Polanski as Byronic hero
Studying the Polanski brouhaha, and most especially reading the columns and comments of his defenders and champions, puts me in mind of certain Romantic heroes and artists of old. I refer to the poet whose exploits—sexual and otherwise—were famous in their day for violating taboos in the name of what you might call poetic license: Lord Byron.
We all read about him somewhere along the line, and maybe even had to memorize (or at least study) a poem or two of his such as “She Walks In Beauty.” But if your English class was anything like mine, the juicier parts of his life were for the most part glossed over.
But take a look. Byron, the original Bad Boy of Art, shocked the society of his times (late 1700’s to early 1800’s) with his flouting of conventional behavior, especially of the sexual variety. And many of his shenanigans would still be considered shocking today, including living in what was then called sin followed by an open marriage with multiple concurrent affairs, incest, and young teenagers as the object of sexual attraction (Byron’s fancy was much taken at one point by a 12-year old Greek girl, for whose favors he reportedly offered five hundred pounds and was refused. Unlike Polanski, he seems to have taken “no” for an anwer.)
There are many differences between Byron and Polanski, not limited to the fact that Bryon was physically beautiful and died so young that his beauty could never be seen to fade, or that his art was greater than Polanski’s. For example, I haven’t come across any examples of rape in Byron’s repertoire, although one certainly can’t be sure. And passionate (if temporary) love seems to have been a more common motivator for Byron than what appears to have been the overwhelmingly sexual nature of so many of Polanski’s exploits (not all, however; Polanski seems to have genuinely loved his wife Sharon Tate, although—like his poetic predecessor—not enough to remain faithful to her during their marriage).
Byron set the tone for a certain segment of the public to admire or at least forgive a particular sort of acting-out on the part of a Great Artist, the art justifying the bad behavior in many people’s eyes. Here’s Wiki’s list of the characteristics of what came to be known as the Byronic Hero, based on both Byron’s own life and the charcters in much of his poetry:
* high level of intelligence and perception
* cunning and able to adapt
* criminal tendencies
* sophisticated and educated
* self-critical and introspective
* mysterious, magnetic and charismatic
* struggling with integrity
* power of seduction and sexual attraction
* social and sexual dominance
* emotional conflicts, bipolar tendencies, or moodiness
* a distaste for social institutions and norms
* being an exile, an outcast, or an outlaw
* “dark” attributes not normally associated with a hero
* disrespect of rank and privilege
* a troubled past
* cynicism
* arrogance
* self-destructive behavior
And here’s some more about the Byronic hero. The only characteristic that doesn’t really seem to fit Polanski is handsomeness; the rest (“‘wandering’, searching behavior; haunted by some secret sin or crime, sometimes hints of forbidden love; modern culture hero” who “appeals to society by standing apart from society, superior yet wounded or unrewarded”) certainly does.
Lord Byron, loved the poet, hmmm the person .. well I wouldn’t be to fond of the person.
I think “Ozymandias” was written by Shelley
http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_percy/672/
I can’t say I am really familiar with Byron’s life or work, though I did have some idea of his sexual escapades. Interesting comparison.
Hah. just noticed that your link and mine are the same…check the author.
Neo,
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/10/024623.php
US won’t play soccer against Honduras?
Grey Fox: you are so correct about Shelley. I originally wrote this piece with a whole part about Shelley in it, which I deleted. I guess “Ozymandia” remained as a sort of Shelley vestigial organ. Will fix, thanks!
Flouting, not flaunting. “Flaunting of conventional behavior” is more of a Vernon Dursley thing.
Brad: I guess I wrote this piece more quickly than usual, and haste does make waste. I will fix. Flouted, indeed.
Although they also flaunted their unconventional behavior.
“And passionate (if temporary) love seems to have been a more common motivator for Byron than what appears to have been the overwhelmingly sexual nature of so many of Polanski’s exploits ”
Its a pity that in English we use the word “love” to describe such a range of things: “Love cake”…”love wife-and remain faithful” …”shared ‘love’ for one night”.
Because the Christian New Testament was mostly written in Koine Greek, preachers often talk about the different types of “love” in the old Greek.
phileo – “brotherly love”
eros – “sexual love”
agape – “Godly love”
While my spellings may or may not be correct, I am not too worried about it since those words are tranliterations(?) not translations or literal Greek (No Greek Letters)
“transliterations” not “tranliterations”
I could never get into Byron’s poetry, but what I did read was romantic and basically innocent by today’s standards.
