the creepy stuff i did
by Douglas Messerli
David
Letterman Late Show with David Letterman,
October 1, 2009, CBS
Woody
Allen and Marshall Brickman (writers), Woody Allen (director) Manhattan / 1979Joe Bini, P. G. Morgan, and Marina Zenovich (writers), Marina Zenovich (director) Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired / 2008, the showing I witnessed was at the Melnitz Theatre, UCLA, on October 1, 2009
However, unless Letterman threatened these women with dismissals from
their jobs if they did not have sex with him, it amazes me that anyone might
have thought that he could get away with blackmail or that viewers might even
imagine this to be of interest except to Letterman, his wife, and the women
with whom he had sex. Certainly, it can (and evidently has) lead to matrimonial
difficulties and may someday end up as an issue in divorce court, but in my
estimation those issues have no place at all in the minds of prurient American
television viewers, who every day, it seems, are shocked and absolutely amazed
that our celebrities and leaders lead lives as sexual beings!
The
media, of course, mightily fuels this ridiculous outrage. In France or even
Italy, the public and press might hail Letterman as an ordinary man. But here
he is forced to describe his noncriminal behavior as "creepy," as if
he were some strange deviant, hiding his actions from an innocent American
mass. Although the American divorce rate, as some sources show, has decreased
in the last few years by 30%, it is still, according to The Marriage Index, 2-6
times higher than in Canada and European countries. Obviously, divorce may occur
for numerous reasons, yet infidelity is obviously high among its causes.
Accordingly, Letterman may be a very
ordinary man. Why are we so fascinated by the topic?
On
the other hand, if one of these women had been an underage intern, it would be
a different matter. And that is what we must consider in the recent arrest of
Roman Polanski, to whose side numerous Hollywood figures have recently come in
support of his being freed from the Swiss prison and possible U.S. extradition.
At
some point I would like to discuss American and current international attitudes
(largely in response to American pressure) about sexuality and children. As a
society, the rising hysteria about child abuse—and I will assert that it has
reached that level of behavior since it has become something that cannot be
rationally discussed—is dismaying to the say the least. Our viewpoint is based
on a Victorian notion of childhood isolation, a blessèd time of innocence in
which children are to be protected from the world at large, and there is a
certain wisdom, I am sure, in this vision, even if the reality seems to be pointing
to the opposite, that today's children are increasingly behaving, earlier and
earlier in their childhood, as adults (with results both good and bad). Those
facts, also fueled by the media, in turn, fan the flames of further fears which
Americans play out.
Nearly everyone save sexual predators themselves, recognizing the power
adults have over children's minds and bodies, want to protect juveniles from
the sexual advances of men and women who may psychologically hurt them, physically
abuse them, or even kill them; most civilized societies understand those
dangers and seek to protect their young. But at what age to draw the line? We
have somewhat arbitrarily named the age of 18, even though one can enlist,
without parental consent, to go to war at age 17. Evidently, children have
permission to die, as long as do it as virgins.
No
matter what age is chosen to be appropriate, on the other hand, there will
always appear to be exceptions, children more advanced, physically and
sexually, than their peers. And one cannot expect the judge or jury to make
such determinations, to pick and choose among the victims. On the other hand,
in severe cases of murder and mayhem there seems to be an increasing decision
among prosecutors to try some juveniles as adults. Not being a lawyer, I don't
know what kind of criteria goes into these determinations, but it does seem
somewhat hypocritical when we can pick and choose how we can apply life
imprisonment or even the death sentence to underage children, while making no
allowance for their sexuality.
In his 1979 film Manhattan, Woody Allen flirts with this very issue. Recently
revisiting this film, I was a little abashed to remember that the girl Allen
has taken up with after his second wife (Meryl Streep) has run away with
another woman, is a 17 year-old high school girl (Mariel Hemingway). Although
the Allen character is clearly someone uncomfortable with the idea throughout
the film—joking at one point, "I'm older than her father, can you believe
that? I'm dating a girl, wherein, I can beat up her father."—noone else
seems appalled by the fact. Indeed all of Allen's friends in the movie seem to
be involved, like Letterman, in extramarital affairs (particularly the
character Yale, played by Michael Murphy) or, in the case of Diane Keaton's
character, easily shifting from bed to bed. Only Tracy, Allen's 17 year-old
lover, seems to know what she wants—an older lover to "fool around"
with. Not until Allen has sent her packing does he realize how much he misses
her; but she's now 18 and on her way to a new experience in life, a six-month
stay in England, which, incidentally, he had previously recommended to her.
