The César Academy defends Roman Polanski and calls for equality for all men
A satirical piece on the French film industry
Press release at March 3, 2020 from the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma
In last week's César Awards ceremony, we awarded Roman Polanski the César for Best Director, prompting a backlash that continues to roil the French film industry. In this statement, we share the thinking behind our decision and call for an end to the discrimination faced by men alive today.
Four decades ago, in 1977, Mssr. Polanski raped a child, then fled from American justice. Still wanted by the courts of California, Polanski is the only film industry professional working today who has an Interpol red notice out on him as he parades the red carpet. This, we do not dispute.
It is the 'And what of it?' where our position and yours may not perfectly align.
You say Polanski should be in handcuffs, rather than pawing nymphs on the steps at Cannes. You say he should be mumbling for release in his seventeenth parole hearing, instead of making press statements about getting "lynched" and showing no awareness whatsoever of the racial irony. You say he will probably never face justice, because, after forty-two years of tanned freedom in Continental Europe, he's going to softly expire in an alpine cottage any minute now.
This is what you say.
But here is our question to you. Why should Polanski be singled out and he alone be held to your new standards? Why is an allowance made for Polanski's predecessors, but not for him?
Let us explain. Think of any great artist. Shakespeare. Michelangelo. Mozart. Picasso. Are you suggesting those men were all sensitive lovers who waited until the third date to ask if he might gently take her hand in his? (Or gently put her hand on his ––, or gently put his hand in her ––?) Are you seriously proposing that, before he wrenched at that corset, Shakespeare sat patiently nodding through all the with-child rumors she'd heard down at the water pump? You think Mozart, before dropping his tights, had her clarify exactly what physical permissions she was granting when she said, "The bit with the violins is pretty catchy, ja..."? Shakespeare had iambic pentameter to write! The time Mozart would have spent clarifying her ums and ahs and get-the-hell-offs could have cost the world 'Symphony No. 36'!
Here is the reality: those men were very probably dickheads by your new definition too. Consent, we remind you, is a very recent idea. Shakespeare, Mozart, Polanski too: these men had a moral duty to their own greatness, and to the metered reality of their own mortality. Meaning: to the swell in their breeches when necessary, because boners are distracting and they had work to do.
The commitment of those men to their own greatness is why we have their masterpieces today. We ask you: what do you people want? Do you not want 'Symphony No. 36' - is that what you are saying? You would rather some meandering waif felt "respected" in those ten minutes than Mozart spent his time creating the soaring masterpiece you're now thinking of using for your third wedding video? Those minutes of that waif's life are documented nowhere; they may as well have not existed. Whereas the work of these men endures forever.
The question we the Academy put to the world today is: do you value "sensitivity in the bedroom" more than you value The Sistine Chapel? Because when it comes to great men, maybe you can't have both. Genius has a price. Sometimes, the genius himself pays it. For example, he ends up with dick rot, or in a pauper's grave, or outed by an inconvenient wife who announces she wrote all his novels. But most of the time, the help pays for his genius. That's why they're called 'the help'. Or 'women'. Or whatever the buzzword du jour is.
The difference between Polanski and those greats of yesteryear is that you know Polanski is a creep. When it comes to Polanski's forefathers, we can only speculate. Contemplating a daguerreotype of the decidedly hairy Dickens, we might struggle not to imagine him pulling his wag out at a cornered chimney sweep. But because no one back then thought to whinge about him to a judge or in their letters, we decline to call him a scumbag. Even though - let's be real - he almost certainly was one. How is that fair?
We have a two-tier system. On one hand: Polanski, hounded because a few people decided to remember and then not shut up. On the other: Shakespeare getting away with it and his name writ large on tour buses in Stratford-upon-Avon. And the only difference between these two men? Their timing in history. Again, we ask: where is the justice in that?
If all men are truly born equal, then the man born in the twentieth-century must be held to the same standards of behavior as the man born in the sixteenth-century. If you're going to heap blame on anyone, make it the bone-idle fluffies in history who never thought to whinge to a judge or in their letters. The laziness of those women is why we have such unrealistic ideas about the men alive back then, setting up the egregious double standard faced by men alive today.
