Roman Polanski: US Court Is Like Nazi Germany
Biographer Thomas Kiernan writes,
“Roman just couldn’t understand
why screwing a kid should be of concern to anyone. He’s screwed plenty
of girls younger than this one, he said, and nobody gave a damn…When in
France, he arrogantly displayed pubescent girls under his spell who were
used and discarded, shouting, ‘I love young girls…very young girls.”
Movie Director Roman Polanski: US Court Is Like Nazi Germany
Roman Polanski: “Trust yourself, rather than
putting your faith in God, the law, the state and the ideologies they
embody, or indeed, in other people.”
…by Jonas E. Alexis
You can’t make this stuff up. Roman Polanski and his team of
lawyers have compared the US Court to Nazis! Listen to this: “Mr.
Polanski was as justified in fleeing this Court’s illegal conduct as he
was to flee the Germans who invaded Poland.”[1]Why was he fleeing the US Court? Polanski, the director of movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Ninth Gate, cannot accept the fact that he was caught raping a 13-year-old child. In response to Polanski’s claim, one commenter said:
“The difference, Mr. Polanski, is that the Polish people didn’t rape underage girls in Germany, prompting the Nazi invasion. Despite the standing ovation you get from Meryl Streep, you broke the law and fled jurisdiction, you’re a felon. Not a hero.”[2]
A little bit of background here.
In 1977, Polanski, then age 44, was convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, Samantha Gailey. Polanski asked Gailey’s mother for permission to take photographs of the girl for the French magazine Vogue, and the mother, probably blinded by money and fame, agreed. Then Polanski asked the girl to “change, well, in front of him.” Gailey, who changed her last name to Geimer, remembered,
“It didn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to go back to the second shoot…Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn’t quite know how to get myself out of there. I said, ‘No, no. I don’t want to go in there. No, I don’t want to do this. No!,’ and then I didn’t know what else to do. We were alone and I didn’t know what else would happen if I made a scene. So I was just scared, and after giving some resistance, I figured well, I guess I’ll get to come home after this.”[3]
Geimer testified to her lawyer that Polanski gave her a sedative, and the lawyer declared that “despite her protest, he performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her.”[4] In his defense, Polanski declared on 60 Minutes,
“The girl is not a child. She is a young woman. She’s had, and she testified to it, previous sexual experience. She wasn’t unschooled in sexual matters. She was consenting and willing. Whatever I did wrong, I think I paid for it.”[5]
Geimer was thirteen years old at the time. Blinded by his lust, Polanski could not figure out right from left. Biographer Thomas Kiernan writes,
“Roman just couldn’t understand
why screwing a kid should be of concern to anyone. He’s screwed plenty
of girls younger than this one, he said, and nobody gave a damn…When in
France, he arrogantly displayed pubescent girls under his spell who were
used and discarded, shouting, ‘I love young girls…very young girls.”
Yet despite these things, Polanski’s lawyers repeatedly argued in court that his client “is a criminal only by accident.”[6] What?In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary is raped by Satan in a dream and later bears his child. Sexual deviancy is also a part of The Ninth Gate, a movie which Polanski labeled “an advertisement for hell.”[7] Wikipedia declares: “The movie’s plot is based on the idea that an ancient text called ‘The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadow,’ authored by Aristide Torchia along with Lucifer, is the key to raising Satan.”
This description could be applied to Bitter Moon as well, which biographer Christopher Sandord pinned as “soft-porn melodrama,” filled with “moral corruption, violence, voyeurism, black comedy, escalating claustrophobia.” Polanski declared, “Trust yourself, rather than putting your faith in God, the law, the state and the ideologies they embody, or indeed, in other people.”[8]
If the law has to be abandoned, then moral corruption would politically be fulfilling. This corruption can also be projected onto society through films such as Bitter Moon. Biographer Ewa Mazierska writes that this is actually
“the message we can find in most of his films. Polanski’s anti-clericalism and distrust in the forces of law and professional authority potentially situate him in a sympathetic relation towards his female characters and towards members of ethnic minorities who are oppressed by these institutions.
