The Guardian/Observer and Roman Polanski

“Transgression” makes raping a child sound so … avant garde!

I like the way your name and image remain on the Guardian thread with the note that your comment is deleted, leading casual viewers to wonder what terrible thing you wrote.

Leaving aside Polanski, it seems a little naive and middlebrow, this seeming reluctance to believe that an important artist could be a bad person.

Perhaps you should simply compliment Mr. French on his “newfound sense of freedom” vis-a-vis the personal history of Roman Polanski.

Aha. Nasty remarks about Mr. French’s abilities as a reviewer have been left up. So I guess their excuse is that Chris’s comment and similar ones are “off topic” – the “topic” being narrowly defined as the film being reviewed.

It seems to me that for 20 straight years the Roman Polanski issue has been the number one easy way for people to send the groundbreaking message “I am against rape, no matter what trendy people might say”, and also the number one easy way for people to send the groundbreaking message “I am so serious about art, I think we should separate the art from the artist, no matter what trendy people might say”. What will we do when he dies?

…and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression…

The “led him into” is as an unpleasant as the “transgression”. Is it common for people who’ve been liberated from the yoke of tyranny to feel a need to rape kids? It isn’t a phenomenon I’ve heard of.

Saw The Ghost when they showed it again on tv this week (‘The Ghost Writer’ in the States), and was reminded what a good movie it is. Among many virtues it’s not one-sided, giving the Blair character a persuasive speech in his own defence. At the time of its release, Polanski was arrested in Switzerland. In general I try to resist a conspiracy mindset, but it’s hard to view the contemporaneous Justice Department push against Swiss-based tax evasion as completely coincidental. The movie, a crowdpleaser on a very current topic which got generally excellent reviews, went on to make only $11m in the States. (It cost about four times that to produce. Toy Story 3 made nearly half a billion the same year.)

I can’t fault the clear line you take on this (and Kieran takes too). Exceptions to the law can’t be made for artistic merit. But just as defenders of Polanski often try to build a bogus aura of martyrdom around him, there’s equally a countervailing tendency towards overly judgmental vengefulness among his critics. If I was him there’s no way I’d want to risk being rendered up to it.

Philip French’s attempt to look at how things might seem from inside his head seems perfectly fair, and relevant to the movie he’s reviewing. Maybe you feel “transgression” is too weak a word. Fair enough, and if all you did was point that out then you’re right to be ticked off about the Guardian deleting your post. I’d like to suggest though that it should be possible to have a discussion about Polanski without retreating to well-drawn lines relating to this one issue.

I did a comment as well, making the same points as everyone else. Mine was deleted.
It’s over at my site, if anyone wants to read it.

Philip French’s attempt to look at how things might seem from inside his head seems perfectly fair, and relevant to the movie he’s reviewing. Maybe you feel “transgression” is too weak a word. Fair enough, and if all you did was point that out then you’re right to be ticked off about the Guardian deleting your post. I’d like to suggest though that it should be possible to have a discussion about Polanski without retreating to well-drawn lines relating to this one issue.

Polanski’s take on his liking for nymphet flesh is that he’s just doing what loads of guys like to do. “Transgression”? Rape is a crime. When you are next burgled, complain about the “transgression” that has happened to your house. As for this discussion about Polanski, it was French that started it. He could have discussed the film without the cod psychology.

a new found sense of freedom — isn’t that essentially the reason the Catholic Church has given to excuse their child rape problems from the 60s and 70s?

Felix Gilman’s response to this on Twitter.

bq. pity poor roman polanski, for whom life “is a succession of traps”, e.g underage girls placed temptingly near quaaludes

. But just as defenders of Polanski often try to build a bogus aura of martyrdom around him, there’s equally a countervailing tendency towards overly judgmental vengefulness among his critics. If I was him there’s no way I’d want to risk being rendered up to it.

