Here's Why So Serious

How to explain the oxymoron of THE DARK KNIGHT?

The hero must become an outcast in order best to serve his chosen community, while the villain is neither evil nor mad, merely free.

A psychological depth resonates throughout this film. All the characters get to be human, with flaws, foibles, and admirable qualities. All get to make life choices we can relate to.

Joker is getting the attention and perhaps rightfully so, not just because Mr. Ledger died in January of an accidental drug mix and pneumonia.

Heath Ledger's final performance as Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT is being hailed because he so perfectly captures our misery, our anger, and our madness at seeing through the hypocrisy of rules as civilization stumbles and society's controls and controllers enact draconian extremes to keep the reigns of power in their grip. His villain is not evil, and not even malicious. It just wants to clear away the lies and have some blunt truth for once.

His villainy is of a liberating nature, whereas Batman's heroism stands for control, even fascism.

Go figure. It’s all right there for you, if you can count that high while gasping in awe. Moral dilemmas, ethical toss-ups, and even the balance of action with inaction all strip away pretense. Poses won’t do suddenly. That's why an angry man fails and a prisoner and presumed criminal succeeds at one point: only the criminal can think far enough outside the box of imposed rules to do something both perfectly obvious and utterly right. Everyone else is stymied, and this is telling.

There is no room for the free individual anymore. Repent, Harlequin, said the Ticktockman, as Harlan Ellison once put it.

Ledger's Joker is all too sane. That's part of what makes him so scary. He has actually thought it all out and knows full well what he's doing and why, and he understands the rules and definitions he'll be breaking, and goes ahead anyway because to do anything else is to be untrue to himself.

He moves quickly sometimes, but mostly is still or posed, and warily predatory. It's an amazingly complex performance.

He simply is a free individual in a locked-down, fearful world of total control freakism. Which makes him a freak.

His clown makeup says it all: I'm dead to you, hence the whiteface, but I'm just a joke to you, because you've all surrendered already to the fascists. Now watch me burn.

He says at one point: "Everything burns."

Whether it wants to or not, he might have added.

And so THE DARK KNIGHT puts it, too. Lie to the citizens and hold secret meetings to decide how things will be? Spy on 30 million people to find one person labeled a terrorist? Violate rights to cut through red tape and even law? Torture to get information regardless how reliable it is?

Why so serious? Indeed, why such tight collective control? Because we fear the wild creature within each of us, the Free Individual, which is to say the one free from restraints and restrictions, rules and regulations, free from control by others.

Fear of someone doing what ever they want.

And the funny thing is, those at the top, in power, do exactly that, all in the name of protecting us from such people. All in the name of restoring order, which means control.

THE DARK KNIGHT, especially via Joker’s rational anarchy and reasoned chaos, lets us question all this and much more. It is simultaneously a very public and very private kind of movie. Part of it demands yelling and fists raised in strong feeling, but much of it insists upon silent reflection and some deep, hard thinking.

That's Ledger's legacy, a role allowing us all to hope for oblivion while ignoring the pain and courting a final, all-out confrontation with society's extremes.

At one point Joker mutters for Batman to hit him with a speeding motorcycle. He genuinely wants release from the misery of existence, and he knows only when they collide will they touch the essence of the yin-yang dilemma.

Because then light and dark is One. For however brief an instant, that touch, that merging of forces, is all that counts, and will obliterate all the lies and compromises, all the shortcomings and cheats, all the deceptions and hidden agendas that have brought it all to this.

The image of our world may well be a jackboot's heel being ground into a human face, but the spark of life, and the only moment of truth in our world, is when face meets face in equal confrontation at full speed.

Anything less is another loss.

Do we want to settle for letting our outcasts enforce our imprisonment, or do we want to break free and act on our own behalf to change the slaughter to laughter?

This movie elevates the super hero movie to serious art and it does so effortlessly, largely on the shoulders of an actor whose work is done. By all means see it on the big screen and come away changed.

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Not This Little Black Duck, or: That's All, Folks

http://www.alternet.org/images/managed/storyimage_thumb_newyorker.jpg

Here’s what Don Hazen, editor at AlterNet, had to say about the NYer cover depicted here: “The New Yorker magazine hits the news stands today [Mon 14 July 2008] with a shocking cover -- a caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama depicting the presidential candidate in a turban, fist-bumping his wife who has a machine gun slung over her shoulder, while the American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover is shocking in that it depicts the Obamas in bizarre caricatured images and associations which reflect the very stereotypes with which the conservatives, particularly Fox News, have been trying to frame both the Obamas. Thus, instead of satire, the cover becomes a political poster for conservatives to reinforce their messages.”

