Exclusive excerpt from Sabine Prokhoris' latest book,
"Who's Afraid of Roman Polanski?"
Editions du Cherche Midi.
Watermark: falsification
There are the basic feelings and emotions that connect you to the world.
There are the circumstances of a destiny, taken from the "anonymous scroll1 » of the history of men.
All this is intertwined. Not to make a work the spillway of the (supposed) "miserable little pile of secrets" of its author - a voyeur's fantasy - but, as Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "imprinting a certain complicated watermark, the absolutely unique design of which becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through the ministerial paper of life"2 " From then on, this irreducibly singular "watermark", the fruit of the hazards of existence, gives everyone the opportunity to read, with renewed intensity, questions that concern anyone.
The watermark here, what does it give us to think about?
If there is one thing that Roman Polanski had to deal with, in several forms, the fatal experience, it is the destructive power of falsification erected as a norm.
Let's clarify.
From his earliest years, the monstrous Nazi lie, the astonishing power of persuasion of exterminating anti-Semitism going hand in hand with its terrifying enterprise of mass murder broke into his young existence, like so many others then prematurely grieving. Improbable coincidences and encounters saved his life. His own resources in adversity saved his spirit.
Now a man and a recognized artist, his pregnant wife was murdered by followers of a hippie sect, the infamous Manson Family. From then on, without knowing anything – and even after the crime had been solved –, multiplying in a way the sectarian imposture, spreading like a plague the miasmas of the criminal madness of the Manson Family, the media like vultures threw themselves on Polanski, shamelessly fabricating all sorts of fables depicting the author of Rosemary's baby 3 as an evil character, to ultimately insinuate that obviously, "Sharon had to die." We will examine this. This time, and for a long time, Polanski saw himself targeted by monstrous fabrications, by name, and no longer in the flood of mass persecution, even if the whiffs of an unspeakable anti-Semitism - although recently flagrant, and in an obscene way4 – continued to lurk obscurely around him.
A few years later, a rape complaint was filed after Polanski had sexual intercourse with a girl of almost fourteen, Samantha Geimer.5 ; an offense acknowledged by Polanski. At the ensuing trial for illicit sexual intercourse with a minor, as the charge was reclassified in agreement with the opposing party, a trial in which Polanski pleaded guilty, the forfeiture of an American judge, a dealer and junkie of media narratives, opened wide the doors to a world of alternative facts/truths. In the wake of this regrettable affair, accusations, each more improbable than the last, began to proliferate against Roman Polanski, from various women, some of them anonymous, recruited by a dedicated website. Not one of these allegations was based on the beginning of a shred of evidence, but the conviction that they brought to an increasingly large fringe of public opinion was formed by the following strange intellectual operation: deducing the actual reality of the rapes from the “rapist” nature of Polanski posed as a prerequisite, demonstrated by the initial “rape” of Samantha Geimer – according to the version that imposed itself after the fact as the official “truth” regarding this confused episode, in contempt as much for the qualification of the charges brought in this case as for Samantha Geimer’s repeated protests against the relentlessness towards Polanski and the instrumentalization of the case. A method that is clearly infallible. The apple tree produces apples, and the rapist produces rapes: QED. It is therefore useless to look any further than this circular reasoning. To worry about establishing the facts? To worry about reality and even simple plausibility? For what purpose! a fortiori if "feminist ethics", provider of "objectivity6 " of substitution detached from the normal conditions of truth because subject to higher "values", and consequently tailor-made for the needs of the cause, guarantees the truth of accusations, which will thus have the power of spells. Efficiency that the media sphere will activate with enthusiasm.
This suffering knowledge of the devastating powers of alternative "truths" is undoubtedly one of the deepest sources of Polanski's cinema. In his scrupulously demanding style regarding the means of accuracy as in some of his recurring themes. We understand that there is something essential here. By irremediably ruining the distinction between lies and truth, a universe of alternative "truths" in fact engenders a total universe, without exteriority: the complete dystopia of a realized hallucination which, like a black hole, absorbs and destroys the real as much as the imaginary, gangrenous from one end to the other. The whole of reality becomes an unbreathable nightmare, a nightmare from which it is impossible to wake up. No way out.