Had Polanski simply served his ludicrously short sentence, this would have been a forgotten incident by everyone but the victim and her family decades ago. Kindly remember that Polanski is not a fugitive from a rape charge: he took a plea bargain and that trial is long since over. Polanski is a fugitive from a sentence he decided he disliked and had the resources to avoid, and for extremely sensible reasons that is the sort of thing that gets straight up the nose of prosecutors, judges and sensible people everywhere.

The state of California, like every polity in the world, has a strong vested interest in trying to ensure that as few people as possible demonstrate the fact that a large personal fortune puts them above the law. (Even perhaps moreso to the extent that is inevitably true.) Polanski made an informed decision that he would prefer to make himself a symbol of just that rather than serve any time: asking for sympathy after the fact is a little rich.

Chris@20: I shall also “ugh” at patronizing/idealizing so-called common sense. Classism is classism.

Tedra @23 My point was that so far from “this seeming reluctance to believe that an important artist could be a bad person” being “middlebrow”, most people have no problem coming to terms with the idea. I merely cited Auden to indicate that this was hardly an original insight.

I read the young woman’s testimony, which was on-line at The Smoking Gun, I believe. The sad thing was how very matter of fact she seemed to be about it. It seems to have been more of an underage-prostitution thing rather than rape-by-force; the payoff was a modeling gig. It seems clear that the deal was facilitated by the young woman’s mother, abetted by Jack Nicholson, at whose house the incident occurred, and the unnamed female hollywood personality who was in the house at the time. I think a case could be made that that is just the sort of thing that goes on amongst that set, which is why “insiders” were willing to defend him. I do wonder where the original complaint came from?

“Polanski is a fugitive from a sentence he decided he disliked and had the resources to avoid, and for extremely sensible reasons that is the sort of thing that gets straight up the nose of prosecutors, judges and sensible people everywhere.” True, and an important point. Somewhere I read the Polanski believed that, having undergone his 90-day evaluation, the plea deal was going to be disallowed. (Maybe because he showed a fucked-up attitude during his 90.) Perhaps paranoia on his part was not unjustified, who knows? Whatever, it’s hard to feel bad for him at this point. Roses for nobody here.

Somewhere (Emptywheel?) I read some more details about Strauss-Kahn that suggested it started out as an operation to retrieve a bugged blackberry that evolved into a smear opportunistically. It’s well to keep in mind that there’s always more to these stories than us common folk ever hear about. It’s also true that if people would behave reasonably and only put it where it’s supposed to go, these things wouldn’t have a chance to happen.

Bonus points for the conspiracy-theory defense of DSK, though.

Saw The Ghost when they showed it again on tv this week (‘The Ghost Writer’ in the States), and was reminded what a good movie it is. Among many virtues it’s not one-sided, giving the Blair character a persuasive speech in his own defence.

I remember being ambivalent about The Ghost Writer when I saw it, not too long ago, but this is true, and it’s also notable how good a character the PM’s wife is, too. Thanks for reminding me of Olivia Williams’s performance. I just saw her in An Education, and she was excellent.

32: Well, the relationship between a director and scriptwriter, DP or cinematographer, and actors is particularly close, much like the bonds between Hitler and his henchmen, and by working with Polanski they are certainly tolerating and excusing his crimes, so from now on I don’t think anyone should watch any movies starring any actors who have been in a movie directed by RP since the rape.

So there.

I mean, if French is a monster for using the word “transgression”, what does that make Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet and John C. Reilly? Polanski can’t make movies and pay his lawyer bills and avoid extradition and justice without a lot of help. No more Winslet movies for me.

Let’s get some support here, this I think could really work.

I don’t doubt that he is a pretty good filmmaker, I just doubt that he is amazing enough that I’d want to get over the fact that he is a pedophile and ultra-rich fugitive from a couple of months in the county jail.

I enjoyed the BBC Radio 4 Book At Bedtime reading of The Ghost but haven’t wanted to see Mr. Polanski’s film version, even though it got good reviews, precisely because of Polanski’s crime and his evasion of responsibility. I can’t really tell which is more offensive: the denigration of the crime itself, or the imputation that a sudden onrush of freedom made child-rape a natural consequence. Given such a grand achievement of Fail it seems perfectly appropriate that the Guardian would seize the opportunity to add yet another layer of crapness with a misguided censorship regime.

