Mark Steyn, writing about Hollywood’s instinctive cuddling up to Roman Polanski, hit a bunch of the usual points:  Hollywood’s boundless hypocrisy (they all but ran Mel Gibson out of town for crimes immeasurably less than Polanski’s), Polanski’s horrible life (not only losing three generations of his family between Hitler and Charles Manson, but having his surviving mother essentially reject him after the war to keep his stepfather happy).

That, alone, is worth the price of admission.

But at the end came a great point that’s easy to neglect amid the human cost of the rest of the story; Hollywood’s treatment of the likes of Polanski debilitates and infantilizes “art”:

Earlier bad boys – Lord Byron, say – were obliged to operate as “transgressive” artists within a broader moral order. Now we are told that a man such as Polanski cannot be subject to anything so footling as morality: He cannot “transgress” it because, by definition, he transcends it. Yet all truly great art is made in the tension between freedom and constraint. In demanding that an artist be placed above the laws of man, Harvey Weinstein & Co. are also putting him beyond the possibility of art. Which may explain the present state of the movie industry.

When art not only becomes an arm of the establishment (see:  most jazz since 1970, when arts grants replaced heroin as the main inspiration for jazz music in America), but when the establishment infantilizes artists, it takes away much of the reason to have art in the first place.

As Steyn notes, Polanski’s work since he went on the lam fits the pattern; except for The Pianist  (which was fantastic), it’s been fairly forgettable stuff.

Worth a read.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 7:03 am and is filed under A 'n E, Crime and Punishment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.