@Zoltan Newberry – Yes, I also had the experience, when I saw that piece quoted, of agreeing with Katha Pollitt for the first time. (I’m optimistic enough to hope it won’t be the last, though.)

@Barbara –
You are right, Barbara.

Katha Pollitt may have just circulated the only piece of her’s with which I will ever agree, and, with it, there’s a photo of Polanski’s victim at the age of 13, and she really looks all of 13. My 15 year old daughter is far more mature looking than that.

Yes, RP truly deserves what he is belatedly getting now.

@CK: My information about the age of consent in the Netherlands (great name in this case) may be out of date- I hear rumors that they are de-liberalizing a bunch of their laws- but I came by it honestly. A “mature” classmate of my son’s, in middle school, was Dutch. Now that I think about it, she wasn’t the kind of girl to second guess a pick up line like, “You know, it’s legal for 12 year-olds in this country!”

As for my personal boycott, I have this thing about contributing to the comfortable lifestyle of someone who has committed a crime for which he has not paid his debt. Sure, my pitiful stand doesn’t really mean anything to Mr. Polanski, but it’s also true that Roman has probably paid a sizeable price in opportunity costs. Not enough, as his Oscar will attest, but he lives under a well-deserved cloud, and for the time-being, behind some well-deserved bars.

@J.E. Dyer – In case there’s any ambiguity about what I’ve written on this thread, I think Polanski should be in jail. I see no inconsistency between that and my continuing to enjoy his better films. Do you?

@Barbara – nicely stated – except that according to this informative reference on worldwide age of consent laws, the age of consent in the Netherlands is 16. 15 appears typical for Europe, with Spain in the lead at 13 – check that: It’s 12 for… the Vatican State. Make of that what you will…

There are a handful of states in the US where age of consent is as low as 14 (e.g., Arkansas), but goes up to 16 where the age gap between partners is greater than a few years or the older partner is older than 18 or 21.

We all understand that “consent” is not the real issue in the Polanski case – except in the sense, as you observe, that the Polanski defenders fall back on a kind of supervening “social consent”: In other words, they’re okay with a sexual E-ticket for artists of sufficient renown, especially ones whose spouses and other loved ones have been viciously murdered, and especially if acts that would count as “serious crimes” for other people take place in utterly degenerate moral environments like Hollywood of the 1970s.

BTW – my favorite Polanski movie is THE TENANT. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a black comedy with strong currents of psychological horror. At the climax, the main character, play by Polanski, has finally been driven to dress up as the former tenant of his apartment (a woman), and throw himself out of her upper story window to his death… except that he manages only to injure himself severely. So he drags himself bloody and broken back up the stairs and throws himself out the window again – this time achieving the intended purpose.

There’s a lot of that going around.

Barbara — you go, girl. Here is an interesting comparison. If everyone wants to steep himself in melancholy irony, consider that Hollywood and the cinematic industry everywhere are rushing to downplay Polanski’s crime and affirm his artistic genius, blah blah blah. There are adults who don’t excuse Polanski, exactly, but wonder if this ancient crime really had to pursue him for the rest of his life. I mean, after all. And so forth.

Now the comparison. There are young American men in their late teens and twenties today who have been branded as “sex offenders” for the rest of their lives because the parents of 16- and 17-year-old girls reported that the guys in question were caught having sex with their daughters — when the guys were 18, 19, and 20 themselves.

We can argue all we want about whether sex can possibly be “consensual” when it involves a girl of 16. But anyone with a brain also knows that a whole lot of 16-year-old girls are having sex with teenage boys who are a year or two older than they are. We also know that the culture today encourages those girls to get on the pill and make sure the guy is wearing a condom, because the pill doesn’t protect you from STDs.

What the culture does not do is encourage those girls to refrain from having the sex. I’m sorry, I just can’t get politically indignant about teenage boys having sex with underage girls who are barely younger than they are. If it’s not a moral problem, to which the answer is, “Don’t do it!”, then what the hell kind of problem is it?

The point is this. Those young guys will have “sex offender” following them around everywhere they go until the day they die. Every job they apply for, the prospective employer will find “sex offender” on the routine background check. Whenever they move into a neighborhood, their residence will be annotated on the sex-offender map. There will be blocks they can’t even live on because they’d be near a school if they did.

Yet they did nothing even approaching what Polanski did, which was clearly assault rape. So bring it on, and tell me how ambivalent we all ought to be about Polanski and the long-forestalled punishment for his old, old crime. When someone starts to care about these young guys branded as sex offenders for something society is madly encouraging their young girl partners to engage in — then it will be time to worry about Polanski.

@fuster (16) and Peter (17): fuster has it right. I’m very surprised at the willingness to minimize, excuse, and otherwise gloss over what Mr. Polanski did. I have to ask: could he have created “The Pianist” without being a child molester? Could he have created “The Pianist” after having served time? Of course, we can’t really know the answer to the last, but it seems obvious that the answer to the first is yes.

It is a self-serving trope, promulgated by the self-regarding, decadent members of the artist community, the vast majority of whom are basically ridiculous, that degenerate or anti-social behavior is a necessary adjunct to their creativity. But worse is that people are willing to give a particular someone a pass because he made a film that was “great.”

One aspect of all of this that no one is discussing is the implicit suggestion that the attitudes of Europeans toward screwing children is more “sophisticated”. This is a Leftist spin on a socio-political tactic. In Holland, the age of consent is 12. We are horrified that girls are married off in other parts of the world at very young ages, but in Europe adults can use children for sex without any particular social compact. Lenin and I agree on one thing: the key to strengthening the State’s power is the erosion of normative family ties, and adult-child sex is an excellent way to accomplish that.

Paul Mirengoff: “Sure, he was a great film director, but then O.J. Simpson was a great running back.”

I was replying to the “nice lighting” post, toad. Didn’t really follow your Churchill comment.

@CK MacLeod – You’re not a big Churchill fan either?