I didn’t imagine I was defending anybody. I defenestrate them all, corrupt products of a corrupt system. (I did like Chinatown.)

A political disaster that appears to be a smear against the Labour Party and left-center parties generally, moreover, if I understand that part of it.

Gosh, I guess my #3 came out all wrong; the people I was lampooning as middlebrows are Polanski’s defenders/sympathizers/commiserators, unwilling to believe that the auteur of Chinatown could be a common sleaze, not ordinary people with enough sense to call a spade a spade.

but boycotting Woody Allen for his bad personal life is like boycotting spam on animal rights grounds. You’re not exactly losing much are you?

I saw “The Ghost” just recently myself, and the I thought the Blair character’s speech in his own defense was a blatant bit of ventriloquism from Polanski himself.

It’s all very well to say I should be able to separate my knowledge and opinion of the artist from my appreciation of the movie as a piece of art, but even if that character’s situation and speech are straight from the original novel (which I have not read), the fact that this is a Polanski movie makes that speech jump out and say “Look at me, I’m the Artist and I’m just like this somewhat sympathetic character!”

…supermen don’t adhere to your reactionary petty bourgeois morality.

During the original controversy over Polanski and his apologising friends and peers, I was reminded of George Orwell’s essay on Salvador Dali, Benefit of Clergy:-

” In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the grounds that he might write another King Lear.”

Shakespeare might get away with it if the girls weren’t that little and he had assaulted them a few decades ago, as long as he had been feted in Cannes and was a winner of the Palme d’Or, or at least Ben Jonson, and all the Jacobean dramatists would be lobbying on his behalf.

As others have said, it’s different rules for the privileged. Uniquely privileged at that. Bill Gates wouldn’t get such a chorus of hearty support in similar circumstances – his geekiness, perhaps, being offered as an excuse for drugging and sodomising young girls. A successful artist has the same kind of glamorous aura as once an aristocrat would have had, and can get away with forcibly tumbling the peasantry if he wants. It’s droit de seigneur.

@ Marshall
I also read the trascript and what I remember is the girl crying and begging him to stop when he tried to have anal sex with her. How very interesting that you seem to remember the testimony very differently.

David Moles @29 the conspiracy-theory defense of DSK

[ears prick up] So is it the ‘conspiracy theory’ or the ‘defence’ bit that’s supposed to be objectionable?

I think it’s the former, that we see here appeal to the curious argument-ending properties of the term ‘conspiracy theory’, as if in some variant of the game Mornington Crescent.

If the idea is that DSK was somehow manipulated into doing what he thought was an assault, that’s not really a defence in moral terms – blame is not of course a fixed quantity*, and DSK is not exculpated by another’s wrongdoing. Cf. Marshall @41.

If on the other hand the idea is that the ‘conspiracy theory’ posits a (much more plausible) setup whereby a consensual act was presented as non-consensual, then that’s a defence of DSK alright, but not of an objectionable kind: the defence is that he didn’t do it.

That’s not a particularly implausible claim in view of the known facts and the wider context, unless kneejerk implausibility is imported by use of the ‘CT’ label.

Gratuitous CT-related point – The Ghost (and the film version – viewed btw, with exquisite moral sensibility, via a moody copy downloaded off the internet) has been receiving approval on this thread, and relies on pointing out just how realistic it is that Cherie Booth/Blair might have been a CIA agent. And it is pretty realistic, in general terms, that someone in the upper echelon of NuLab was just that. The tricker question is who – Mandelson is an excellent candidate – and how formal the arrangement might have been. Of course we can’t count arrangements which are informal and programmatic to the point of being inchoate, or they’re all in the frame.

(Similarly, it’s almost certain that at least one senior journalist and/or editor is in the pay of MI6 – the difficulty is in saying who they are.)

