Bill Wyman has a great article on the Polanski Affair, the salacious documentary that confirmed the fanatical belief of many of his admirers that he was the true victim in this care, and on the role that the media plays in this case. Disturbing sugary excerpt:
In "Wanted and
Desired," it's weird how detached Zenovich [the director] stays from the victim, and
how she undermines her in subtle ways. The tone is set early on, when a
friend of Polanski's tells of being woken up and informed that the
director had been arrested. The moment is actually played for laughs,
with interspersed shots of a worried Mia Farrow using the phone in a
scene from "
Rosemary's Baby."
A filmmaker attuned to the psychological undercurrents of
the characters in her drama might have been conscious of the state of a
13-year-old girl, who had just been drugged and raped and had spent the
next period of time at a police station reliving the incident; and
shaken by the story of "Rosemary's Baby" -- that, too, about a
horrifically abused woman.
But the scene isn't used to illustrate the victim's story
-- it's about poor Roman. He's the person making the desperate phone
call. It's an odd juxtaposition when you think about it. That's when
the friend, having just been told Polanski has been arrested, says,
"This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" Here again, Zenovich is
playing with semantics. It's obvious the friend was saying he couldn't
imagine Polanski, say, following a woman down the street and grabbing
her in an alley.
If Zenovich wasn't tipping the scales in Polanski's favor, she could have asked the guy, "Well, what about
statutory rape, having sex with an underage girl? Could you imagine him doing
that?"
We also hear people note, meaningfully, that meeting
someone like Polanski could help a potential young actress's career.
Such a remark about a grown woman would be slightly offensive; about a
13-year-old it's exceedingly so. The girl told police at the time she
had repeatedly told Polanski no; on the screen Zenovich runs a line to
that effect from the girl's grand jury testimony, but immediately
follows it with a quote from Polanski's: "She was not unresponsive."
This creates a subtle he-said-she-said dynamic that, in a case in which
consent isn't a issue, represents another bit of moral prestidigitation.
It's strange to see a female filmmaker anchor her
documentary's arguments with such atavistic attitudes. It gets worse:
In the media circus of the time, some of the European press reported
that the victim hadn't been a virgin.
I feel dirty just hearing people doing everything to justify having sex with a 13 year old girl just because they love the movies or are moved by the personal history of the man who had sex with her. In many less developed countries. perverts who have sex with little girls always argue that their victims are women, that they provoked them, that they wanted it or that they weren't pure anyway. I guess that we can no longer argue that the "West" cares more women than the rest.