The article went on to give the Obama campaign’s reaction:

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, said in a statement: "The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

So, on the grounds that Americans are too unsophisticated to get satire, and too literal to understand how a literal depiction of the right’s smear of Obama reveals its essential absurdity, they condemn the cover.

This is more revealing than the cover itself.

Why should certain things, such as Mohammed, be off-limits to political satire and cartoons? Should anything be?

What we’re seeing is Obama supporters trying to twist things not to their favor, but toward censorship. Toward political correctness as a weapon to fight free expression of complex, subtle ideas. They are demonizing irony.

If the right takes the cover up as a poster for its bigotry, so what? That merely reflects the right’s core idiocy and vile mean-spiritedness.

If the stupid among us can’t grasp the difference between a pointed political cartoon and a documentary photograph, so what? Perhaps offering actual education in place of indoctrination in America’s schools would eventually improve such a dismal performance.

To penalize the satire is not only willfully missing the point, it is to take one more step toward the fascism that is corroding what was once the USA.

Freedoms and liberty should be precious, not convenient. Are we to stand idly by as liar and lunatics dictate the terms of public discourse? To cite another satire few have ever understood: “Not this little black duck.”

Here’s what Warner Bros. says about Daffy, by the way: “As his personality gained depth at the hands of Warner Bros cartoons’ directors, the little black duck became more self-analytical, competitive, peevish, paranoid, and neurotic... Daffy, like the Greek hero Sisyphus, is a victim of injustice who continuously protests. And it’s his refusal to surrender his will to the whims of the conspiring universe that makes him heroic”.

It’s always like that for satire, and any other intelligent art. The masses never get it, and it’s used against the masses by cynical manipulators with ulterior motives and hidden agendas.

As it was with the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, so it is now with this NYer cover cartoon. Intolerance and a lack of any sense of humor are being used in tandem to crush dissent. In this specific instance, it is also being used to suppress and condemn the unmasking of a vile right canard.

Does it occur to no one allegedly in the Obama camp, let alone anyone in favor of freedom and liberty of the First Amendment varietal, that taking the cover’s depiction seriously as a literal truth, rather than seeing it for a scathing revelation, is precisely what the right wants? That refusing to see how it explodes the absurdity of the notions it depicts is precisely what the blinkered, ditto’d right does? That embracing the cover’s mockery of the ideas the cartoon so acidly attacks would be exactly the antidote to such prejudicial stereotypes?

So either the Obama side of things isn’t as slick as its PR would have us believe, or it has cynically decided to stand with the right by playing to the Lowest Common Denominator mentality and stirring up fake, distracting controversy rather than engaging genuine issues.

Seem familiar, folks?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la méme chose.

Rush Limbaugh started out as an anti-right satirist, until the right, being literalist and stupid, took what he was saying not as mockery but as confirmation. At that point, he decided to shill for pay and became what is laughingly called a pundit. The creation of the ego-monster, the lunatic gas-bag, the mindless mouth that not even oxycontin can close, came about simply by taking satire as validation.

This failure to laugh is a failure to puncture the pretense, and only worsens the pretentious among us.

The emperor has no clothes, shouts the NYer cover, but before the crowd can laugh and clear away the compliance born of fear and the conformity born of collective silence, the laughter is cut off by shrill accusations that the little boy who cried out the emperor’s nakedness is a sexual pervert who must be punished. And so the crowd falls upon the boy, stones and beheads him, and the oppression of idiocy goes on.

So by all means become outraged that a cartoonist on the cover of a nationally prominent magazine dared to show the plain truth about the right’s nonsensical accusations, in order to emphasize how silly they are. Because your outrage will demonize such revelations of truth, and help ensure the continued fascist dictatorship of fear, compliance, conformity, and willful ignorance and blindness that has made what’s left of this country what it is today.

The One Party of the USSA has spoken and only Big Brother is left smirking in the shadows.

