As this great post reminds us, Roman Polanski raped a child.
I have no sympathy for him at all. This was not some quasi-consensual affair with an underage groupie--he drugged a 13-year-old and forced her to have sex with him against her will. He fled the country because he was afraid he'd have to do jail time. He should do jail time.
As the father of three children, I wonder how anyone can have sympathy for a child rapist. I have to wonder also about Harrison Ford (4 children) , Johnny Depp (2 children) , Peter Coyote (2 Children),Kristin Scott Thomas (3 childen) and pretty much everyone who's appeared in one of Polanski's movies since he raped a child. Wonder if they would have been so eager to work with a child rapist an thereby help rehabilitate his image if it had been one of their children he'd raped? Do actors have any conscience at all about who they work with and the implications of the work they do, or are they all just straight up whores?
Idiots are prattling on about how Polanski's genius somehow makes him above the law, but the guy hasn't made a decent movie since 1974. Frantic was an okay Hitchcock pastiche until it veered into self parody in the last third, and otherwise, the guy lost his mojo when he lost his ability to return to the USA.
But still, he made three of the best movies ever. The discussion that follows is about the ending of all three, so if you're planning a big child rapist film fest (cue up some of child-porn fan Jeffrey Jones' movies while you're at it), you may want to stop reading here.
The Fearless Vampire Killers. This is the best horror comedy of all time, and it manages to be both funny and scary, something few horror comedies ever manage. And, at the end of this movie, after many laughs and almost unbearable suspense, evil triumphs. We think our hero (Polanski in his pre-rapist days) (As far as we know) has gotten away clean with the lovely girl, but she's got a fanged surprise for him. Evil is triumphant.
Rosemary's Baby. Again, almost unbearable suspense as Mia Farrow is pimped out by her husband, raped by Satan,and bears the child. She's got the chance to kill it at the end and save the world, but she chooses to nurture it instead. Evil once again wins the day.
Chinatown. Some private eye MacGuffin thing I don't remember except it has something to do with water rights an everything to do with evil John Huston having molested his daughter Faye Dunaway. And of course, at the end, evil triumphs and Jack Nicholson (who would later host a child rape in his house) finds that there is no justice, that this repulsive evil act will remain forever unpunished.
So in Polanski's three great films (no, I'm not counting Repulsion, which is a piece of crap, though evil is pretty well triumphant in that one too), evil triumphs,and in two, (and arguably all three, since what's a vampire but a metaphor for sexual danger) the evil in question involves rape.
The endings of these movies are, for me, sobering and depressing, but it seems that for Polanski,they were inspiring. Who knows what the hell he was thinking, if anything, but it does seem fairly weird that he, the confessed child rapist, went on the lam and lived the high life for thirty years after making three masterpieces in which evil rapists win and their victims and everyone on the side of good suffers. Maybe all the horror that Polanski saw in his real life convinced him that the only way to thrive in this world was to become a creature of unrepentant evil.
And what's sobering and depressing for me is that for thirty years, he was right.
I hope he dies in jail.