Or precisely, and very clearly in Polanski, the work of imagination – fiction – recreates another space, free from this curse. Not by turning away from it to flee it, but by confronting it, like Perseus trapping the frightful gaze of Medusa in his sparkling shield. Capturing the reflection of this horror in the inventive mirror of the imagination will provide the means to thwart its deadly power, thus turned against itself. The fantastic vein in which Polanski excels – in which some have thoughtlessly believed they could detect the filmmaker's monstrosity, without seeing that it was their own that they were projecting – accomplishes this feat in a particularly subtle and lively way. By deliberately playing, but within the field of fiction, with the porous border between the fantastical imagination and the real world, sometimes to the point of no return for the characters in a film, and to the limit of vertigo for the troubled spectator, by cleverly distilling the sensation of petrified chaos where the anxiety of confinement rises in a universe that spins like a top on itself, but by providing the means to defuse its hold – through humor in particular, the sovereign antidote to mystifications of all kinds – the fantastic work allows an invincible escape. Truly vital for Polanski, as we can see. Thus, in the real world this time, regenerated by the oxygen of fiction, a circulation threatened with occlusion can reopen between these two registers – that of reality, that of the imaginary –, which both crush and distort the absolutist cancer of alternative “truths”, providers of brave news worlds more sinisterly destructive than each other. It is not without reason that Roman Polanski's autobiography begins thus:
For as long as I can remember, the line between the imaginary and the real has always been hopelessly blurred for me.
Desperately. But still, only hope. “Imagination dead. Imagine,” wrote Beckett. Then the border is drawn again, and the free joy of the border-jumper.
This concern to revive and transmit the truth through the untamed power of imagination intersects in Polanski with a recurring questioning of the figures of destiny: saving chances or on the contrary bearers of misfortune, troubling coincidences with an undecidable meaning, offered to the risks and perils of interpretation, secret "vertigo" "which gives the temptation of misfortune7 " to rush there irresistibly, versus inexhaustible resources to counter his decrees. At a crossroads, just like Oedipus, Tess's father, a poor peasant, meets the one who will almost playfully reveal to him who he is - a descendant of the noble D'Ubervilles; misfortune for Tess will ensue, all the more absurd since the wealthy "parents" to whom her family will send her are not - false D'Ubervilles, but authentic parvenus. Trelkovsky by chance rents a cursed apartment; he will plunge headlong, touching, comical too in his passionate final performance, into the terrifying fate of the tenant who preceded him. Macbeth stumbles upon the witches of destiny on the moor; he will be irresistibly sucked in by that of which he has not really understood the meaning. Conversely, Wladyslaw Spielman – who is not a fictional character – will ultimately owe his life to the most improbable of encounters: a German officer, sensitive to music and to his fate as a hunted Jew, quite simply a good man, will secretly help him to survive.
The tension between these two realities – an unfailing sensitive and emotional vitality, the touchstone of truth, the test, repeated for Polanski, of a hateful unreason methodically applied to dissolve reality, so that nothing can stand in the way of its devastation – forms a prism, through which his creative gaze works and which, in varied and more or less direct ways in certain works, often in a highly burlesque way, his cinema puts into perspective. Perhaps this is his most remarkable strength, and his most precious contribution today: to illuminate, as if by a masterfully handled dull lantern, without any – fallacious – promise of certainty, the truth about imposture. And to sharpen, through his art, our discernment in this matter.
"As soon as a cause determines everything, there is no more room for fiction (or history or science), whose purpose has nothing in common with propaganda.8 ", noted Philip Roth. More room for the truth in other words, whatever paths one takes to uncover its contours, with patience, accuracy but also modesty, because no totalizing vision is to be hoped for in these enterprises - fiction, science, history, but also true journalism - which each develop according to their own modalities and methods.
How many crimes, how many abject betrayals, have not been committed in the holy name of great causes, we will add.
Our challenge here: to contribute, in the pages that follow, to a reflection, more urgent than ever, on what Salman Rushdie calls the "languages of truth", endangered on all sides by the languages of fake, whose poisonous logic it is important to bring to light.