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“A Slim Chance of Mimetic Redemption, or:

“A Slim Chance of Mimetic Redemption, or:
Fun With Your New Soul,
An Open Letter to
The Now Closed Thomas M. Disch”
by
Gene Stewart

Dear Mr. Disch,

You were, they say, depressive, and prone to the vicissitudes of being gay in a world that was not. White Fang Goes Dingo, indeed. These were things I never knew, although there were probably hints in your elegant stories too subtle for this reporter. You missed your partner, Charles Naylor, and remained kind and generous to individuals with temerity enough to approach you while maintaining a reputation as a cantankerous and often regally vicious curmudgeon.

It has, yes, occurred to me that your suicide may well prove, down the line, to be another of your seamless literary hoaxes.

You wrote and published poetry at award-winning levels and issued theater and opera criticism, all matters guaranteed to confuse this reporter, who liked his opera in space, his theater sf’nal. And it was in those realms you never disappointed. From Camp Concentration and The Puppies of Terra to 334, your work shown with intelligence, irony, and wit absent from the majority of whiz-bang dreams our stuff was made of, and always there were eye-widening ideas offered or subversive, sly angles taken to startle readers into glimpsing what science fiction could, sometimes, aspire to in the literary realm.

Even your horror -- The Businessman: A Tale of Terror for the consumer unit who likes to think about what’s being done to him; The M.D.: A Horror Story, a deliciously dark mockery of what we laughingly call medicine, which first does grave harm; The Priest: A Gothic Romance, touching, dare one say groping, on pedophilia; and The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft of the sort performed on malleable young minds by teachers -- spun new yarn from old thread, and wove it into patterns delightful and dark. Behind the fun, a cynicism breathtaking took wing, darting with the light touch of bats avoiding blows.

You were home-schooled, always advanced, and you were Catholic, always looking back in piercingly critical observations about the church and its ways, as in The Priest. You reserved your loathing perhaps too much for yourself, given how much legitimate contumely you had to spread among the types represented by your horror novels.

Like another well-known curmudgeon mysteriously called Harlan Ellison, you found the Army, and regimentation of any kind, maddening, a fact reflective of the freedom, including of sexuality, found celebrated so well in your book On Wings of Song.

You supposedly once said this: "I have a class theory of literature. I come from the wrong neighborhood to sell to The New Yorker. No matter how good I am as an artist, they always can smell where I come from.” And you were as good as the best of them, those others, the snobs and elite who kept tight ranks in the literary deer park that reserves big money and, more importantly, serious acclaim and the possibility of success that lasts generations for itself, specifically withholding it from the likes of genre writers like you. Bitterness set in, did it not, sir? And your best work was as pearls before swine.

To subvert them by reaching into the delicate minds of their children, you gave us all The Brave Little Toaster, later sending him to Mars, thus luring them into science fiction as well as fantasy. Even the animated version, in a touch of grace, retained your fundamental qualities, brilliantly offering hope even to the mere appliances of a world run by other orders of being, an optimistic, if sarcastic, dream for the useful work-doers such as us. Such work detonates in young minds like 102 H-bombs.

But now we learn you have finally gotten into death, an exclusive club from which you were barred for 68 wearisome years. Your reputation will echo ‘round the bones of your work left for us to gnaw upon, and the genocidal writers among us especially will have no idea how best to remember you, even as their own work shows influences of your elegance, your antic irony, and your dry wit. You died a prisoner of neighboring lives, leaving us only the word of god pinned against the wall of America; we can but hope you have fun with your new soul as we read again and again the words you arranged for us before you left.

Sincerely,

Black Alice (Clara & Alfred Reeve)

P.S. - Mr. Disch apparently used the sounds of the Fourth of July to cover the sound of his gunshot, a courteous celebration of a kind of freedom most of us lack the courage to engage.
--A.R.

Waiting for Better

“Waiting For Better”
by
W B Kek

We touched the moon a dozen times
Before we fell to earth
Where hunger rots the feast of peace
And war is all we’re worth.
It costs ourselves, our children, too,
To keep the fighting stoked.
We burn what graces sins accrue
As death gods we invoke.
“Forget the heights, explore the depths,”
Our battle cry implores.
And yet a glimmer far above us
Calls to distant shores
The best of us, their spark not dead --
Ambitions unfulfilled.
If few respond, at least those few
May justify blood spilled
And leave behind this legacy
Of taunting every fate
In favor of a higher goal.
The worst comes as we wait
For better lives.

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An Email to a Friend In CA

Trees down everywhere. I can hear chainsaws even as I write this.

We had 125,000 without power, but I think it's down under 50,000 now, perhaps fewer.

