[The best] French film of the year, hands down, is Roman Polanski’s “J’accuse.” Polanski is an absolute master of every aspect of filmmaking, he works with the best actors and technicians — which means they are eager to work with HIM — and the result is an incredibly important film that’s also thrilling to watch.
I’m typing this on Jan 29th — the Cesar nominations were announced today and “J’accuse” leads with 12 nominations. That means that a majority of the 4,313 members of the Cesars Academy are in the mood to champion excellence. Whatever you think of Polanski himself and his confirmed and alleged bad behavior in decades past, it’s impossible to deny that“J’accuse”is outstanding. I see no rationale that holds up to scrutiny for contending that he shouldn’t have been given the money to make it in the first place or that it shouldn’t be shown. The hypocrisy makes me ill. It has been a matter of public record since 1977 that Polanski raped then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer and now, all of a sudden, mostly young (but not exclusively) protestors are vandalizing the areas around theaters to write “Polanski is a Rapist” and “Theaters Are Complicit With a Rapist” on buildings and the street. The City has to remove that stuff — it costs money.
For some useful perspective, I urge everybody to read Geimer’s excellent autobiography “The Girl” from 2013. She’s very smart, very funny, very self-aware and she was delighted when Polanski won the Oscar for “The Pianist” in 2003. Hey, protestors — that was 17 years ago! They’re hardly pals but the only person he owed an apology to was her — not us, not society, not people so ignorant that they think “Somebody else could have made that film.” Geimer was delighted when“J’accuse” won the Silver Lion in Venice in September 2019 — “Joker” won the Golden Lion. We’re told that we must listen to women but hardly anybody cares to “listen” to Geimer — who is in her 50s and (understandably!) hates being frozen in time as a 13 year old to feed other peoples’ misplaced outrage. When she says that it’s pointless to protest or boycott Polanski and to please take your outrage elsewhere where it might do some good and make the world a better place, the but-but-but-he-raped-you-and-you’re-a-victim-for-eternity crowd won’t accept her own clearly stated assessment that being sodomized by a grown man at a tender age was highly unpleasant but not eternally traumatic.
I think she’s a role model for overcoming the fallout from sexual assault but hardly anybody wants to view her that way. By the transitive power of faulty reasoning, an awful lot of people think Polanski shouldn’t make movies and if he does, you certainly shouldn’t go see them.
UD is definitely ajudge the art, not the artisttype; but she cringes when Lisa gets to “highly unpleasant.”
… but only Margaret Carlson, so far, has really distinguished herself in this line. Her column in The Daily Beast is inspired.
A B-story involving the two famous lawyers on the case emerged on Thursday after attorney Alan Dershowitz, who’s worked for Epstein, boasted of his “perfect, perfect sex life” on Laura Ingraham’s Fox show. Dershowitz is furious that his ties to Epstein have been characterized by opposing attorney David Boies as going beyond parsing the rules of criminal procedure. Like a schoolboy, Dershowitz challenged Boies to a sex duel: to swear under oath that he’s only had sex with one woman during the same period.
Well but if you ask UD fiction is truth; you can’t approach an understanding of Ghislaine Maxwell without understanding, say, Madame Merle and Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil — two characters with whom Maxwell herself, with her high-level literary education (“I was drip-fed Shakespeare at Oxford,” she told a party reporter at the launch of book on Richard III by a Hollywood mega-lawyer in the late ’90s. “Just sniffing fresh ink gets me high.”), would be fully familiar. Naturally everyone’s citing The Great Gatsby in connection with Epstein — the identity is so strong that one assumes Epstein with some degree of self-awareness fashioned himself after Fitzgerald’s creation – and of course he called his notorious jet The Lolita Express. It’s not just that we reach for the deeper truths of the best literature in order to grasp the cruelties of human beings; some cruel human beings come to know and have confidence in their way of being in part through the discovery of literary models.
All of which is why the genius of Carlson’s little essay lies in her framing the entire Trump/Dershowitz/Epstein story as fiction. Not merely the Dershowitz B-story, but Trump’s “racist political thriller… a plot twist… Celebrity Racist… The Jeffrey Epstein Show… Billions meets Stranger Things meets Empire … The show is now on location in the Southern District of New York where former U.S. Attorney and recent Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, was dropped from the cast … Trump Trilogy… ” How really to understand Dershowitz (not to mention Trump) without revisiting the by-now fully fictionalized (for we know him through his engrossing, dominant role inAngels in America) Roy Cohn? Cohn “worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.”
Whoever among Ireland’s playwrights has inherited a gift closest to Samuel Beckett’s will find spectacular dialogue for her own Worstward Ho in a recent interview with an Irishwoman who joined ISIS in order to “fulfill her dream of living under Sharia law.” Read the following, if you can, with an artist’s eye.
We were in the taxi, he [her new husband] said, “When you go up here at the roundabout, close your eyes. There’s a man like this on the cross on the roundabout and his eyes are gouged out and he’s wearing a red suit and you don’t want to see it.” …
Life was like back home [in Ireland]. Just like back home. You get up in the morning, go shopping, get your stuff, come home, cook your dinner, clean your house. It’s just like my everyday life. Go visit a friend, drink some coffee.
This is what we came for, you know. We came for, like, no alcohol… no prostitution, no gays, no anything… And, for me, I really liked to live in the Islamic State because I never got to see any of this. I just had to experience a lot of bombing and this, that and the other, and hearing someone died and hearing this and hearing that but I didn’t have to see any of that.
You’re not gonna tell ol’ UD that this is not pure theatrical gold.
Hot New Hiphop notes the incompatibility between lyrics like
I showed her a Xanax, she hurried up and took
I fucked her so good, she got up and started cooking
Rolling up big blunts, out a pound of cookies
If you ain’t got 40 bands, then you can’t book me
Pulled up on the side of your bitch, she wouldn’t stop looking
That bitch good as tooken, good as gone
I guarantee tonight my nigga, that bitch ain’t coming home
I got money to count, I got bitches to fuck
I got packs to flip, pistols to bust
and a public cafe.
One of Duke University’s cafes was playing this song for its customers when a vp of student life walked in, got wind of the pistols bitches and niggas, and took it up with an employee. The woman apologized and turned off the music, but the vp was really pissed and called the store’s management, which fired the woman and another guy who was also working the counter while the Xanax and the fucking so good wafted o’er the air.
The vp says he did not ask for them to be fired; he didn’t apparently ask for anything except for management to note that children and other non-violent, non-misogynistic people enter Duke’s establishment. The firing was management’s call.
UD doesn’t think the workers should have been fired. She does think that the cultural centrality of hiphop – like UD, I’m sure you’ve heard lyrics worse than these in public establishments – makes these incidents inevitable, and that universities need to think about whether this music is a good look for them.
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UD thanks dmf.
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UPDATE:
I’ve been in public places with young kids around and thought, yikes, that song is a lot. I certainly wouldn’t go babysit for friends and throw on Dr. Dre with their 4 year-old. But even if you think the standards should change, the approach of calling out random people helplessly embedded in profane U.S. culture, as if upbraiding them is a righteous project, is not the way forward…
UD (see above) agrees; and yet think of that phrase: helplessly embedded… Really? Does that mean no one employed in a public setting has the capacity/responsibility to reject disgusting lyrics? Are we all helplessly embedded?
The story is going national, which is also good. Attention must eventually be paid to the matter of – quoting from the article above – our helplessness relative to vile lyrics in public spaces.
The effort to throw out the Balthus
Is warming the ghost of Sir Malthus:
“Our art’s overbreeding.
Too much painting needs feeding.
You empty the too-crowded salle thus.”