That film received nearly unanimous praise,
and no reviewer I've read seemed at all appalled that it was, in some senses, a
film about child abuse. Maybe because it was fiction it was saved from public outcry,
although one must remember that just two decades earlier Lolita, another fiction about this subject, was banned in the USA.
Allen, one should recall, has had his own sexual scandale, involving himself in an affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the
adopted daughter of Allen's lover of the time, Mia Farrow, a romance she
discovered by finding nude pictures of her daughter taken by Allen. Frankly, I
might describe Allen's actions as far more "creepy" than anything
Letterman has done. Ultimately, Allen married Soon-Yi, and they remain married
today. It comes as no surprise, accordingly, that Allen is one of the
signatories of the petition demanding Polanski's release from jail.
If
in the film-fiction Manhattan Tracy is
apparently more mature than all the adults of that film, the girl with whom
Polanski had sex in 1977, Samantha Geimer, although a mature looking girl, was
not even close to legal age; she was only 13 at the time. Geimer, moreover,
clearly did not want a sexual relationship with her photographer and reported
his sexual advances as rape to the police. Whether Polanski had set out to rape
her or whether his sex with her seemingly arose from a too-intimate setting, a
sauna at Jack Nicholson's house, is not really the issue. Polanski fed her both
Champagne and part of a Qualude before engaging in sex. And even imagining
that, as a sexual swinger of the international set, he was unaware of how
serious Americans took such infractions, he surely couldn't have been so stupid
to think his actions would have no consequence.
Although one might find it psychologically fascinating that he committed
these infractions just a few years after the brutal slaying by Charles Manson
and his dreadful followers of Polanski's beloved wife, Sharon Tate, events all
further interwoven, surely, with his childhood memories of the murder of his
parents in the death chambers of World War II concentration camps, it can have
no direct bearing on his criminal behavior, particularly since he was twice
found to be free of serious psychological problems. It may be fascinating to
consider those issues when discussing his films, but cannot be seen, as some
have attempted, to be an excuse for
his actions.
Finally,
it seems ridiculous to argue, as some in Hollywood have, that he should be
excused from this sexual "slip up" because of his immense talent.
When will we learn that great artists, writers, and other geniuses often
support evil actions and those behind them? I love the writing of Knut Hamsun,
but to do so
one must also accept the fact that he was a supporter of
the Nazi cause and actually met with Hitler. My own thinking about poetry has
been very influenced by Ezra Pound, but I cannot condone his support of the
Fascists and his anti-Semitic writings. Great artists can also be bad human
beings.
Yet
Polanski's acts are even more muddied by the actions of the press, lawyers, and
judge overseeing his criminal case. As Marina Zenovich's 2008 film, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (screened at UCLA soon after Polanski's Swiss
arrest) reveals, from the moment of Polanski's act he was hounded by the news
media, who cast him as the perfect target for Americans who hated the
intelligentsia, were xenophobic, and who feared the sexuality he exuded.
Even after serving his time in the Chino prison, Polanski and his lawyer
were further threatened by the judge, and after flying to Europe, where the
filmmaker was captured in pictures at the Munich Ocktoberfest surrounded by
young women (an event Polanski had not even wanted to attend, but was
encouraged to by a German friend), Rittenband threatened to sentence Polanski
to more time in Chino and demanded, illegally,
that Polanski give up his rights for deportation. Dalton and Polanski refused.
Even the blue-eyed upstanding Mormon prosecutor Gunson admits, had he been
asked to do what Rittenband had demanded, he too might have left the country.
In 1978, after almost a year of such public torture, Polanski illegally fled
the US.