My eldest son left the house scoffing at the email warning I had just received. Five minutes later, as I fumbled to send a Text Message to him, he called and said he was turning back and that we should head to the basement. It was blue sky and calm where I stood in our front yard when I got that call.

I was outside to stop my middle son from driving over to pick up his girlfriend. I asked if he'd do it in twenty minutes or so, after the storm blew over. He was going to ignore me when my eldest son called. He then listened to reason and put his Corvette back into the garage.

As he came out of the garage, I stepped up onto the porch and wham, he, just behind me, was pelted by hailstones. It hit instantly, almost without warning, and there were 100 mph winds.

We ducked, my eldest made it back, and he got utterly soaked running from car to house. Meanwhile, my wife was at Jazzercise, and would be en route home soon. She has no cell phone. So I came upstairs to see how bad things were getting when I spotted large branches blocking the street. My middle son saw them too and ran out to clear the street so my wife wouldn't have to.

He was drenched as if he'd gone through a car wash, of course. He said it felt sort of like that, too. We watched him almost be blown over a couple times.

After this we ducked some more in the basement, and once it rolled over, we came up and my wife got home and we began clearing debris.

Two big van loads of debris from our yard alone was taken to the dump site. They had to establish sites all over Omaha and Bellevue for the incredible amount of stuff that was down.

At the top of our street, on the street intersecting it, in two spots, major branches blocked the street from sidewalk to sidewalk.

Cops announced no one should drive the rest of Friday night and into Saturday morning, so the clean-up crews could clear road and emergency crews deal with downed power lines and so on.

We were lucky, no power outage and no damage to vehicles or house, but all around us are damaged roofs, destroyed trees, and some local flooding.

Thank goodness climate instability is just a liberal myth, huh?

Now how about the fires out your way? Any of them affecting you?

Night Brooding

Plonk: In drops the heavy thought that we are gearing up to wind down. My wife and I watched 12 MONKEYS this evening. I'd seen it before but had forgotten how good it is. It struck me that it foreshadows M. Night Shyamalan's THE HAPPENING and CHILDREN OF MEN and 28 DAYS LATER and so on, at least in the foreboding sense of inevitable doom. Apocalyptic themes are not uncommon in movies but those like the ones I mention are films with an eerily prophetic feel.

Time and again plague is cited in such fictions. The Stand by Stephen King is his best-selling book and it's a doorstop about a plague bringing about mankind's end and, with it, the final showdown between Good and Evil. Albert Camu's The Plague, by contrast, comes off, despite its bleakness, as elegantly hopeful.

A sentiment that crops up regularly is that mankind deserves to be wiped out or does not deserve to survive. Our excesses, our cruelties, and our general rampage of indiscriminate destruction are cited, and even brief references to specific examples convince us to nod in agreement.

We feel guilty and crave punishment. We feel ashamed and dive into depression and self-negation, dragging the world with us.

I would argue this is quite a serious theme for popular entertainment. Oh, sure, its okay for writers and directors to get artsy but the fact of us eating up morose works like these speaks of a possible universality underlying the sentiment of approaching and deserved doom

That's why I wonder if we are all sensing something that's really looming.

Of course, history shows me any number of examples of millennialism. Crying doom is a lucrative cottage industry and doomsday is a cult-leader's best spiel. It is even religion's cornerstone in many major cases. Shrinks tell us it's just good old personal mortality being projected into paranoid fantasies and perhaps so, for the most part.

Trouble is, these things have a way of being self-fulfillling prophecies. Cults suicide, wars escalate, and science errs in favor of annihilation. It is not difficult to see where straight-line trends lead. Over population plus antibiotic-resistant diseases multiplied by jet travel equals a dead loss for humanity.

And how soon we forget how close we've come before during, say, the Black Death or the 1918 flu pandemic. Perhaps this creeping dread we all feel is ancestral memory of other end times when only small percentages of populations survived.

What we need to do is fight the sense of inevitability and overcome the inertia that keeps us doing the same suicidally stupid things over and over. Breaking the cycle of pollution, of subjugating nature to our whims rather than trying to live with and within it, and of killing and obliteration wars bring us would go a long way toward proving the doomsayers wrong. Let those terrifying visions of what has almost been and what might very well soon be teach us object lessons. Our own actions can turn these dystopias into mere cautionary tales, if we but heed their warnings.

If this goes on the lights go off for good.

Why not stop the stampede before reaching the cliff's edge?

