The César Academy defends Roman Polanski and calls for equality for all men

A satirical piece on the French film industry

Press release at March 3, 2020 from the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma

In last week's César Awards ceremony, we awarded Roman Polanski the César for Best Director, prompting a backlash that continues to roil the French film industry. In this statement, we share the thinking behind our decision, and we call for an end to the discrimination faced by men alive today.

Four decades ago, in 1977, Mssr. Polanski raped a child, then fled from American justice. Still wanted by the courts of California, Polanski is the only film industry professional working today who has an Interpol red notice out on him as he parades the red carpet. This, we do not dispute.

It is the 'And what of it?' where our position and yours may not perfectly align.

You say Polanski should be in handcuffs, rather than pawing nymphs on the steps at Cannes. You say he should be mumbling for release in his seventeenth parole hearing, instead of making press statements about getting "lynched" and showing no awareness whatsoever of the racial irony. You say he will probably never face justice, because, after forty-two years of tanned freedom in Continental Europe, he's going to softly expire in an alpine cottage, any minute now.

This is what you say.

But here is our question to you. Why should Polanski be singled out and he alone be held to your new standards? Why is an allowance made for Polanski's predecessors, but not for him?

Let us explain. Think of any great artist. Shakespeare. Michelangelo. Mozart. Picasso. Are you suggesting those men were all sensitive lovers who waited until the third date to ask if he might gently take her hand in his? (Or gently put her hand on his ––, or gently put his hand in her ––, et cetera?) Are you seriously proposing that, before he wrenched at that corset, Shakespeare sat patiently nodding through all the with-child rumors she'd heard down at the water pump? You think Mozart, before dropping his tights, had her clarify exactly what physical permissions she was granting when she said, "The bit with the violins is pretty catchy, ja..."? Shakespeare had iambic pentameter to write! The time Mozart would have spent clarifying her ums and ahs and get-the-hell-offs could have cost the world 'Symphony No. 36'!

Here is the reality: those men were very probably dickheads by your new definition too. Consent, we remind you, is a very recent idea. Shakespeare, Mozart, Polanski too: these men had a moral duty to their own greatness, and to the metered reality of their own mortality. Meaning to the swell in their breeches when necessary, because boners are distracting and they had work to do.

The commitment of those men to their own greatness is why we have their masterpieces today. We ask you: what do you people want? Do you not want 'Symphony No. 36' - is that what you are saying? You would rather some meandering waif felt "respected" in those ten minutes, than Mozart spent his time creating the soaring masterpiece you're now thinking of using for your third wedding video? Those minutes of that waif's life are documented nowhere; they may as well have not existed. Whereas the work of these men endures forever.

The question we the Academy put to the world today is: do you value "sensitivity in the bedroom" more than you value The Sistine Chapel? Because when it comes to great men, maybe you can't have both. Genius has a price. Sometimes, the genius himself pays it. For example, he ends up with dick rot, or in a pauper's grave, or outed by an inconvenient wife who announces she wrote all his novels. But most of the time, the help pays for his genius. That's why they're called 'the help'. Or 'women'. Or whatever the buzzword du jour is.

The difference between Polanski and those greats of yesteryear is that you know Polanski is a creep. When it comes to Polanski's forefathers, we can only speculate. Contemplating a daguerreotype of the decidedly hairy Dickens, we might struggle not to imagine him pulling his wag out at a cornered chimney sweep. But because no one back then thought to whinge about him to a judge or in their letters, we decline to call him a scumbag. Even though - let's be real - he almost certainly was one. How is that fair?

We have a two-tier system. On one hand: Polanski, hounded because a few people decided to remember and then not shut up. On the other: Shakespeare getting away with it and his name writ large on tour buses in Stratford-upon-Avon. And the only difference between these two men? Their timing in history. Again, we ask: where is the justice in that?

If all men are truly born equal, then the man born in the twentieth-century must be held to the same standards of behavior as the man born in the sixteenth-century. If you're going to heap blame on anyone, make it the bone-idle fluffies in history who never thought to whinge to a judge or in their letters. The laziness of those women is why we have such unrealistic ideas about the men alive back then, setting up the egregious double standard faced by men alive today.

That double standard must end. Men alive today have suffered long enough. It has now been a full three years since the world began demanding accountability from men alive today, and I think we can all agree that is tantamount to infinite persecution.

And so, yes, we the Academy honor Polanski. You say: we have rewarded pedophilia and dismissed criminality. We say: we chose to focus on the man reflected in the work, and not the man reflected in the court ruling, the extradition request, the subsequent claims from other women, and the outrage from almost every feminist alive. We did so after asking ourselves, 'What would Aristotle do?' And it is proudly that we shall continue to judge our fellow men by the same standards as an extinct civilization in whose entertainment women were knocked up by swans.

That is why, today, we make no apology for refusing to condemn a man just because suddenly child rape is a barrier for most people. Instead, rather than unfairly singling out men alive today for punishment, we call for every distinguished man in history to be investigated for sex crimes. All those twitchy female academics whose sweaters smell of baby bats? Let's have them get to work, instead of just carping. All the complaints the lazy women of history failed to make to a judge or in their letters, those academics must unearth them somehow. (And no saying, "It's too hard... The fog of history is too thick," et cetera. If men in history get to cry "fog", then so must men in the present.)

Only when that happens – when dead men are held to the same standards as the living; when the world knows beyond doubt whether Picasso was handsy with more than a paintbrush, if Alexander Graham Bell only invented the telephone to facilitate his fetish for heavy breathing, and did Marlowe raid more ass than Dulcolax – only then will we at the César Academy accept we might be a little bit wrong and/or deeply fucked-up.

By that time, though, we’ll all be dead too.

Vive la liberté, égalité, fraternité! (But mostly just fraternity.)

End of Press Release