That
the California enforcers are still vigilantly attempting to return Polanski to
the US for sentencing—a sentencing which clearly threatens, as the New York Times recently pointed out
(Sunday, October 11, 2009), to be a less forgiving prison time for his
acts—seems unfair at best.
Although there is little question that Polanski "got off" the
first time around, with a very short time in jail, in the end one must ask what
is justice, what is imprisonment about? Certainly, justice did not win out in
1978, either for the accuser or accused. Why do we imprison people? Obviously,
in part, we incarcerate the guilty as punishment for their crimes. But we seem
to have forgotten that we also jail individuals with the hope of reformation,
with the desire of somehow redeeming their lives. Today, it appears,
particularly when it comes to sex crimes, that we no longer believe in that
possibility. And we all know that some sexual abusers, particularly when it
comes to children, have
committed crimes over and over again. I do think, however,
that we should not presume by such recidivism that all such criminals are
unable to be reformed. Clearly, Polanski has led, in the 31 years since his
escape from America, a productive and seemingly governed life. What can be the
use of trotting a 76 year old man off to prison for a crime he committed at age
44? It seems to me that Polanski has been more than punished for his acts,
unless, as I suspect, we are a terrifyingly vengeful society when it comes to
sex.
Los
Angeles, October 12-13, 2009
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2009).
When I
shared some of the above comments with my M.F.A. students at Otis College of
Art + Design in conjunction with our reading a book that involved issues of
sexuality, I found their reactions very similar to what I feared were those of
the general American public.
Several of my students insisted that
Polanski had to be returned if only to be made a symbol of the fact you cannot
simply escape our justice system and "get away with it."
I suggested that I had never been much
interested in converting human beings into symbols. But even more importantly,
one has to ask what is a symbol?
No
one in my class could say, although one ventured, "something or someone
that means something else."
"Perhaps, but such a trope could also be
an allegory, where every time you see a figure or an image it also stands for
another thing throughout the entire text. A symbol, on the other hand, is not one other person or thing but represents a whole group of possibilities.
"In Eudora Welty's Golden Apples, for example, particularly in the first
story titled 'Shower of Gold,' we are presented with a character, Miss Snowdie
MacLain, a woman who is nearly an albino, who from time to time is visited by
her itinerant husband, King MacLain, who upon these occasions impregnates her,
only to leave again for more than a year at a spell. The MacLain's are
characters, a couple in Welty's fiction, who have a very strange relationship,
but remain credible characters nonetheless.
"Surrounding this couple, however, are
a series of associations, the 'shower of gold' hinted at in the title, and the
fact that she is an albino, unable, at some points, to explain her pregnancies,
information we get from the narrator of this story, Mrs. Rainey. When Snowdie
announces she is going to have a baby, for example, the narrator notes:
She [Snowdie MacLain] looked
more than only the news had come over
over her. It was like a
shower of something had stuck her, like she'd beencaught out in something bright. It was more than the day. There with her
all crinkled up with always fighting the light, yet she looking out bold as
a lion that day under her brim, and gazing into my bucket and into my
stall like a visiting somebody.
"Now that's good descriptive writing,
we feel almost as if we can see Snowdie MacLain, a woman who is a bit confused about
the facts but nonetheless proud of knowing that she is soon to give birth. The
story remains just that, a story. But for the knowledgeable reader, the way
this story is told suggests other things, stories, images, etc. Do any of you
recognize what that 'something else' is?"
None of them spoke.
"In Greek legend we have many
stories about Zeus, his rape of Leda as he transformed himself into a swan, his
abduction of Europa while disguised as a bull, his love of the Trojan prince
Ganymede who was stolen by an eagle sent by Zeus. In short, Zeus, King of the
gods, was a serial rapist.
"Another such tale concerns Danaë,
the daughter of King Acrisius and Eurydice. When the oracle reported to her
father that he would be killed by his daughter's son, Acrisius locked Danaë up
in a cave to keep her childless. But Zeus appeared this time as a golden rain,
a 'golden shower' that impregnated her with a child, Perseus, who would later
kill Medusa, the female monster whose gaze turned people to stone. Perseus
later participated in the athletic games in Larissa, throwing a discus which,
by accident, hit an attending guest, Acrisius, in the head, killing him and
fulfilling, of course, the oracle's prediction.
