The War over Roman Polanski

Should Roman Polanski be extradited to the US over his statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in March 1977? It's an interesting legal question. But it's not the question that is driving the trans-Atlantic furore that followed the film director's arrest in Switzerland last weekend.

Instead, various prejudices and unresolved battles are being projected on to l'affaire Polanski, robbing it of its legal complexities and turning it into a proxy culture war in which clapped-out conservatives and disoriented liberals are hurling intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) grenades at one another.

Polanski, the Polish-French maker of some decent films (Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, The Pianist) and some awful ones too (Frantic, The Dance of the Vampires), pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles court in 1977 to having sexual intercourse with a minor.

On March 10, 1977, then 44, he had taken Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old child model, to the home of Jack Nicholson in Mulholland, California, where he said he was going to take photographs of her for the French edition of Vogue. After taking the photos, he gave Gailey champagne and a sedative and performed oral sex, intercourse and sodomy on her while she said: "No, I don't want to do this." The original charges against Polanski were "rape by use of drugs, sodomy, and a lewd and lascivious act with a child under the age of 14". As part of a plea bargain Polanski got it reduced to "sexual intercourse with a minor".

When he realised that even this charge could land him in jail, he fled the US.

But the newspaper commentary and feverish diplomatic activity that greeted his arrest in Switzerland have not been concerned with the facts of the case, the question of legal precedents or the issue of justice.

Instead, Polanski has been turned into a symbol. For conservatives, still convinced that the 1960s are the root of all evil, he is symbolic of the perversions allegedly unleashed by the naked, hippie, free-love liberations of the countercultural period, with his rape of a 13-year-old girl seen virtually as the logical end product of legalising drug use and encouraging people to be sexually experimental.

For liberals he is a symbol of tortured European artistry who is being victimised by an ugly and prudish America. For US officials, Polanski symbolises European degeneracy and they fantasise that returning him to an American jail will be a victory for Reaganite decency over French moral turpitude.

For French officials, meanwhile, Polanski is a symbol of Europe's gallant recovery from its dark past (Polanski and his family, Polish Jews, were persecuted during the Holocaust), who is being tortured anew by "the darker side of America, the side that scares us all".

Just as Mia Farrow's Rosemary was a vessel for the devil in Rosemary's Baby, so Polanski has been turned into a vessel for all sorts of political jibber-jabber today.

It is striking how quickly the discussion of what Polanski, one man, did to Gailey, one girl, twists and turns into a discussion about competing moral values and even clashing national standards. For 60s-baiting conservatives, Polanski has long been a rotting symbol of everything that is wrong with that decade.

Both Polanski's experience of a terrible crime in 1969 and his execution of a crime in 1977 are held up as evidence of the darker side of the 60s and why a diet of sexual looseness, rock'n'roll and drugs is a Bad Thing.

In 1969, Polanski's wife Sharon Tate, a beautiful actress, was brutally murdered by Charles Manson's cult, the Family. Family members stabbed to death Tate and four others at Polanski's home in California while he was away; Tate was 8 1/2 months pregnant.

That crime, carried out by a tiny cult of weird hippies, has been cited by US conservatives as the neat conclusion to a decade in which traditional values had collapsed under the weight of a new generation that was less respectful than its 50s forebears; it was the "dark side of the California dream", as one writer argued, a product of the "political, social and cultural turbulence of the 1960s".

The Manson crimes have been analysed more than any other serial-killing episodes in US history because they have been elevated from the realm of crime to the world of politics and morality, used by conservatives to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the collapse of traditional values in the 60s (instead it was all the fault of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, drugs and other things loved by Manson) and to depict sexual liberation and social experimentation as having necessarily brutal consequences.

Yet just as Polanski was a victim of alleged 60s excesses, so he was a rapacious product of those excesses, too. Any sympathy for Polanski dried up following his conviction for unlawful intercourse in 1977. This, too, conservatives argued, was part of the degeneracy of the American west coast in the mid to late-20th century; it sprang from a determination to "push back the boundaries of sexual liberation", as one report said this week.

Some American law enforcers and right-wing commentators seem to imagine that having Polanski returned to the US will finally end the odious influence of the 60s on society. Under the headline "Why we dislike the French" one conservative columnist asks how liberal Europe can "support a child rapist".

Yet if this attempt to write off 60s sexual liberation (some of which was progressive, some of which was solipsistic) on the back of Polanski's past is bad, then the defence of Polanski by European government officials and commentators is even worse.

They are motivated not by anything remotely related to legal norms or questions of justice but by a snobbish anti-Americanism in which Polanski (who is probably a bit of a creep) becomes recast as a paragon of European decency against hung-up America.

So determined are some liberal observers to use l'affaire Polanski to get one over on the US that they have even forgotten about their normal role of stoking up hysterical panics about pedophiles and have re-depicted Polanski's encounter with Gailey as just an over-exuberant heavy-petting session. European liberals rallied to Polanski's defence against what Frederic Mitterrand, nephew of the former French president and a friend of Polanski, described as a senseless and outrageous arrest that springs from "the darker side of America, the one that scares us all".

In short, Polanski is not merely being pursued under an old legalistic arrest warrant, the kind that exists for many fugitives, but is the European victim of evil America.

One French commentator says the US is "acting out some kind of prudish revenge" against a "great talent who never abided by American rules". Here, Polanski's actions in 1977 are presented as a bit of rule-breaking and anyone who thinks he should be punished for them is clearly an un-arty prude.

But whatever you think of the arrest warrant against Polanski and the motivations of US law enforcers, it is not prudish to think that performing oral sex and sodomy on a drunk 13-year-old is unacceptable behaviour.

The difference between the liberal media reaction to Polanski and to Gary Glitter - the big-haired glam-rock star who in 1997 was discovered to have child porn on his computer - is striking. Where Glitter has been turned by the British media into a symbol of the pedophilic evil that is allegedly stalking our land, Polanski is presented as the misunderstood artist who is the real victim here, of a "money-grabbing American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian judge".

So keen are some liberals to mark themselves out as Not American that they are effectively saying: "Polanski might be a pedophile, but he's our pedophile."

But perhaps the worst aspect of the Polanski affair is the competition of victimhoods. It is testimony to the domination of the victim culture in society that Polanski haters and Polanski defenders have used the language of victimology to make their case.

For many American and British commentators this is all about Gailey, whom they have transformed into the archetypal victim of the alleged great evil of our time, child abuse. "Remember: Polanski raped a child", says a headline in Salon online.

For European observers, by contrast, Polanski's actions can be explained by his victimised past, especially during the Holocaust. We have to understand his "life tragedies" and how they moulded him, says one filmmaker.

Anne Applebaum, a US commentator who spends much of her time in Europe, says Polanski fled the US in 1978 because of his "understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived in Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto." (Applebaum fails to disclose that she is married to Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who is campaigning against Polanski's extradition.)

This spat in victimology confirms that the politics of victimhood dominates debate on both sides of the Atlantic, but in the Anglo-American sphere it is the victim of child abuse that is most sacrosanct, while in Europe it is the victims of the Holocaust who enjoy the most unquestioned moral authority, to the extent that Polanski's fleeing of the US can be excused as a latent reaction by a tortured man to the horrors of Auschwitz.

L'affaire Polanski has become a culture war that dare not speak its name, a pale imitation of the debates about values that have emerged at various times during the past 50 years.

As a result we are none the wiser about the legal usefulness of 30-year-old arrest warrants or contemporary extradition laws, as observers have instead turned Polanski into a ventriloquist's dummy or a voodoo doll for the purposes of letting off cheap moral steam.