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Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, A Review

This is a documentary about his 1977 arrest for statutory rape. It’s new and highly rated, having debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. It shows how his arrest was based as much on who and what he was as any possible crime, one he denies. His background is interesting in itself, from his mother murdered by Nazis in Poland, his father’s death-camp internment, and his own abandonment to fend for himself to his rapid rise to celebrity in 1960s London based on his early Polish films, his marriage to Sharon Tate, her murder by the Manson Family, and his dalliance with 13 year old Samantha Geimer that led to his status as an outlaw on the lam.

His supporters, including defense attorney Doug Dalton, maintain it was a set of trumped up charges rather similar to the persecution of Michael Jackson, based on the prosecutors’ view that Roman Polanksi was a decadent Eurotrash sicko steeped in perversion. A Mormon prosecutor was assigned the case and it went to a judge who asked for the case because he liked celebrity cases. Judge Rittenband loved the media and ran his courtroom like a tyrannical director. He had Hollywood pals and attended country club parties. He even kept a scrapbook and took telegrams to reserve seats in at the trial.

Polanksi was short, foreign, and spoke with a heavy accent. He was considered perverse due to his weird movies and veiled background. A malign dwarf, he was called. He riled their anti-intellectual, anti-cultural, and anti-European ire while inflaming other, more visceral bigotries, such as success envy.

His trial was scheduled, perversely, for the eighth anniversary of Polanksi’s wife Sharon Tate’s murder. Samantha Geimer, the 13 year old girl who took ‘ludes and allowed herself to be seduced in a hot tub, having been left there with Polanski by her own mother, was called a corrupt little high-school vixen and slutty model wannabe.

The Mormon prosecutor, to find out about Polanski, watched his films at a handy restrospective at a nearby theater. He watched everything from KNIFE IN WATER through ROSEMARY’S BABY and decided all the films had a theme of the corrupt leading the innocent into corruption over water. So he prosecuted on those grounds; that Polanski had lured a 13-year old all-American girl to her moral doom, rape, in a jacuzzi.

No one at the time noticed how surreal this was. Had Roman Raymond Polanski been around in 1947 he might have had the Black Dahlia murder pinned on him.

As it was, Sharon Tate’s death at the hands of the Manson Family was perhaps worse. Polanski was shattered, devastated, and flew from London, where he’d been in talks to direct DAY OF THE DOLPHIN. The papers at once blamed him for the murders, actually claiming he had flown stateside, killed them, then had flown back to London.

Again, no one at the time noticed how surreal this was.

Imagine living through all he had -- the loss of parents in the Holocaust, surviving alone as a preteen in a war-shattered Eastern Europe, the murder of your wife and child and friends by the Manson Family -- without becoming a madman, a drug addict, or a suicide. He dived into society to keep from being alone, one psychologist said, observing how Polanski kept up his social calendar no matter what happened to him. It was his way of staying stable; avoiding too much solitude.

Of course, this led him to earn a reputation as a party animal, one who liked very young girls. He had famously discovered Natassia Kinski when she was 15, affair and all. A psychologist commented that, especially after the loss of his wife, Sharon Tate, and the stability she had offered him, Polanski, a man with no life map, no blueprint for how to live, fell back upon being wary to the point of fear of relationships with adult women.

What ever the case, Samantha Geimer, at 13, was introduced into the social swirl surrounding Roman Polanski, famous director, by her mother, or so the press claimed, and left alone with him as a seduction ploy that was part of a casting couch blackmail scheme. Geimer later testified that she had been nervous after the first photo shoot Polanski conducted for the French edition of VOGUE, when he’d asked her to change in front of him. She said of the incident in the jacuzzi, which took place on 10 March 1977 in Jack Nicholson’s house in Los Angeles, that he had plied her during the shoot with both champagne and quaaludes to relax her and that, once he had her in the water and was pressuring her for sex, she said no several times but finally “gave up on that.” She sounds like a little girl who was pressured for something she was not ready for, caught in a situation she did not know how to escape. Whether it was part of her mother’s plan or not, statutory rape is exactly what it sounds like.

One thinks of Mary Miles Minter, her mother, and the murder of William Desmond Taylor. How dangerous, the fires Polanski seemed to play with and dance among. Is it any wonder that, after ROSEMARY’S BABY, he took on, in the press at least, a Satanic aura?

