.N. Endless debates on whether Polanski's final film, the now-delayed The Ghost, was completed the way he intended it. Another abortive Mia Farrow fast. And don't even think you'll be able to find a copy of Chinatown on Netflix before 2011.
"That's not funny," you say. Who's laughing? Not me. The whole thing's just a waste from top to bottom, and there is an utterly real chance it could get worse before it improves. If this isn't a culture war, then I'd hate to see the real thing.