"Welty's character Snowdie shares a
great deal with Danaë, and reading about her reminds one of that myth and other
such myths Welty weaves throughout the stories of The Golden Apple. Snowdie is not Danaë, but shares things in common with her and the events surrounding
that Greek myth, and Welty's story is enriched by this combination of
associations.
"That is a symbolic relationship. But
it works only if the reader knows the Greek myth. None of you knew it, which is
why, I would suggest most writers don't use symbolism these days. In our
society in which fewer books are read and we have forgotten much of our
literary history, we have lost sight of many of the associations that allow for
symbols to properly function."
As I told this story, I privately wondered
how Welty's brilliant collection—filled with tales of abduction and rape—might
be received today. Would today's readers find the genteel Miss Welty an immoral
writer advocating child sexuality since, at one point, two young twin boys rape
a girl their age?
"Perhaps you mean that Polanski
should be made an 'example,'" I suggested. "But, I might ask, in my
role as Devil's Advocate, what would his being sent back to jail be an example of, to whom would that example be conveyed?"
"An example of our justice system,"
one student nearly shouted. "An example to others that you can't just
expect to run away from your criminal actions and live happily ever after just
because you're rich and famous."
"I have my doubts," I answered, "about
punishment actually preventing crimes. I think most people who commit such acts
as Polanski are either convinced that they are somehow above the law, that it
doesn't apply to them, or that they probably won't get caught. I suppose there
are some potential child molesters out there who might think twice about
actually acting on their thoughts; perhaps there are more than I can imagine,
and the other punishments meted out by the system prevent these men and women
from acting. I hope that's true.
"Yet it seems to me that criminals
will continue to proliferate, with or without examples of how our system
operates. Just look at the overcrowded prisons we find throughout our country.
Never before have our prisons been so full of men and women who have broken our
laws; in 2008 almost 4 million people were incarcerated at year's end" (While
I was editing this CNN reported that this year to date there have been 90,000
rapes! Could that be true, I wondered to myself? Upon checking the statistics
elsewhere I discovered that over the past two years 787,000 US women were the
victims of sexual assault! What can that say about our society, when even rape
becomes, in some perverse way, ordinary? Imagine every man and woman and child
in the state of South Dakota, population 804,000, involved in such acts! I can
only ask myself, "What is wrong with this picture? Could it be that there
is a correlation between our fears about and lurid fascination with all things
sexual and the brutal behavior behind these acts?")
"When I hear, we have to make an
'example' of someone, I think of something like a frontier posse angrily
gathering to track down their man, an event that usually ends in a hanging or a
shootout. Even if this posse were to catch their man and bring him safely back
to justice I suspect any example it might convey would to the law-abiding
society itself, which implies that the example works something like a pat on
the back: 'Good for us! Hooray! We've got a great system of laws.'
"I don't think I like the idea of
turning human beings into examples either."
"Justice has to be served!"
proclaimed another student.
"That may be true," I argued, "but
in this case it wasn't served. Judge Ritterband, as I told you, twisted the
system for his own purposes. Were Polanski to have stayed for his sentencing, I
should imagine his case might easily have been overturned given all the illegal
maneuvers the lawyers from both sides describe. What that would have meant for
Polanski is probably numerous other courtroom battles. Whose justice is it,
finally, to try a man over and over from the same crime? In a sense, by fleeing
the country, Polanski gave Ritterband just what he had illegally demanded.
Polanski deported himself, and for all these years has never been able to
return to the US."
Two of my women students stridently spoke
up: "I think he should be locked up and they should throw away the key."
"Precisely my point," I
responded, "with regard to sex we are a vengeful folk."
At that instant I don't think my students
much liked me.
Evidently, the seemingly non-judgmental Swiss
also felt that the American attitudes towards sex were slightly perverse, and
let Polanski out of prison so that he might return to his home in France.
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