No Excuses: Hollywood Should Speak Out Against Roman Polanski

In an interview published October 12, 2009 on Bloomberg.com, Francis Ford Coppola was quoted as saying, “the cinema as we know it is falling apart.”  It is due, he explains,  in great part to fresh sources of competition, such as pirated dvds and the contemporary take on the news as “infotainment.”  Well, maybe.  Perhaps people are just trying to save money; perhaps they can’t be bothered with a feature-length film when YouTube, Twitter, or the tickers of 24-hour cable news beckon.  But conspicuously absent from Coppola’s assessment is the real and growing separation between Hollywood’s vision of American life and how Americans themselves view it.  As the kids say, it’s the disconnect.

The current elephant in the room should be particularly hard to ignore.  Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland , and the subsequent outcry of certain Hollywood elites in his support made sharp contrast with the feelings of non-industry Americans on both sides of the political spectrum.   Kate Harding, a Democrat and feminist, wrote a scathing condemnation of both Polanski and his apologists.  Her article went viral; links to it appeared all over the blogosphere, most notably on conservative sites such as Hot Air.  Eugene Robinson, writing in the Washington Post, conceded that perhaps the culture warriors weren’t so wrong about Hollywood after all.  Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg infamously commented that Polanski’s drugging and subsequent sodomizing of a 13 year-old girl wasn’t “rape-rape, ” and luminaries such as Martin Scorsese and Penelope Cruz signed a petition in Polanski’s support.  With few exceptions, the rest of Tinseltown kept its trap shut. Could it be that it is not only Pirate’s Bay and social networking testing our fidelity to Hollywood, but rather our revulsion at a demonstrated willingness at best to ignore, and at worst to rationalize, even celebrate the sordid and the criminal?

Some have argued that people in Hollywood won’t speak up for fear of losing work.  Josh Olson, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, argues instead that as it is so gosh-darn obvious that child molestation is bad, Hollywood doesn’t need to come out and say so.  Toward the end of his piece, published October 6 in the L.A. Times,  he writes,

I don’t need to see Melissa Silverstein, Jonathan Kuntz or, frankly, ANYONE sign a petition telling me that they disapprove of molesting children. I don’t need them to swear under oath that they think it’s good for a fugitive from justice to be hauled in. I’ll take it on faith, because I assume that, in spite of their penchant for drama and their apparent need to demonize people they know nothing about, they’re mostly decent people.

Really?  We can take it on faith?  The problem with Olson’s premise is that Hollywood is not a particularly modest and quiet town.  People there aren’t known for keeping their heads down.  In fact, celebrities are constantly bombarding us with opinions on any number of things.  Alec Baldwin became famous during the Bush years for his op-ed rants in the New York Times.  George Clooney urges world leaders to do more in Darfur.  Will Farrell makes ads asking us to support health care reform.  At a gay rights rally, Lady GaGa screams into a microphone at President Obama.  Clearly, celebrities are as capable of being moved and speaking up as the next American.  But it seems that Polanski’s “lapse in judgment,” as Patricia Arquette put it,  just isn’t all that important.  At least not enough for “decent people” in Hollywood  to  talk about.  At Salon.com, Harding writes, “Let’s keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her….”  When, in response to Scorsese et al.’s petition, so many on the right and the left are standing up in censure of Polanski’s offense,  is it “decent” for the rest of Hollywood to remain silent?  It is a telling symptom of the larger disease.  In this suffocating silence,  Coppola’s cinematic world will continue to contract.  It’s the disconnect.