The Light Blue Ribbon

Posted by Jennine Lanouette on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Ever since the arrest of Roman Polanski, I have been trying to sort out my feelings about it. I am surprised at how pained I am. It almost feels personal.

I am reminded of the words of Evelyn Mulwray in Polanski’s film Chinatown. “It’s very personal, Mr. Gittes. It couldn’t be more personal.” Evelyn’s impulsive reaction to Jake’s questioning is our first hint of what, much later, we will be brutally confronted with. As a teenager, Evelyn was sexually molested by her father.

Jake is questioning Evelyn on the whereabouts of her husband Hollis, head of the L.A. Water Department, because Jake’s photos of Hollis with a young girl have shown up in the newspaper, in an obvious attempt to discredit a city official. Jake is simply trying to find out who set him up. What we later learn is that the young girl is the product of Evelyn’s past trauma and Hollis was hiding her to protect her from becoming another victim of her father/grandfather’s grasp.

I have been studying and lecturing on this film for about 15 years now. If I had to pick a greatest film ever made, this may well be it. Certainly in the top five. The insight it has given me on the transcendent capabilities of film drama has had a profound effect on my work. It was released in 1974, three years before Mr. Polanski’s encounter with the young Samantha Geimer.

I was, also, once in a relationship with a man who had been sexually molested as a child. He and I had a deep connection, like soul mates, but his past proved an insurmountable obstacle to our intimacy. I know well the destructive effects of sexual abuse.

I am reminded of another scene in which Evelyn is trying to head Jake off the trail that leads to her daughter. She tells him that her husband’s “infidelities” didn’t bother her because she was having affairs of her own. When pressed for details, she responds, “I don’t see anyone for very long. It’s difficult for me.”

When I was in graduate school in the early 80’s, we lionized Robert Towne for his screenplay of this film. A school chum of mine learned one day I hadn’t yet seen Polanski’s other films, so he dragged me off to see The Tenant. But it was too dark and weird for me. Not that I was a stranger to dark, weird films. Lynch, Herzog and Kubrick were among my favorites. But I also knew that Polanski was the guy who had gotten in trouble for having sex with that young girl. Being not much more than a young girl myself at the time, that uncomfortable knowledge biased me against his particular dark, weird films. Still, Chinatown was an undeniable masterwork. I dealt with this contradiction by choosing to believe that the genius of Chinatown was in Robert Towne’s script and Polanski was simply the faithful executer.

There is an image in the film that I have not been able to get out of my mind since the arrest story broke. In the climactic scene, when Evelyn finally confesses to Jake the truth about her daughter who is also her sister, there can be seen in the background a young girl’s straw hat with a light blue ribbon around it. A picture of pristine girlhood innocence, bringing into the scene not only the presence of the daughter being hidden upstairs but also the violated innocence of Evelyn.

In the mid-90s, I began teaching Script Analysis and, in deference to the great Robert Towne, I chose Chinatown as one of the first films to cover. I was eager to discover Towne’s trade secrets in this Neo-noir detective story that is so often described as “enigmatic” and “labyrinthine”. As I gamely dug into it’s notoriously inscrutable plot, I was soon surprised by what I found.

Explaining to Evelyn why he got out of Chinatown and quit the police force, Jake says, “I thought I was keeping someone from being hurt and actually I ended up making sure she was hurt.” They have become intimate because they are drawn to each other’s wounds. She is literally drawn to his when she tends to the cut on his nose. He, in turn, is drawn to the “flaw” in her eye, an indelible mark of her vulnerability.

But when Evelyn gets a call and suddenly leaves him without telling why or where to, Jake lapses back into a distrust that only continues to build until he finally makes a mistake that leads to her death. Thus, not only has he repeated the trauma of his own past, but he has also opened the way for Evelyn’s past trauma to be repeated since her death leaves her daughter in the control of her sexually abusing father.

In a way, this was inevitable when Evelyn (and her daughter) lost the protection of her husband, Hollis. He was murdered by her father due to his refusal to build a damn, from which her father plans to profit. “I will not make the same mistake twice,” Hollis says, referring to a previous damn break he was partially responsible for that killed 500 people. This makes him the one character in the film who consciously decides not to repeat his traumatic past. And he is murdered for it.

When I started studying this film, I had already been reading books about sexual abuse trauma and reenactment to better understand the effects of my partner’s abuse history on our relationship. I didn’t realize there would be a secondary benefit to this research when, while innocently preparing my Chinatown lecture for class, I suddenly became aware of how truthfully both Evelyn and Jake’s traumas were represented in this film. The resonance of these characters to my own experience broke a loneliness I felt in my struggles not to abandon this person whose challenges couldn’t easily be talked about in polite company. Someone involved in the creation of this film had also been around trauma and knew its downward spiraling effect.

