‘I’d rather be a dog, and bay at the moon, Than such a Roman…’

Arriving late the debate, I’ve thought long and hard about the Polanski case, in which a famous and respected Oscar-winning filmmaker is facing charges for having champagne-&-Quaalude-leavened sex with a 13-year-old 30 years ago, an incident everyone has known about in the intervening years and gave hardly a thought to. The charges seem indefensible on his part as long as you don’t admit that 13-year-olds sometimes have sex (in Texas if they wait a year they can get married), and don’t admit that you’ve ever plied a woman with drinks in the hopes of getting her into bed. (C’mon, you have. I have.) Hell, it’s kind of indefensible anyway.

But I’ve finally decided where I fall on the issue: I don’t care.

I don’t care because Polanski’s victim doesn’t care, and because it’s old news, and because it’s an ambiguous case with a smattering of judicial chicanery involved, and because the more fiery point being snookered around in the press now, by brickbrows who believe in the destruction of a mythical Hollywood Babylon, is the petitions that have been rather thoughtlessly signed in Polanski’s favor.

But if Polanski goes free or goes to prison, it doesn’t matter to me anymore than does Mackenzie Phillips’s lurid assertions about her father. This isn’t public policy, or even a scandal about people that matter. It’s just a fart in the wind. It’s a semi-abstracted moral question that’s fun to argue about over cocktails. Until it’s not fun anymore. I don’t believe Polanski should “get off” because he’s a celebrity, but neither am I convinced that there’s much “getting off” that should be necessary, given the situation and the years and the rest. Frankly, my gut reaction is that if I’d suffered what Polanski suffered – seen his wife cut to ribbons and the baby cut from her stomach, not to mention escaping the Holocaust – then I can imagine feeling as if I had carte blanche, come what may. But then I might very well have gone to prison, and I wouldn’t expect there to be much debate about it.

Certainly Polanski’s was loathesome behavior, but is it deathlessly criminal decades after the fact? Does the passage of time alter or semi-neutralize the importance of what happened? If I brain you with a tire iron (obviously a less venal scenario), that is assault. 30 years later, what is it? Something even the victim should care very much about? It seems uncertain. Every state, including California, has a statute of limitations for straight-on rape, usually ranging from between three and ten years. Is that reasonable? They’re not applicable to Polanski because he had already pled guilty in a plea bargain deal that the judge was apparently not going to honor. Is that reasonable? It’s a legal boondoggle now, not a case about preadult sex, which is something I could’ve guessed would’ve happened if I’d noticed a young teenager stripping in Jack Nicholson’s jacuzzi while drinking champagne late at night and having world-famous men photograph her.

It’s 2009, and nothing, literally, is at stake. I know statutory rape is bad, but I’ve also known teenagers that screw and do dope, sometimes in tandem. The world still turned.

I do think it’s a good thing the authorities waited, or else we might not have The Pianist, which is a very good movie. Then again, I could’ve done without The Ninth Gate.

I don’t care. Lock him up, set him free.