Roman Polanski again

Let’s have fun with this one. The so-called MeToo movement — mostly neo-Marxist agitprop in its motivations and intentions — has shattered the awkward and ill-fitting illusions of modern democratic totalitarianism, breaking the uncomfortable bonds of progressive fellow-feeling at last. Suddenly, beginning in earnest with the exposure of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the left had turned on itself, as the activist female Marxist left overtly attacked the elite celebrity Marxist left, after decades of covering for that elite in a self-interested alliance of mutual backscratching.

One of the most untouchable of sacred cows at the center of the erstwhile backscratching alliance has been director Roman Polanski, a mediocre craftsman responsible for several moderately popular films — but not a single really important or influential one — who found himself permanently ensconced in entertainment lore as a genius, a great artist, and misunderstood soul, mainly on account, not of his work, but of his infamous party life, culminating, most tantalizingly (er, I mean artistically), in the statutory rape of a twelve-year-old girl. The longer his legendary crime continued to go unpunished, the brighter his film career seemed to glow in the minds of his fellow movieland mediocrities and the movie reviewers who make their names and fortunes by doing free advertising for the entertainment industry under the canopy of “art criticism.”

For forty years, this creepy but fun-loving mediocrity has been living on the lam in Europe to evade the evil, prudish U.S. authorities who, for reasons incomprehensible to Polanski’s millions of female admirers throughout the leftist egalitarian art world, insist on trying to catch this convicted rapist and force him to serve the prison time to which he was sentenced in a court of law.

Well, today, on the eve of the general release of his latest critically-acclaimed film, which is apparently a thinly-veiled exploitation of the Dreyfus Affair as an excuse for an allegorical self-absolution, Mr. Why-can’t-the-unwashed-masses-understand-the-special-world-of-the-great-artist? Himself, Roman Polanski, stands accused of another rape from his past — not a “mere” statutory rape this time, but an overtly violent rape of a then-eighteen-year-old woman. The alleged victim declares that she has come out with her story after all these years because Polanski is using his new film to exonerate himself, and she just could not allow this to go on without speaking up.

Is she telling the truth about the rape? Who knows? Well, she knows and Polanski knows. He, of course, is already convicted of a rape in which he claims innocence, so we may, I think, discard his denials of the new accuser’s claims, on character grounds. That leaves us with nothing but our judgment of the accuser’s own long-overdue accusation — and of course the MeToo movement, the fundamental premise of which is that all accusers must be believed at face value, and all accused men are guilty merely on account of having been accused. 

On MeToo grounds, then — buttressed in this case by what we already know, and what has already been established in a U.S. court, about the accused — I think we have no choice but to conclude that Polanski is guilty as charged. Again.

Now, will the grande dames of Hollywood art and American female Marxism buy into this reasoning, and apply their own premises to Polanski at last? My guess is they will quietly answer “No” on this not-so-tricky question; and as we all know from a past generation of female Marxists, “No means No.” Unless the person to whom you are saying “No” is the modern flabby entertainment world’s idea of a great artist, of course.

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