*This is a pet point I’ve been pushing for years, with I think some success. It’s obvious but still often overlooked, largely because so much rhetoric relies on implicitly denying it.

bq. a smear against the Labour Party and left-center parties generally

bq. a blatant bit of ventriloquism from Polanski himself

Neither of these, I think.
Robert Harris was an early Islington-type supporter of New Labour. Like many, he turned against Blair out of disillusionment at his allying himself to Bush Jr. He’s still a well-padded progressive on the right of the Labour movement, of the kind who split off to form the SDP.
Pierce Brosnan’s line in the movie “Cheeky fuck!” is apparently verbatim what Blair said when told about Harris’ book. The speech in the movie about the two queues at the airport was in the book, if I remember right, but it was Polanski’s decision to put it at the crucial point where the two main characters are confronting each other. It’s not a million miles away from Harry Lime’s speech in the ferris wheel, although it’s put in the mouth of a less straightforwardly evil character: are you entirely sure your principles are solid and pure?

me @ 56

All in all, Roger Rabbit may hold up better, implicit racism notwithstanding.

Actually I think he’s Notting Hill in real life, although it’s possible he may have bought his house from Hotblack Desiato.
It’s his brother in law Nick Hornby who’s pure Islington.

34: Unfortunately, I think the reason showbiz works this way is that if actors refused to work with every objectionable, creepy nutcase potentially involved in the process, they would never make a movie. Polanski is extraordinary in the high profile of his act, but what most everyone inside the industry knows (and few people but Polanski himself will say outright) is that the guy is very, very far from being the only rich and powerful entertainment insider to have sexually abused a minor. Refusing to work with him on those grounds — aside from perpetuating the circus surrounding a case about which the victim herself has explicitly said on many occasions that the subsequent 30-year clusterf*** was worse for her than the original crime — but continuing to work with others on the grounds that they have not been outed and one can therefore deny having known this sort of thing, would not come across as some kind of profound moral rectitude. It would look a lot more like grandstanding.

Not like that’s anything particularly wonderful or admirable, obviously. But I suspect it’s the working reality of the industry, and coupled with Polanski’s undeniable artistic talents is part of what kept him in business as a director. In general, I could also understand if the Guardian wants to explicitly avoid every discussion thread about Polanski devolving into a shouting match over his court case — and there’s something to be said for the perspective that if his victim has gotten over it, maybe other people completely unconnected to the case ought to see their way to letting it go, too — but then they should have edited out the allusion to it in French’s review and/or actually applied the principle consistently in moderating. Yet they didn’t do either one. Bad idea.

Isn’t failing to work with a publicly admitted child rapist and fugitive different from failing to work with people who seem a little bit shady and might turn out to have raped? Arguably anyone might turn out to be a rapist, I’ve been surprised by lots of horrible things at various times. There must be some moral difference between not intimately investigating rumors of sexual wrongs and not associating with someone who is in fact known to be a child rapist.

Polanski has a new film out.
People start screaming “child rapist”, ignore the victim’s wishes and vilify his fans.
Rinse.
Repeat.

Btw, make sure you never touch the works of e.g. Muybridge, W.S. Burroughs, Althusser.

Oops — that was to geo, not Sebastian!

@hardingr — it doesn’t actually change the fact that Polanski raped a child. It just means that the victim has been treated incredibly badly by a bunch of people (all men, I think). I expect that a very large proportion of men don’t think that they are committing rape when they do, because we live in a culture where “rape” is imagined as violent stranger rape. We don’t, by and large, accept that ‘no’ means ‘no’, and we certainly don’t live in a culture where women are allowed to change their minds. For many people, consent happens as soon as a woman puts herself in a situation where sex is a possibility. It’s especially hard to accept rape by someone with whom there is already a sexual relationship, but it happens. All the damned time.

@ geo, ADA

I’ll remember in future. Evidently my knowledge of medieval law, custom etc is derived from Braveheart.

men with power and privilege can get away with raping or sexually assaulting women (or other men, for that matter) far more easily, and often act is if they have the right to do so.