So, was this a case of tit for tat gone awry? Her mother was an aspiring actress who described herself as “an extra” to Polanski upon first meeting him. Samantha Geimer, grown now, denies it was part of any scheme and considers it just something that happened and that she got over. She is now married with three children and has put the incident behind her. She says it was not what anyone claimed.

Polanski pled guilty to consensual sex with a minor on his lawyer’s advice, based on the fact that no one had been sent to prison on that plea in years. However, the law allowed for a sentence of 6 months to 50 years in a state prison.

The judge ignored a probation psychiatric report saying Polanski was not a degenerate and should not go to prison, and sent him for a 90-day observation period at Chino for a diagnostic study, in order to punish him without allowing him legal room for appeal. The judge then told the attorneys to fake their pleas in court so the press would think it was not worked out in advance. The deal being that, if Polanski got a good report after 90 days, which all expected, then it would end the punishment and he could walk away a free man.

So the lawyers stood in court, faked their arguments, then listened to Judge Rittenband read a lenghty conclusion obviously written ahead of time, all so the media would not lash back at him.

Oh, and Polanski was then granted a 90-day stay so he could finish the movie he was directing.

Polanksi fled the country. Or did he? He was caught at the airport and laughed off suggestions that he would not be back, saying it was a business trip to Europe to talk to his financiers.

A random photographer caught a shot of Polanski in a Oktoberfest tent in Munich sitting between two pretty girls, smoking a cigar, and Judge Rittenband took this as an insult. He issued a growly order for Polanski to return at once to California. All this because no one would hire Polanski except the schlock producer Dino De Laurentis, who had insisted on business drinks in Munich. Absurdity once again stalked Polanski.

Random observation: Polanski sure rode in crap cars more than a few times, back in the 1970s.

He returned stateside and went to the 90-day stint at Chino, where he was afraid the other inmates would get to him and kill him, which they threatened to do to all child molesters. He was kept in protective custody but the danger was real, as others had been killed there in similar circumstances.

Chino authorities on the probation board let him out after 42 days had been served, saying there was no reason to keep him further. Naturally the prosecutor called this a free pass, the press howled for Polanski’s blood, and Judge Rittenband felt personally pressured.

By now the judge could not stand the heat, and announced he was going to go back on his promise to release Polanski after time served at Chino. This was the deal he himself had forced on the attorneys. He literally said a prison sentence must be maintained for the press.

He told the defense attorney that he would sentence Polanski in open court, then, after the press had left, would meet with the attorney in chambers to release Polanski into defense attorney Dalton’s custody. the judge then demanded Polanski sign papers waiving deportation rights.

The lawyer Dalton countered that he wanted a hearing in public so the deal would be on the record and the judge threatened to withdraw the offer.

Neither prosecutor nor defense attorney wanted any part of Judge Rittenband’s plans and the prosecutor told Dalton he would tell anyone at any time what the judge had tried to pull. No one could trust Judge Rittenband now.

Polanski heard about all this, said, “Gentlemen, I’ll be seeing you,” and left the offices. He drove to De Laurentis’s house, where, De Laurentis claims with a twinkle in his eye, “I handed him an envelope with, as I recall, some scripts and notes in it.” Polanski then flew to Paris, France.

He fled an out-of-control judge laying a railroad for him. And France’s extradition laws barred the US from forcing Polanski to return.

When Polanski did not show in court, Judge Rittenband held a press conference on the pending case, which was unprecedented. The defense and prosecution then held a conference announcing all the judge’s machinations, which forced Rittenband out.

Samantha Geimer summed it up well. She said, “the judge was enjoying his publicity and did not care what happened to me or to Mr. Polanski.”

Roman Polanski is 74 and remains wanted stateside.

Recently the two opposing attorneys in the case presented arguments to a new judge, who agreed that, if Polanski came back, he would serve no more time and could clear himself of all charges. He stipulated the hearing would have to be held in public, with TV cameras, no doubt mindful of Rittenband’s secrecy and wishing to avoid all appearances of such deception.

When he learned the hearing that would fulfill his legal obligations to the state of California would be televised, Polanski declined to return, so the case remains unresolved.

Polanski lives in Paris. He speaks six languages, lives a cosmopolitan life of parties and culture, and is one of the most respected directors in movies. France has embraced him, and he has embraced France, his birthplace and his likely final resting place.

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED (in USA) and DESIRED (in France) is a worthwhile portrait of an interesting man.

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