Absurdity, Allegory and China

Coming clean: I have watched Chinatown more than I’ve watched any other film. I have—more often than I could or care to quantify—played Chinatown roulette: pop in the VHS (80’s – 90’s) / DVD, hit fast forward and stop it at random and watch five minutes for a guaranteed hit of really great art.

The last time I pulled that trigger was three weeks ago, before Roman Polanski wandered into what a petition for “immediate release” is claiming to be an extraterritorial film festival. Or rather, what everyone who is not a peckerwood should clearly understand to be an event reeking of an “extraterritorial nature.” There is also the mention of a “neutral country,” which is a quaint 20^th C. term for Switzerland.

First let me swipe away the “extraterritorial nature” claim that the petitioners seem to want to grant to film festivals. Here’s how the paragraph appears in the petition:

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

Someone spent a lot of time with that sentence. And though there is no mention of the forgiveness of crimes within this natural bubble of extraterritoriality, I would love to hear the legal case being made for what this bluff implies: try imagining Sundance, Cannes, Venice, and New York (among hundreds of others) with the temporary legal equivalency of, say, a Vatican City. Would it be a geographically-bound territoriality or would it be a tony consciousness thing, subjectively measured by the height of one’s imagined notch on the consumable art stick? Would it, say, extend to a dogfighting Show in Brooklyn during the NYC festival where a flaming star might find him/herself laying down a bet as the feds came crashing through the door? Would it allow for it’s own police force? Who would have primary jurisdiction since there would be a temporary nature to the extraterritorial nature of the event? Does this sound like the all-too-familiar “all animals are equal but” privileged niche that allows for anything money and influence can buy? Didn’t Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides deal with this sort of thing back at the dawn of tragedy, when we in the West were finding our performing arts feet?

The petition reads more like a script being shopped, the creation of an alternative reality that will, I swear to God, make money. It is also a not-so-cleverly veiled political threat from the moneyed art class aimed at the current administration. I can only hope that the Obama folks blows it off.

In the race to get new angles on a very old story (longer than any of the literate petitioners seem willing to admit—more on that a little lower on this page) “THE EDITORS” of the New York Times (NYT) have provided a variety of viewpoints on the matter by dangling a sampling of cross-spectrum opinions from notables who are, according to their short bios, qualified to weigh-in on the matter within the hallowed pages of the sadly fading Times. Go and have a look for some fine examples of just how wide the plain can be, even if some of the positions are quite slouched.

For example, Damon Lindelof, “co-creator and executive producer of Lost,” has somehow worked his way into the mix in what can only be an editorial grasp at the early adolescent boy crowd, though why “THE EDITORS” would feel the need to “you know, feel all inclusive and shit” of a group that I cannot imagine even exists much beyond a mandatory high school currents events class (an NYT “fifteen year old male” demographic?) is another Times’ head-scratcher to add to the growing stack of rapidly accumulating editorial gaffs. Lindelof’s free adolescent runoff goes something along this line: those Renaissance guys did all sorts of nasty things, but their pictures still hang on the walls of the Louvre [Lindelof and his wife recently spent a day at the Musée having lots (and lots) of artistic insights and come-uppances via a rented audio walking tour w/headphones] and no one remembers anything except what hangs on the wall. He uses Woody Allen, a signer of the “Free Polanski immediately” petition as a future example:

Because 200 years from now, when my descendants watch a Holo-Ultra-Virtua-Blu-Ray version of “Annie Hall,” they will have no idea that Woody Allen married his own daughter. And even if they did?

Wow Damon! That’s so way f**king cool. Let’s go get wasted with the cast. And, ohh yeah, before I get too trashed to forget, Woody Allen didn’t marry his daughter. Check it out, dude. But great name for your show, man. Great name. You, like, really seem to know a lot about it.

And then there is Mark Bauerlein, an Emory English prof, who uses his hem-and-haw academic dodge in such a way as to be able to deny long into the future that he said anything that anyone could ever possibly claim he said, no matter which side of the straddled fence the claim may come from.

The free Polanski-ites have created a post-messy fundamentalist production of Oedipus where the big guy (lame from child abuse, let me tell ya) still learns it all—that he is a father-killing, mother-marrying, half-sibling to what he thought were only and just his children—and who still finds his wife swinging from a rope, though at that very moment of utter and awful realization, unlike the original, both the play and a newly invented mysterious player step into the boudoir just as Oedipus is about to gouge out his eyes, when the new guy grabs the wretched tyrannos and stops him from going all bloody, announcing, “It’s okay Oedipus! God loves you!” thereby saving him from a life of blind, homeless wanderings through the mythic landscape. Oedipus off the hook is Uncle Walt on acid, where Agamemnon splashes about in a backyard Argolid sauna in a wholesome family threesome with Cassandra and Clytemnestra who are both tastefully outfitted in one-piece, sans cleavage, bathing suits. Or Medea with her children in an Athenian theme park, watching, smiling and being the vigilant mother as the boys take a few spins on the slave-cranked merry-go-round, the world somehow, miraculously, ordered. Fade to black.

Polanski chose his path, the one that has led to his incarceration in the “neutral country” of Switzerland awaiting possible extradition back to the US, when he flew the LA coop. His guilt is certainly not in question: he admits to having had sex with a thirteen year old after mentally undoing her with alcohol and drugs. You can blame his flight on post- ________ (fill in the blank) trauma, though in the end that really doesn’t matter. Or at least it hasn’t mattered for many others who have experienced life’s traumas and then went on to rape under-aged young women, no matter if, as Angelica Huston who was in the house at the time of the crime, said, “She did not look like a 13-year-old scared little thing,” or not.

Should he get a bye? Well, I’m not the one to pass judgment on that, but if I were the one with the gavel I’d be making him dance the dance. Art, the insatiable hunter, demands that much, which is something that Martin Scorcese and all the others who signed the petition, seem to have forgotten. But they all know there’s a good movie here, and one of them will, no doubt, make it. And I swear to God, it’ll make a lot of money! Maybe even resurrect a career.