Hollywood's Superior Moral Compass and its Future

Wretchard writes about the support for Roman Polanski among the intellectual elite as it relates to traditions of inequality before the law. Very interesting.

The arrest has outraged the Poles and the French and many public intellectuals, not because Polanski didn’t commit the crime: he pleaded guilty to it; not because there’s any doubt that he’s a fugitive: he was. The outrage really stems from the idea that Roman Polanski, a man of genius and a tormented background, should be treated like a common criminal. And when you think about it, the only population that can naturally be treated as common criminals are common criminals. Uncommon criminals ill-suit the case. For much of human history, inequality before the law was the norm, and it was regarded as perfectly natural that different rules should apply to different classes of people. . . .

On a more practical note, Glenn Reynolds (a libertarian who is tolerant of many kinds of behavior outside the "mainstream") finds support for Roman Polanski to be a big potential problem for Hollywood's image.

Roman Polanski anally raped a 13-year old girl. After plying her with Quaaludes and champagne wasn't enough to make her succumb to his charms, he ignored her protests and did what he wanted. . . .

Yet Polanski had -- and still has -- important defenders. . . .

. . film mogul Harvey Weinstein chimed in to argue that -- by going after a multidecade fugitive -- the government was the one "acting irresponsibly and criminally." Weinstein went on to opine that "Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion."

Compassion for rich and powerful auteurs, anyway. . .

Yet Hollywood's compassion is peculiarly narrow. They're still trying to decide whether to forgive Elia Kazan for naming communists in Hollywood more than a half-century ago. Anal rape of a 13-year-old girl merits compassion, but there are limits.

My daughter -- just past 13 herself -- comments that until pretty recently, actors and theater people were just a rung, or maybe a half-rung, above common criminals in the public estimation, and suggests that the Polanski scandal, and Hollywood's tone-deaf reaction to it, may go some distance toward returning things to the status quo ante. She may be right.

Though self-righteous moralism has been Hollywood bigwigs' stock-in-trade for decades, the evidence suggests that, overall, their moral position is nothing to brag about, and the Polanski affair may bring this home in a way that earlier scandals have not. . .

Why hand your money to a bunch of obvious moral cretins, when there are so many better things to do with it? Technologically and market-wise, Hollywood is in the weakest position it's ever been, and yet it is also more arrogant than it was in its Golden Age.

Such circumstances seldom end well.

As Glenn often says, read the whole thing.

Mark Steyn has another interesting thought:

Earlier bad boys – Lord Byron, say – were obliged to operate as "transgressive" artists within a broader moral order. Now we are told that a man such as Polanski cannot be subject to anything so footling as morality: He cannot "transgress" it because, by definition, he transcends it. Yet all truly great art is made in the tension between freedom and constraint. In demanding that an artist be placed above the laws of man, Harvey Weinstein & Co. are also putting him beyond the possibility of art. Which may explain the present state of the movie industry.

Update: If Hollywood has lost ABC's Green Room, some soul-searching is in order.

UPDATE: The French Culture Minister who defended Polanski earlier wrote about having sex with young boys in Southeast Asia. Plus, the Polanksi Culture in Hollywood: normalizing sex with children.