5 Reasons Why the Roman Polanski Story Doesn't Interest Me Much

The truth: I don’t actually care enough about the Roman Polanski story to come up with five reasons I don’t care about the Roman Polanski story. I’ve got one — you’re welcome to flesh out the rest in the comments.

Here it is: I don’t see that the story says anything we didn’t know about our society, and I think it says nothing at all about art or ideology or culture or even the ostensible moral failings of “Hollywood.”

Men — and in some cases women — from every walk of life, political orientation and station in life have coerced, drugged and raped young girls. It's disturbing but true. In “red” and “blue” states; blue-collars and white-collars; businessmen and starving-artist freaks. If there’s some reason I should extrapolate a larger meaning from this particular case of rape -- decades ago and in a rather rarefied circle -- more than any other, it’s unclear to me why.

And beyond that, it's just a celebrity story, and I’m just not that into celebrity stories. Especially one that peaked when I was 9 years old.

Having said that, a few quick thoughts (you knew I would!) ...

There were some who tried to defend Polanski, or split hairs to suggest that he hadn’t really done anything all that bad. Tana did one of the better take-downs of the genre yesterday, calling out the hosts of The View.

Ugly and stupid stuff. But, while I have no empirical evidence to back it up, based on my own cruising of the interwebs the ratio of bloggers decrying Polanski’s armies of deeply insensitive apologists to actual deeply insensitive Polanski apologists seems to be running about 1,000:1.

Having said that, I think asking whether the process of tracking Polanski’s travel schedule for three decades and now going through lengthy and no doubt costly  extradition proceedings -- and then a trial -- is the Los Angeles DA’s best use of finite resources is in no way a defense of Polanski nor is it an attack on the rule of law. Prosecutors make choices of whom to pursue based on practical criteria all the time. And while I guess the law doesn’t concern itself with the fact that the victim of the crime apparently wants to drop the matter, humans inevitably will.

Also, the international politics are interesting.

Finally, just as the sun rose in the East this morning, right-bloggers are saying that the case only proves the age-old theorem: Some Scumbag Who Does Art=Hollywood=Liberalism=Oh My God Obama Raped A Girl At Jack Nicholson’s House and Fled to France!

Best post I’ve read responding to such nonsense comes from Thers at Whiskeyfire: “All These Humbert Humbert Cats Coming on So Big and Sick”