Which is what I meant. In future, to make the same point, I’ll find some well attested examples of the treatment of female domestic servants – impregnated by the master, then dismissed in disgrace by the mistress.

It may well be the case that Lewis Carroll was a pedophile, but as he seems to have lived and died without sexually assaulting anyone, adult or child, can’t we read Alice in Wonderland without fear of endorsing degeneracy?

Isn’t Lewis Carroll dead? Anyone?

Juliet was fourteen. The Mme Butterfly, fifteen when the opera takes place, would have been fourteen when married to Pinkerton, since her child is one (or two).

In real life, however, fifteen year old Ariel Durant (b. Ida Kaufman) roller-skated to her wedding with her teacher, Will Durant, with whom she had fallen in love. My great-grandmother also fell in love with her teacher (13 years older) and married him at the age of fifteen . However these were love stories, happy or unhappy, as the case may be, and nothing like what Polanski did. (Woody Allen is only a little less creepy, among other things because it has the feeling of a forced marriage to mitigate scandal).

Apparently Charles Dodgson was a ladies man who hung out with grown up ladies, though he wanted to marry into the Liddell family and set his sights both on Alice and her older sister who was nearing the marriageable age of 16. As far as being in love with pre-pubescent girls, John Ruskin set a fashion for this among Oxford undergraduates, so I remember reading.

“I think the review’s use of the phrase transgression is perfectly okay. He’s not making any statement outside of a film review. ”

He’s making factual statements about what happened to RP in real life. He’s not talking about a character in a movie, or a movie dealing with things like what’s a transgression vs. a ‘real’ evil deed.

Help me out here.

The point is that people might not want to pay their money to a living rapist. Consider yourself helped.

69: Isn’t failing to work with a publicly admitted child rapist and fugitive different from failing to work with people who seem a little bit shady and might turn out to have raped?

It’s not really a “might.” There are many people out there working in industries — basically any form of showbiz that’s swimming in variously under-age groupies and/or climbers of any kind, and that’s more forms of showbiz than you might think — where the known realities are very often every bit as shady as what Polanski did, sometimes even worse. This is ugly and frustrating and not exculpatory of Polanski (though again, the single-mindedness with which unconnected people seem to focus on his case when even the victim is asking them to move on is… really something), but it is a fact. And it does mean that demanding people in the industry Renounce Polanski and All His Works as if this kind of sin were not known to be fairly widespread isn’t going to get much movement, although most of them will not tell you why outright for obvious reasons.

If what you’re hoping for is some real broader change, I think what you would need is a large-scale onslaught on the standard culture in which entertainment industries bring together a bunch of potentially toxic catalysts [booze, drugs, large (or even just moderate) amounts of money, the heady sense of collective creativity (or a less-heady sense of grasping ambition), young and beautiful people both underage and not, old rich men both skeevy and not] and essentially sort of throw the whole bunch of them together in a blender of unsupervised environments. I’m not pretending I have a great suggestion about what to do about all this, I just think obsessing over Polanski is probably not that thing.

My first thought, on looking at the Guardian comments, was that it should be fairly obvious to many (most?) chance visitors that something odd is going on, and that readers who know the Polanski backstory will be able to form a pretty shrewd guess. The percentage of comments deleted is spectacularly high, and growing with time; in cumulative effect, this makes a more effective outcry than the actual deleted content, which presumably spanned a scattershot range from incisive to clumsy. It’s almost tempting to try to take it viral: contra Colin Danby @1, standing up and being deleted in a good cause is surely no dishonor.

But then I reflected on two past experiences with this alleged newspaper (on that topic not to be discussed, per @6), and I thought, how easy it would be for them to notice — even on their own paranoid initiative, never mind after an actual compaign takes hold — and send the whole futile exercise down the memory hole en suite, instead of piecemeal. Ink by the barrel, and all that; best to let it go.

Substance, I think the condemnation of criminals as a class is unjust as well, though for different reasons. Some criminals should be honored for their crimes, but I think the notion of celebrating pedophiles for their sexual orientation is bizarre for the same reason that condemning them for their sexual orientation is. Pedophilia is a fact of their identity, rather than a behavior that merits either praise or blame.

