The Volokh Conspiracy

because it has compassion…. We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” So says studio co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, as quoted by the L.A. Times. Well, all right then. From now, I’ll just defer to the movie industry for all my moral judgments. Because, you know, all those telethons.

Thanks to Patterico and InstaPundit for the pointer.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand was quoted in French media as saying, “In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face.”

The law is supposed to be scary to criminals — and the law’s persistence, over the span of decades, is scarier still, but rightly so. People shouldn’t be able to evade justice by fleeing to a hospitable jurisdiction. Sometimes they in fact can, because of various legal restraints on extradition. But if they slip up and fall outside the protection of those regimes, justice should indeed pursue them, and in the process scare others into realizing that justice is not easy to avoid.

Conversely, generosity here would be a misplaced generosity. The only person who rightly deserves generosity is the victim, who understandably doesn’t want a fresh outbreak of publicity. Some victims are emotionally helped by the punishment of those who victimize them, but others might on balance be hurt by it. And indeed this risk is usually greater many decades later, when the satisfaction of knowing that the person who harmed you is being punished is generally less, and the worry about renewed unwanted publicity is the same or even greater.

But we also need to think about not just generosity but also the simple debt we owe to other potential victims, to do what we can to prevent such crimes in the future — both by deterring potential victimizers and by reinforcing the norm that even fame, money, and talent shouldn’t protect one against punishment. And generosity to Polanski? It’s hard to see why he is a fitting target for generosity. Some say he has suffered enough; and without doubt he has paid a cost. Practical exile even to a friendly country in which one can still work and be celebrated is something of a cost. But it’s not the sort of cost, it seems to me, that criminals of this sort need to pay.

Naturally, much depends on the nature of the crime. The milder the crime, the less of an imperative there is for punishment, and of course the less the proper punishment should generally be. And even this crime, while serious, is not as horrific as some crimes, such as murder or forcible rape of children. (The statement of the victim, to the extent that it is uncolored by the financial settlement with the criminal — and I can’t say in this case whether it is or it’s not — is certainly some evidence of the magnitude of the harm done in this case, which in turn is part of the evaluation of the magnitude of the crime.)

But this was no normal tryst with a 17-year-old, of the sort that might be labeled statutory rape but is generally not prosecuted, may not be much different from legal sex with an 18-year-old, and would in fact be legal throughout most of the United States. This was apparently sex with a 13-year-old girl to whom Polanski had given champagne and part of a Quaalude. By any standard, this is a very serious harm, one for which the “42 days in prison [spent for] diagnostic tests” before the conviction does not seem an adequate punishment, especially given that Polanski’s fleeing lost him the benefit of any sentencing discount he might have hoped to get for plea-bargaining (though it sounds like the discount wouldn’t have been as much as he’d wanted).

So, yes, it’s a scary part of America that tries to pursue justice even 32 years later. And there should be a scary part of France that does the same to those who commit serious crimes in France, and a similarly scary part of all civilized countries.

Thanks to InstaPundit and Megan McArdle for the pointer.

When I was running university film societies in the 1970s and early 1980s, I considered Roman Polanski’s Chinatown the best film made in the 1970s. I don’t know what I would think today because I haven’t seen it for three decades. And I still consider Rosemary’s Baby one of the best horror movies ever made.

I mention this because good artists are not necessarily good people and bad people are not necessarily bad artists.

The first writer I encountered who explored this issue was George Orwell in his essay on Dali. The essay is also memorable because its second sentence contains one of Orwell’s most resonant ideas: “any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

Notes on Dali

George Orwell

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book (Frank Harris’s autobiographical writings are an example) can without intending it give a true picture of its author. Dali’s recently published Life [The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (The Dial Press, 1942)] comes under this heading. Some of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but the persistent ordinariness of everyday life has been cut out. Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age, it has great value.

Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.

When he is six years old there is some excitement over the appearance of Halley’s comet:

* Suddenly one of my father’s office clerks appeared in the drawing-room doorway and announced that the comet could be seen from the terrace…. While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down in to his office, where I remained as a punishment till dinner-time.”

A year earlier than this Dali had “suddenly, as most of my ideas occur,” flung another little boy off a suspension bridge. Several other incidents of the same kind are recorded, including (this was when he was twenty-nine years old) knocking down and trampling on a girl “until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.”

When he is about five he gets hold of a wounded bat which he puts into a tin pail. Next morning he finds that the bat is almost dead and is covered with ants which are devouring it. He puts it in his mouth, ants and all, and bites it almost in half.

When he is an adolescent a girl falls desperately in love with him. He kisses and caresses her so as to excite her as much as possible, but refuses to go further. He resolves to keep this up for five years (he calls it his “five-year plan”), enjoying her humiliation and the sense of power it gives him. He frequently tells her that at the end of the five years he will desert her, and when the time comes he does so.

. . . When he first meets his future wife, Gala, he is greatly tempted to push her off a precipice. He is aware that there is something that she wants him to do to her, and after their first kiss the confession is made:

* I threw back Gala’s head, pulling it by the hair, and trembling with complete hysteria, I commanded: “Now tell me what you want me to do with you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously erotic words that can make both of us feel the greatest shame!”

* Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered: “I want you to kill me!”

He is somewhat disappointed by this demand, since it is merely what he wanted to do already. He contemplates throwing her off the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, but refrains from doing so.

. . . Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I do not think that I have given an unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would — a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat’s dung boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even — since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard — on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it. . . .

But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dali’s merits, the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the æsthetic sense. Since “Mannequin rotting in a taxicab” is a good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschewismus: on the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion) “Art for Art’s sake.” Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals.

It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K.: kicking little girls in the head is O.K. . . . It is also O.K. that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.

One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. 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 ground that he might write another King Lear.