Going Roman Polanski'ing

Okay gals (and guys) [though I don't mean by putting gals in the primary position to be feminizing my guy readers which could be construed in some circles as a sort of homophobic 'slight'; nor do I consider it as a chivalric, paternalist gesture towards the ladies, which perhaps in this day and age could be a little bit demeaning, though I don't see any gals around these parts anyway, so I'm not certain for whom in particular I could be accused of doing this. Nor either am I letting the gals in first as some kind of PC role reversal, much in the sense you might have seen sci-fi films in the late 80s casting women in positions of power and authority ie executives police commanders scientists etc.... Once and for all, to settle the question of why the gals come first this time and the guys come last: aww heck! I'm just sick of guys, they fill my head with such nonsense dart games, trying to get me to fling my thoughts in one direction and then another, all the while preventing me from hitting my real target, which is nowhere on the dart board at all, nor in this building which Elvis has never entered so I don't care how many times you've told me he's left it.]

Okay gals and guys, being a movie lover I've always heard a lot of buzz about Polanski, but for some reason most of it has been more in line with "Gossip" than about the guy's actual cinematic output, a fact which distresses me greatly. What people who enjoy cinema should be interested in when it comes to discussion is other people's processing of the cinematic content, their viewing experience and the like. When you watch the movie you're glued to the screens and the speakers, the entirety of the outside world is shut out, you could care less about even the person next to you. It's when those lights go off that it suddenly dawns on you that this wasn't just your experience, it was the experience of all those little limbs and faces shifting out the darkened room. You've had this grand emotional investment and suddenly you're cut off from the object of all that. The proper reaction should be to seek consolation in those with whom that experience is also true. NOT in acting like a nonce and mentally assaulting the origin of those cinematic masterpieces who has cut you off from the fix with the inevitable credits scroll.

Look: when you talk about movies, YOU TALK ABOUT MOVIES. You don't go spinning your spade digging up depravity. If you want to do that, go exultantly horde porno movies and complain about the trash after it's filled with rags of your semen [or if you're a woman, rags of the substance which excrete from your vaginal regions, though I haven't done the labwork to say with certainty just what those substances are.] (Not that I have anything against porno movies: it just seems to me that there's an MO about these parts ie planet earth, people who simultaneously deluge themselves in a flood of unmanageable feelings and subsequently declaim them as "Evil." And it's not just sexual pornography; it's food addicts, drama addicts, religious addicts, drug addicts. But we're talking about movies here, pure cinema... and it being the subject, I'm going to have to remind you against that. Go somewhere else and do that. I'm not going to talk about porno movies so that's why I don't mind you going there to release your steam valve of confusion in those marshes, it also being a medium of moving images and sound.)

All that being said, Roman Polanski said something poignant at Cannes the other day. according to the uk rag "The Guardian":

Speaking at the Cannes film festival of his latest film Venus in Fur, the 79-year-old Polanski said that "trying to level the genders is purely idiotic." "Offering flowers to a lady has become indecent … The pill has greatly changed the place of women in our times, masculinising her. It chases away the romance in our lives."

 Now you can tell by their highlighting his age in the context of the quote they want to depict him as some dirty old wanker, a slant no doubt enhanced by the fact of his sad past mistakes in the realm of sexual identity experimentation and subsequent societal-legal interpretation thereof, also mentioned in the article. But The Guardian knows whom they're crafting a narrative for, and it's certainly not people who are capable of enjoying the craft/art of film. Why don't we talk about his lighting choices or the way he frames a scene? Why don't we talk about the little things he has his actors and actresses do with their hands when they're not engaged in overt theatric drama? Why not talk about the way Polanski manages to craft characters who are constantly subverting their own understandings of themselves? But no, we've got to drag his ass across the carpet like a dog with the runs once again. If The Guardian could have its way it seems we'd all have some unforgivable tick in our characters. I'd only hope they'd have the foresight to prepare the gasoline so we could all immolate ourselves in a final grand testament against the frailty of the human spirit... But here I am getting just as sensationalist as them.

As to the quote itself, what bothers me most is not what the man says but how it's presented out of context. No one is allowed to ask the obvious question: is the pronoun "our" supposed to be interpreted as dirty old men, and is the implication then that he honestly believes, even after his 'pedophilic abuse fiasco' that the true meaning of romance is a sado-masochistic one way control game where the man, as Sinatra said, must have it his way? Instead The Guardian gets to work with its hacksaw of journalistic punctuation, gagging and binding the man, the reader along with him... A prismatic fractal switcheroo, if you catch my drift. The muckrackers never cease pissing their papers yellow. Whenever they beg the question it's just to get us to scratch our brains and blame the pain on whatever keeps the ad revenue coming in. But now I'm sounding petty punk post modern marxist.... As a good businessperson says, truth in advertising. We all apparently want to hear about innocent little girls being deflowered by dirty old men. So who's really making the joke?