Polanski’s work, on the other hand, went beyond dark to diseased: “Rosemary’s Baby”, “The Tenant”, “Repulsion”, “Bitter Moon”, and even “Chinatown” (a great film which I still love).
And no doubt others, but I stopped watching Polanski because I found his work sickening.
It’s a tricky business to look for the artist’s personality in his or her works, but in Polanski’s case I am not at all reluctant to note a sickness in the man reflected in the sickness of his art.
I assume Polanski is magnificently charming in person which, along with his talent, goes some of the way in explaining the current loyalty his colleagues have for Polanski.
huxley: Polanski is said to be very charming. But I agree about his artistic oeuvre.
Byron was not really into love. He was into lust, passion, the thing that draws two together that then becomes love if one can stay put long enough to build the hearth of coals that warm long and burn slow.
Byron was also miles ahead in intelligence, and his ability to turn a phrase is what was key to his being tolerated. Byron represented, to the people of his time, a kind of throw back to the old courts, the old scandals, and in many ways even the older rules.
This is why you won’t find real rape in any of Byron’s works, and why he would accept no. the rules of the court were not necessarily rules outside the church. They believed in God, and so they tended to lawyer god. So while attacking a girl would be completely wrong, bribing one of her own free will to choose and accept that choice falls into a very gray area. The point being is that he could be forgiven as he always gave others their freedom, at least I have never read anything to the contrary of such (that is temptation is not where blame used to go, it used to go to the person that accepted temptation. Another thing we inverted. By punishing the one that accepts the temptation, you stop temptation from being workable. This kind of cultural thing stuck all the way up to our century in those who wouldn’t accept hand outs or charity, but would work for the money. the latter being theirs to own, the prior could be a beholden or bribe as much as it is a help. And it was always to be paid back quickly before some action was asked of you. however if you condemn the tempters, you absolve everyone of accepting the temptation. This doesn’t work, because there are always tempters, and such rules make tempting and such things much more prevalent as the victims gladly accept the collar around their necks).
Just as we love a old hippy that isn’t a socialist but just an artist, they loved an ‘old’ fop who followed all that. In his day and age, what he did was not criminal, and scandal was a way of saying that one could be socially isolated for such reputation. But again, his intelligence was the reason why he wasn’t; he was just too interesting to have around.
Polanski on the other hand is not the rogue, or the principled person who strays. What he is, is a man with appetites that cross the line, and he has no empathy for others. He loved Tate only in the manner that he wanted something from her. She was killed before we got to see them after she had the baby and so forth. His movies explored his sociopathic view of the world. His boldness was not the boldness of the empathetic that lets go and reaches some height. That’s the story that the empathetic are told, these guys are mostly people with little regard for any values, culture, or empathetic concepts towards others. It makes such art real easy. Even sicker one can see it as masochists glorifying a subset of our population for hurting the things they love (to hate).
And then there is his life story of where he is from, what he saw, what happened and such during those years. The same years I keep mentioning formed the mental attitudes of many of the people that others are following today and celebrating. Understanding those years is key to understanding what came forth from them. Funny that the artificial character of Silence of the Lambs learned his appetite during those years in similar places. You can develop tastes during such war or seeing things then that never leave you. Then further to get your training in art in soviet schools.
Of course no one wonders how he was allowed to leave and why…
[This when we couldn’t get my great grandmother out]
the rest (”‘wandering’, searching behavior; haunted by some secret sin or crime, sometimes hints of forbidden love; modern culture hero” who “appeals to society by standing apart from society, superior yet wounded or unrewarded”) certainly does.
I think that you are romanticizing him to some degree. where was his wandering? What searching behavior? The haunted thing is that some of his trysts were rapes, and other bad thing, so they have to be shrouded in mystery, all the better if it helps him pluck more apples. Modern culture hero is a payola kind of thing, which in case we haven’t noticed is no longer working. That is Hollywood is more and more irrelevant and more and more not able to use their organizations to lift up people so that the public will follow them more. Appeals to society, etc. is just another form of Grouchos not wanting to be a member of a club that would have him (ie we want to be with and at the places we are not allowed to be). I’ve been behind the red tape and stood there drinking while they whine about being a zoo animal for a bunch of people. And that whole superior thing is an outcome of the manufactured thing like payola. Its called imagemaking.
I have just started reading this series from the beginning and its interesting given that we are being subjected to a whole bunch of stuff but don’t understand it or even our response to it.