“This is often, but not always, the case. Those who seek connections between Polanski’s life and work might see a link between the author’s life experience and the ideas he espouses in his films….Unlike his more politically-minded colleagues, he is not afraid to use certain politically incorrect ideas or stereotypes to make the narrative work.”[9]
Like Freud, who flirted with incest,[10] Polanski views incest as a pleasurable thing, something he inserted into Chinatown.[11] Then Polanski lets the cat out of the bag when the interviewer was concerned that most people would view his film “as being very un-American.” In response, Polanski declared that he wanted “to make a Polanski film.”[12]
In other words, to create a Polanski film is to go against the moral order, and to go against the moral order inevitably leads to corrupting the culture through “art.” For Polanski this would invariably lead to sexual deviance, which to him is essentially Jewish. Ewa Mazierska of University of Central Lancashire declares, “Polanski’s films reflect his Jewishness and Polishness, as well as testifying to his nomadic character and lifestyle.”[13]
—————————————————-
After living abroad for thirty-two years in order to escape charges of rape, Polanski was arrested in 2009. Suddenly the Jewish community in Hollywood went berserk. On this issue, the LA Times was conservative, scolding actors and actresses for standing for Polanski.[14] Harvey Weinstein, who became famous for producing films such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape and The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover and co-founding Miramax Film, wrote that Polanski’s rape is a“so-called crime…Now Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes film festival, and I are calling on every US filmmaker to lobby against any move to bring Polanski back to the US, where he could face life in jail.”[15]
Weinstein continued, “Polanski went through the Holocaust and the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, by the Manson family. 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.”[16]
So, since Polanski went through the Holocaust, is he therefore above the law? Here we are seeing a pernicious ideology slithering under the political surface. We must also say in passing that this was one reason why an anti-Jewish spirit was rampant during Hitler’s rise to power.
Jewish scholar Warren Hoffman of Temple University argues that “any piece of culture in which the themes of queer sexuality and Jewishness are put in dialogue with each other constitutes queer Jewish culture, regardless of whether that work was written by an individual who identifies as queer or Jewish.”[17] (Movies such as American Beauty and The Human Centipede, among others, support Hoffman’s point.[18])
Moreover, according to Hoffman, this queer sexuality “has defined Jewish American culture since at least the great wave of the late nineteenth-century Jewish immigration.”[19] Citing the book Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, Hoffman declares, “The nineteenth century…witnessed not just the emergence of the modern Jew but the emergence also of the modern homosexual. This is more than historical coincidence.”[20]
For example, when Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome—“God of Vengeance”—was made into a play in 1923, “the entire cast…was arrested for presenting a work of ‘immoral’ theater on Broadway.”[21] Hoffman describes the play as “Yiddish lesbians,” and “though it is unclear what Asch knew about theories of sexuality when he wrote Got fun nekome, the text seems to lend itself to a reading of sexual inversion, then in vogue as the predominant theory to explain homosexuality.”[22]
Asch was a Polish-born Jewish writer and novelist. Asch’s God of Vengeance came out in 1907, but it was not made into a play until years later. Asch made it clear that the links between Oscar Wilde’s sexual liberation and the play were obvious.[23] Hoffman argues that “Asch’s discussion of a ‘womanmother’ love relationship seemingly evokes Freud’s theory on the development of female homosexuality and the female Oedipal complex.”[24]
Roman Polanski, whether he likes it or not, has implicitly invoked this Freudian ideology in his movies. Finally, Polanski implicitly destroys the “anti-Semitism” ideology precisely because America has been a friend of Jews since the beginning of time. As E. Michael Jones points out, the Puritans themselves were Judaizers.[25] Philo-Semitism is ingrained in the United States, and to say that the US Court is somehow being anti-Semitic is a categorical lie.
[1] Dominic Patten, “Roman Polanski Compares U.S. Court To Nazis Over Order Denying No Jail Time,” Deadline.com, April 14, 2017.
[2] Ibid; from the comment section.
[3] Kate Harding, “Reminder: Roman Polanski Raped a Child,” Salon, September 28, 2009.
[4] “Lawyer: Polanski will Fight for Extradition to the USA,” USA Today, September 27, 2009.
[5] Christopher Sandford, Polanski: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 269.
[6] Sandford, Polanski, 245.
[7] Alessandra Stanley, “Spring Films/Outsiders; Polanski, The Once and Future Auteur,” NY Times, January 16, 2000.
[8] Ewa Mazierska, Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 136.
[9] Ibid., 136.
[10] See E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000).
[11] Paul Cronin, Roman Polanski: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 61-62.
[12] Ibid., 62.
[13] Mazierska, Roman Polanski, 15.
[14] John Horn and Tina Daunt, “In Roman Polanski Case, Is it Hollywood vs. Middle America?,” LA Times, October 1, 2009.
[15] “Harvey Weinstein: Polanski has served his time and must be freed,” Independent, September 29, 2009.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 4.
[18] The Human Centipede was denounced as “torture porn” and called the “sickest movie” ever made. See David Cox, “Is “The Human Centipede: The Most Horrific Film Ever?” Guardian, August 23, 2010; Karina Longworth, “The Human Centipede: Girl-Man-Girl Interrupted,” LA Weekly, May 6, 2010; Jay Stone, “Squash This Icky Bug,” Calgary Herald, September 3, 2010.
[19] Hoffman, The Passing Game, 12.
[20] Ibid., 9.
[21] Ibid., 23.
[22] Ibid., 25.
[23] Ibid., 35.
[24] Ibid., 36.
[25] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008).
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