My concern here isn’t just semantic–pedophilia is not a crime in any jurisdiction I’m aware of, although I think many people would like for it to be a crime, and several states, using involuntary commitment to mental institutions, treat pedophiles as though they are criminals.

I think we’re on the same page now, Substance; as you noticed, the point of the post was that condemnation was appropriate for rapists. But in a shift that I don’t think is particularly uncommon, Sebastian suggested that the problem with Polanski was that he was a pedophile. That’s a little like criticizing the Boston Strangler because he was a heterosexual.

It’s the popular conception that pedophiles are, by their nature, rapists that I think it’s dangerous and worthy of rebuttal.

I think it’s dangerous because it lends support to initiatives like civil commitment for sex offenders who’ve served their sentences and encourages vigilante attacks on perceived pedophiles. Do you think that prejudice against pedophiles is a healthy expression of opprobrium around non-consensual sex? Is there some evidence that demonstrates that pedophiles are more likely to engage in non-consensual sex?

That’s an honest question, given that intuitively people who are sexually attracted to individuals who are legally incapable of consent might indeed engage in non-consensual sex more often, but I don’t know if there’s evidence that it’s true. The important follow-up would be whether the category of “pedophile” and “rapist” were so near to overlapping that treating members of the former as if they were the latter was pretty much harmless. I’m very skeptical that such is the case.

Uh, I’m not sure we should give people who characterize their sexual identity around their fantasies about committing acts of non-consensual sex a free pass because the type of non-consensual sex they fantasize about happens to be inherently rather than incidentally non-consensual.

Uh, I’m not sure we should give people who characterize their sexual identity around their fantasies about committing acts of non-consensual sex a free pass because the type of non-consensual sex they fantasize about happens to be inherently rather than incidentally non-consensual.

If by “not give them a free pass” you mean we should hold them responsible for their behavior, I agree absolutely.

If a pedophile can find sexual release through fantasy, I think that’s a healthy response to a very difficult ethical and psychological problem.

I don’t suppose that all pedophiles and rapists, and I don’t believe all rapists of children are pedophiles. Some rapists attack minors simply because they have the opportunity. Conflating the categories of who people are and what people do is rarely helpful.

“My initial post suggested that it wasn’t fair to treat pedophiles the same way one treats publicly admitted child rapists, and it wasn’t the publicly admitted part that I thought was relevant, but the rapist part.”

But we’re talking about Roman Polanski. He is both a pedophile AND a child rapist. Drugging a thirteen year old girl with a mixture of booze and qualudes and sticking his cock in her ass when she says no is rape. The fact that she was thirteen years old makes it child rape. I don’t need to get drawn into fine distinctions about people who may or may not feel attractions to children in order to know that Roman Polanski is well out of bounds.

In theory some edge cases might be difficult. I could be convinced to feel sorry for someone who find his attraction to ridiculously young girls challenging. I can’t be convinced to feel sorry for someone who feels that attraction, drugs them, and rapes them, gets caught, uses his power to plead to a ridiculously light lesser sentence because he threatens to drag the girl through an awful trial, then reneges on it, runs to France, and wants to be treated like some special artiste.

I only have so much sympathy for people and I’m saving it for someone else.

parse, you’re bringing an A-game to a hacky-sack scrum. Let’s take as given that we issue blanket approval to people who keep their sexual lives private and consensual and safe and sane, and reserve the right to be more selective about our approval if any of those four adjectives do not apply, with especially demanding emphasis on ‘consensual’ and probably somewhat relaxed emphasis on ‘private’ in some cases. Let’s also take as granted that individuals who are not causing any form of suffering to other human beings have a right to their own minds and their own dreams. And let’s take as granted that we’re all willing to acknowledge various corner cases exist, and we mostly feel/express opprobrium to cases where the circumstances surrounding ‘consensual’ are less ambiguous than the corner cases. And then let’s quote bad vampire novels and go figure out what to cook for dinner, and move on to other activities similarly no less illuminating and a bit more enjoyable.