Propaganda, Part 1: What’s Good for the Goose-Step is Good Propaganda
vocalminority.typepad.com/blog/2009/09/whats-good-for-the-goosestep-is-good-propaganda.html
the other parts are:
2. Back to Old-School
3. Enter the Great and Powerful Obamessiah of Oz
4. The People’s Revolution
5. Hope & Change in All Its Taxpayer-Funded Glory
I don’t think part 5 is up yet.
Look up his last words… (Byrons)
Or maybe he was just a horny old bastard with a penchant for buggery.
artfldg: My idea of Polanski’s “wanderings” has to do mostly with geography. Lived in Poland and then France, then Britain, then the US, then back and forth between France and the US, then France with many visits to Poland, and of course the current trip to Switzerland where he was arrested.
Jon Baker,
You got them right, ‘cept that “phileo” is a grammatical fiction – it shows up in grammars, but never in the actual language. Always “philo.” The “e” is added to indicate that it is a so-called “contract verb” and conjugates somewhat differently than the usual verb ending in “o.”
Ah… well from what I read of his life he seems more driven from one place to another against his will than wandered, but i gess that makes sense too.
but i kind of like byron…
and his daughter ada too.
polanski i could take or leave..
So if neither of these scum had ever lived, the world would be…exactly the same as it is today. Contrast, e.g., Norman Borlaug. So let’s keep some perspective.
Neo’s list of Byronic requirements might be enhanced by two more:
*”some” money; more better than less. Money isn’t important if one has some.
*some rude and crude guys who protect their betters from the bourgeois, guys that settle for a small share.
Artfldgr has some very interesting and disciplined comments before he wanders off, as I might now be doing.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding, neo is right on in her comparison to Polanski.
Well, Neo, I suppose I should defer to your professional opinion regarding Polanski’s attractiveness to women.
But it seems to me that, while he’s not classically handsome, he might be attractive in a puckish way.
KBK: attractiveness to women is a very different thing from handsomeness.
Although they’re certainly not mutually exclusive 🙂 .
Byron was both. Polanski, apparently, is only the former rather than the latter. And he’s not attractive to this woman. But then again, I know too much about him.
Nor this woman either. Polanski has a dissipated, dissolute look to him that I find unattractive and uninteresting.
Also, isn’t Polanski about four feet tall? Like something pinched off a bit too soon? Sorry for the graphic imagery.
Polanski is definitely short, though taller than 4′.
He was the short villain who cut Jack Nicholson’s nostril in Chinatown.
During the summer I took a short story course and was inspired to reread all of J.D. Salinger, one of my favorite writers when I was young though more for his short stories and Glass Family pieces than Catcher in the Rye.
I also read some of biographical material on Salinger and was reminded of Joyce Maynard, who in 1972 had her fifteen minutes of fame as a “voice of the young” profiled in the NY Times Magazine.
Based on that article J.D. Salinger initiated a correspondence with Maynard, essentially seduced her, and within a few months Maynard dropped out of Yale to live with Salinger at his retreat in rural New Hampshire. She was eighteen at the time. Salinger abruptly dropped her ten months later.
It turned out that Salinger had a pattern of fastening upon teenaged and young women, keeping them a while, then discarding them.
Which is hard to know if you love his writing as I did and still do, because you can’t miss the beautiful wise young females idolized at the center of most of his stories. The stories acquire a somewhat pedophilic smell.
Furthermore, like Woody Allen, another artist with a young girl problem, Salinger bonds with his audience at a personal level, so it’s hard to separate the artist from the art. Knowing too much about Allen or Salinger detracts from appreciating their work.
Regarding Byron’s interest in younger women, that was a different era, when life was shorter, and harder, and more brutal.
What was acceptable and even common then is not automatically either now.
That’s not apologetic, that’s a simple grasp of the differences in social cultures which technology provides.
And that’s not moral relativism, either — at a time when most die by 45, and death in childbirth is anything but uncommon, and you have to have 10 kids just so 3-4 of them live to full adulthood and children of their own, the rules ARE different.
An excellent example of the Byronic hero syndrome was that bad boy of rock, Jim Morrison. Morrison displayed all of the attributes on the list and his lyrics were often compared to Byron and Shelley.
Although to my knowledge his lusty appetites never indulged in the under aged.
Morrison falls short maybe only with his use of language, his poetry or song writing was predictable and simplistic.
Not to excuse Polanski, because rape is rape, and justice, not the victim, demands punishment.
That being said, I think writers and artists, being able to create things visionary or revolutionary, have to posses a certain Byron quality.