That double standard must end. Men alive today have suffered long enough. It has now been a full three years since the world began demanding accountability from men alive today, and I think we can all agree that is tantamount to infinite persecution.
And so, yes, we the Academy honor Polanski. You say: we have rewarded pedophilia and dismissed criminality. We say: we chose to focus on the man reflected in the work, and not the man reflected in the court ruling, the extradition request, the subsequent claims from other women, and the outrage from almost every feminist alive. We did so after asking ourselves, 'What would Aristotle do?' And it is proudly that we shall continue to judge our fellow men by the same standards as an extinct civilization in whose entertainment women were knocked up by swans.
That is why today we make no apology for refusing to condemn a man just because suddenly child rape is a barrier for most people. Instead, rather than unfairly singling out men alive today for punishment, we call for every distinguished man in history to be investigated for sex crimes. All those twitchy female academics whose sweaters smell of baby bats? Let's have them get to work instead of just carping. All the complaints the lazy women of history failed to make to a judge or in their letters, those academics must unearth them somehow. (And no saying, "It's too hard... The fog of history is too thick." If men in history get to cry "fog", then so must men in the present.)
Only when that happens – when dead men are held to the same standards as the living; when the world knows beyond doubt whether Picasso was handsy with more than a paintbrush, if Alexander Graham Bell only invented the telephone to facilitate his fetish for heavy breathing, and did Marlowe raid more ass than Dulcolax – only then will we at the César Academy accept we might be a little bit wrong and/or deeply fucked-up.
By that time, though, we’ll all be dead too.
Vive la liberté, égalité, fraternité! (But mostly just fraternity.)
End of Press Release
Zoe Marie Bel Newsletter
Get updates on novel 'After The Angels', short story collection 'Hard Place Rock', and poetry collection 'Passengers', as well as news about other projects by Zoe Marie Bel. Newsletter will tickle your inbox approximately every month (intense months of writing may be silent!).
Your email address will not be shared with Viagra merchants, personal injury lawyers or anyone, in fact. You can read more at the hi-octane Winter Bel Arts Privacy Policy.
Notes from Zoe
I'm presently working on a play centered on the #MeToo movement in France, where Polanski is a divisive figure. At least, he is divisive in the arts. Broader French society is less conflicted: "public opinion polls have consistently shown that 65-75 per cent of the population believes Mr Polanski should be extradited to the US" (source) for his assault of a 13 year-old girl.
The satirical "press release" above is a piece I wrote to amuse myself when first plotting my play. In it, I imagine how exactly the César Academy might justify their appalling decision to continue to celebrate Polanski. As you can see, I struggled to find an argument that wasn't insane.
Unfortunately, my piece is topical again, thanks to the French film industry's latest deployment of its creep defense system - this time over Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu faces multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault, including a formal charge presently under investigation. A new documentary captures him behaving toward women and (very) young girls with all the delicacy of a newly-released parolee who's seen only man-tits for 25 years. Despite all of this, there are some who continue to lionize Depardieu for his acting, and to refuse to hold his toxicity toward women against him. This week, 56 prominent figures in French culture (names you've probably heard of but definitely couldn't spell) signed an open letter in Le Figaro, declaring, "Gérard Depardieu is probably the greatest of all actors. When you attack Gérard Depardieu like this, it is art you are attacking."
Strikingly, not one of the signatories of this open letter is younger than 50. Let's not be ageist here. I know plenty of folks over 50 who do not think the movie Green Card constitutes so profound a gift to humanity that Depardieu thereby earned the right to pester and allegedly assault women and girls. But when your opinion isn't shared by anyone born after 1973, maybe it's time to wonder if the values the past has fed you are a good fit for the future.
As for the notion that Depardieu embodies art? I'll agree, so long as he is therefore treated exactly the way we treat art. Placed in a locked room, away from direct sunlight, with strict visiting hours.