Of course, I at first assumed that the “someone” I imagined was Robert Towne. I excitedly looked up some interviews to learn about his motivations for writing the story. I thought I would find a fellow traveler in matters beyond screenplay structure. But my search soon proved frustrating. When asked about the origins of his idea, Towne soliloquizes on the lost beauty of his childhood Los Angeles and the pervasive get-yours-and-get-out ethic that has been its ruin. But he skims over the incest as if it is simply a convenient and effective plot twist. I thought, “Are we talking about the same film here?” He seemed to have no understanding of the underlying trauma themes he had woven in. I was dumbfounded and disappointed.

I had no choice. I had to look to Polanski. I still knew little about him, except what my prejudices would allow. But I didn’t have to go far in my research to be confronted with his Holocaust childhood. And there was no need to go further than that. Polanski had experienced unfathomable trauma. I had to accept that my fellow traveler behind the human truth of Chinatown was not Robert Towne. It was Roman Polanski.

Another scene comes to mind. Having arranged for Evelyn’s escape, Jake confronts Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross, with the bifocals that prove he killed Hollis. But Cross is unphased by the charge. He brags about having grabbed up the valley that will be worth millions when the water is piped in, and getting the citizenry to pass a bond issue paying for the damn that will collect the water, and then arranging for the valley to be incorporated into the city so technically the water does not leave Los Angeles. Gittes asks why he’s doing it. “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” “The future, Mr. Gittes!” he says. “The future!” But neither is Cross satisfied with simply owning L.A.’s future. He still wants “the girl.” Evelyn was lost to him long ago. Jake asks who he blames for that. “I don’t blame myself,” says Cross. “See, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place they’re capable of anything!”

Invasion, appropriation of resources, annexation, eugenics. A chilling description not of the romanticized Los Angeles that Towne grew up in, but of the decimated Poland that had such a formative influence on Polanski. Towne created the congruent metaphors of the rape of the land and the rape of a daughter, which no doubt was what attracted Polanski to the script. But Towne’s treatment of the incest was limited to its metaphoric and dramatic significance, in essence exploiting the issue to serve the story’s other elements. It was Polanski who knew how to bring in and intensify the painful human reality of such a traumatizing event.

My empirical observations were confirmed in December, 1999, with the appearance of an article by Robert Benedetto* in which he closely examines Towne’s third draft to compare it with the shooting script that Towne and Polanski produced in a famously tumultuous eight-week collaboration. Benedetto’s unequivocal conclusion is that it was Polanski who made Towne’s intriguingly good screenplay rise to the level of greatness.

I no longer regard Polanski’s other films as simply dark and weird. In most of them, I see him thrashing about to make sense of where he came from. In Rosemary’s Baby, I see his anger and disdain towards the German people for the devil’s bargain they made with Hitler – We’ll give you our Jewish neighbors if you give us a comfy, secure middle class life. In The Pianist, I see him for the first time, at age 70, telling a story that shows real compassion for himself.

Ever since Mr. Polanski’s arrest, I have been struggling to articulate why when I first read the news I burst into tears. What I now know is that, encompassed in this event, I feel a magnitude of tragedy that overwhelms me. I can’t separate out the component parts. Learning about Polanski’s past after my close study of his film was a humbling experience. How, having portrayed sexual abuse trauma so truthfully, he could then go on to unthinkingly exploit a young girl is one of the mysteries of human nature that I can’t begin to try to explain, even to myself. All I know is I wish he hadn’t done it. But the knowledge I have gained from studying his greatest work leads me to suspect that, in addition to being the heartrending exploitation of another, it was also a profoundly self-destructive act of immense emotional and spiritual proportion. Thus, it was tragic on all sides.

When first confronted with the larger picture of Polanski’s life, I was forced to ask a question of myself: Who am I to judge this man? I can judge what he did. That’s a no-brainer. Everyone knows it was wrong. Given that acknowledgement, it is the judicial system’s responsibility to make reparation to the victim and assess if the perpetrator is a further threat to others. And these two questions were closed in this matter a long time ago. Any further judgment I might have the impulse to make of him is hubris on my part.

Of course, there is the separate issue that he thwarted the judicial process by leaving the country. This, too, I wish he hadn’t done. Even if he had been double-crossed by the judge on the plea bargain and thrown back in the slammer, I doubt it would have been a life sentence. He would have done some time and been released. Neither he nor, more importantly, Ms. Geimer would ever have had to hear of it again. However, it doesn’t entirely surprise me that he did take flight considering that he spent a portion of his childhood incarcerated in the Krakow Ghetto. I am willing to accept that impulse as his own traumatic response.

My fervent hope is that the powers that are now coming to bear on this matter can collectively arrive at a fair and just reparation that will calm down the media and allow this artist to travel freely again in the country where the victim has forgiven him and the devotees of his work await him.

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*Footnote: “The Two Chinatowns: Towne’s Screenplay vs. Polanski’s Film,” Robert Benedetto, Creative Screenwriting, Vol. 6, No. 6, November/December, 1999, page 49.