A willingness to ignore societal strictures allows the anarchy of thought required to think and display things most of us wouldn’t dare.
with what i just heard on msnbc i dont give a rat’s ass worth a damn on the compare and contrast perversions discussion…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7qGWb0FLmo
the idea that you can be put in jail not for what you did in the past that they cant prove, but that you can be put in jail for what your going to do in the future!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the rule of law is going down the tubes and the best we can do is argue over a pervert and be distracted by titilation over things that really really WILL screw with your lives
no matter waht happens, byron will still be dead
and no matter what happens, polanski will still be a pervert and not worth thinking about.
however, while we are thinking about nonsense, how about what they are doing with the other hand.
totalitarian propagandic art
secret organizations pretending to be non partisan
pay offs, kick backs, trillions in tax theft
and now, the power to put you in jail because you have the potential to commit a crime.
sounds like stalins red terror to me….
however the duplicity is in one speech.
and him being a lawyer he knows exactly what kind of legal system he is moving us towards.
but polanski is whats important… right?
Jack Webb Schools Roman Polanski on Sex with Children
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIZ_wEXiAoc
what a slime…
HE doesnt think any one was hurt by it…
so then its ok.
just remember that when he started the acts he could not know the validity of that. its a sociopath squirming on the hook for being caught.
only existing film of anne frank found.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hvtXuO5GzU&feature=player_embedded
WHOOPI GOLDBERG CLARIFIES POLANSKI COMMENTS
http://allday.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/01/2084644.aspx
Goldberg had said, “It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.”
Whoopi wanted to clarify the comment and make it clear that she was talking about the legal charge against Polanski at the time.
Thirty years ago I was an artist in college, a painter. My work is probably best described as somewhere on a between Matisse and Picasso, but with strong influences from the school of abstract expressionism. I am not going to get into detail about my life then. I will say though that I know what living an ‘artist’s life’ means: the intense self examination and reflection, the projection of the personal narrative in the work, the hard work, and, yes, the manipulations in ‘love’ affairs. (Why are so many young women attracted to artists?) I lived it. I don’t want to ever go back to it.
Huxley’s dilemma is well taken. Call my response to it a projection, I don’t care. The fact is I loved Salinger and D H Lawrence and many others in my time, but I can’t read them now knowing the cruelty in interpersonal relations, the intense narcissism, and the lack of a moral compass that is / was pronounced in their lives — all in the name of artistic license and privilege; those things I assumed at one time. I have zero use for them as people.I cannot separate the person from the work most of the time. And why should I? My point is that Polansky abused and raped a young woman and no ‘artistic’ grounds whatsoever exists for giving him a pass. In fact, let it be a ‘teachable moment’ for those artists who might think it does, including Salinger.
The list of Byronesque attributes reads like the defintion of psychopathy from the DSM-whatever.
think it does = think they do and I know there are some other mistakes. 🙁
John C: I agree that there is something about many artists, a connection between their creativity and a heightened potential (in some) for antisocial behavior. But I also agree that all adults are responsible for what they do, and there should not be different rules for artists than for others. Period.
I am reminded of a film I saw recently, “Pollock,” about the painter Jackson Pollack, another destructive, alcoholic, acting-out artist. There was a scene were he’s a a party hobnobbing with rich art patrons in a swank apartment when, in full view of the assembly, he unzips his fly and pees in the lovely fireplace on the fire. He got away with it, too (at least, according to the film). That says a lot.
Antisocial and anti-personal.
Rape a child, pee in a fireplace or cut off an ear, they all point to a fuzziness about the rules, or a raging narcissism that excuses them (they presume) from the norms of society.
DeWayne: liberal use of substances is part of it. They lower inhibitions. Pollock was a raging alcoholic, and Polanski used drugs and alcohol in the rape, both for himself and for the girl. My guess is that he was a regular user.
Again, no excuse. Just an observation.
Thanks Neo . Yes, I saw that movie some 5 or so years ago. By the way, there is another one, a black and white documentary, that stars Pollock himself. He demonstrates his method of drip painting in it. It’s interesting. I can’t remember the title, but it’s probably available at one of the fine arts museums in your area, if you are interested. He doesn’t do any peeing or drinking in it though, at least not in that one.
Also, I didn’t mean for my comment above to be a generalization across all artists.
Neo:
For unabashed substance abuse and bad-boy flair coupled with a scary brilliance, it was hard to beat Hunter S. Thompson.
I think, for creative types, the drugs are another way of breaking down the thought boundaries, and letting the jesters play freely in the mind. Like I said, the anarchy of thought, only on steroids.