Apparently, my comment may have been removed for the following reason (taken from the moderation FAQ page) :

“Q: Why don’t you allow discussion of moderation in comment threads?
A: Because then the conversation could be derailed into talking about moderation rather than the established or initial topic.

If you have suggestions or questions about any aspect of moderation and community participation on the Guardian website, you can write to community.suggestions@guardian.co.uk or cif.moderation@guardian.co.uk (as appropriate).

We occasionally create threads specifically to discuss moderation, but even then, we won’t discuss specific situations, cases or decisions in public, because we feel that’s inappropriate.”

So, I’ll be sending a more grammatically correct version of my letter to those addresses. It will likely state more clearly that most of the comments removed early on were indeed on topic, as they referred to a specific passage in the review — which appears to be within the guidelines. Given that the moderators chose to remove comments that fell within the rules, it seems hardly surprising that subsequent comments also referred to the censorship.

Went to see ‘Carnage’ last night.
It bored and irritated me, the same way ‘Art’ bored and irritated me (and much the same way ‘Art’ bored and irritated Philip French too).
Yasmina bloody Reza. Avoid.

And I liked how the Guardian carries on the English tradition of not caring how foreigners think their names ought to be spelled.

‘Btw, make sure you never touch the works of e.g. Muybridge, W.S. Burroughs, Althusser’.

It’s a deal.

‘You don’t know that Roman Polanski is a pedophile. If you think only pedophiles have sex with 13-year-olds, you are naive’.

I’m struggling with this. Are you trying to say that you can rape a child knowing that he/she is under the age of consent and not be a paedophile?

Has anyone here read any of French’s novels (he writes with his wife under the name Nicki French)? I was going to pick one up at the MKE bookstore, but the plots on the backcovers all involved creepy sex crimes, so I was revolted and bought some Eric Amblers instead. I wonder if the books shed light on the review.

I disagree that the Blair character in the film is presented sympathetically (he is a repulsive, self-pitying shit) but it is true that the case for his war crimes is well presented. But that comes from Harris, so Polanski didn’t have to work hard at it. (I also disagree with whoever said that about Robert Harris handing you the answer on a plate; I was half suspecting her from about half way through the book).

Tess is a fantastic movie. But I’m convinced by the various people who have said one shouldn’t watch his films. However good they are (which is, usually, very).

Are you trying to say that you can rape a child knowing that he/she is under the age of consent and not be a paedophile?

FWIW I’d have thought you can – paedos are attracted to children, and I’m pretty sure this basically means pre-/pubescent ones. An old man who likes 18, 17, 16 y-olds (newsflash – given the opportunity and a lack of inhibition or other obstacles that is a large proportion of straight old men) is not a paedo, and if he gets an extra thrill from the fact that a post-pubescent girl is even younger then that still doesn’t make him one.

I suppose there might also be circumstances analogous – NB but not otherwise comparable – to the homosexual activity between usually straight men that occurs in all-male environments – or perhaps more appropriately, to casual opportunistic bestiality – whereby someone (a vile scumbag, just in case anyone is in doubt) rapes a child opportunistically or for want of a suitable adult victim.

In other words, not akl child-molesters or abusers or rapists are paedophiles, properly so-called. But vernacular usage is it seems moving in that direction.

And now I think I will stop talking about that.

But I’m convinced by the various people who have said one shouldn’t watch his films.

Actually, I noticed most of the various people only suggested that one shouldn’t pay for watching his films. Which is quite a different suggestion…

Harry – those are genuine questions @116 – I’m not clear what the rationale is for not watching the films (or for some related but different policy, as suggested by HV @117).

(Of course bert suggests, plausibly, that it’s a moot point with respect to the latest one.)

I know that moniker from the Counterknowledge forum. If this is the same person, I suggest taking it somewhere else, or raising your game by about 1000%. If not, I’m still not going to dignify that.