Roman Polanski Understands Women: Repulsion
Update: After a flurry of comments and emails regarding this post, ranging from appreciation of my essay, to articulate disagreement, to insane sexist supposedly anti-rape salvos, I've written my take on the Polanski case, at my site. I wrote this piece not to defend his original actions, I wrote this piece to explicate his art. Read here.
I'm not going to go into my Roman Polanski defense. I've been doing this all morning, nearly ranting and raving over my views on the matter, and have grown frustrated and depressed. But in short, I'm not happy about his arrest. So, I would rather discuss one of his greatest pictures, a brilliant portrait of female sadness, alienation, sexual neurosis turned to psychosis. A movie all women should watch -- his masterpiece "Repulsion."
"I hate doing this to a beautiful woman."
--Roman Polanski cameraman Gil Taylor
Roman Polanski knows women because he understands men. He knows both sexes because he understands the games both genders play, either consciously or instinctively. He understands the perversions formed from such relations and translates them into visions that are erotic, disturbing, humorous and, most important, allegorical in their potency. One should not (as so many did with his misunderstood Bitter Moon) take Polanski's films literally, for they are often heightened versions of what occurs naturally in our world: desire, perversion, repulsion.
Film writer Molly Haskell said that at the core of Polanski's work is the "image of the anesthetized woman, the beautiful, inarticulate, and possibly even murderous somnambulate." Her observation is astute, but it's followed by the tired criticism that in all of Polanski's films, including Repulsion, "the titillations of torture are stronger than the bonds of empathy." Of course. Polanski's removed morality is exactly why he is often brilliant: He is so empathetic to his characters that, like a trauma victim floating above the pain, he is personally impersonal. He insightfully scrutinizes what is so frightening about being human, yet he doesn't feel the need to be resolute or sentimental about his cognizance. He is also, consciously or subconsciously, aware of the darkness he explores, especially in his female characters, who could be seen as extensions of himself. 1965's Repulsion proves as much.
Starring ice goddess Catherine Deneuve, Repulsion is one of the most frightening studies of madness ever filmed. Deneuve plays Carol, a nervous young manicurist who shares an apartment with her sexually active sister (Yvonne Furneaux). At first Carol goes about her days in the salon, where she quietly tends to bossy old ladies' fleshy cuticles; walking outside, where she unsuccessfully avoids the leering glances and advances of men; and languishing about the apartment, where, with disgust, she listens to the noises of her sister's lovemaking and silently despises the men who visit. She exhibits a pathological shyness and repression that slowly spiral into madness after her sister leaves on holiday. Carol's dementia creates perplexing hallucinations: sexual acts with a greasy man whom she simultaneously loathes and lusts after; greedy hands poking through walls and kneading her soft flesh; and the moving and cracking of walls. Left alone, she is able to act out what she is so afraid of: the dark sludge of desire.
The obscure, slippery and decayed complexities of such desire are conveyed brilliantly in Repulsion. The diseased atmosphere of Carol's womb is meticulously created with Polanski's use of camera angles, sound effects and images of clutter. Though music is used effectively, Polanski relies more on amplifying the sounds of everyday life -- the ticking of a clock, the voices of nuns playing catch in the convent garden, the dripping of a faucet -- to convey the acute awareness Carol acquires in response to her fear. Polanski also dresses the film with pertinent details that further exemplify both Carol's madness and the aching passage of time: Potatoes sprout in the kitchen, meat (rabbit meat, no less) rots on a plate and eventually collects flies, various debris of blood, food and liquids form naturally around Carol. The film's inventive use of black-and-white film, wide-angle lenses and close-ups creates an unsparing vision of sickness, and Deneuve's performance is effectively mysterious. The viewer, however, is able to empathize with Carol, which is how she lures us into her web in the first place. As Polanski cameraman Gil Taylor muttered during filming, "I hate doing this to a beautiful woman."
And yet, one loves doing this to a beautiful woman, especially one like Deneuve. Deneuve's loveliness makes Carol's madness more palatable (her unfortunate suitor thinks she is odd, but he can't help but "love" this gorgeous woman), but eventually it becomes horrifying. Carol is not simply a Hitchcockian aberration of what lies beneath the "perfect woman," she is the reflection of what lies beneath repressed desire -- in men and women. Polanski has a knack for casting women who are nervously exciting (Faye Dunaway in Chinatown is a blinking, twitching mess), and therefore dangerous to desire. He makes one insecure about longing for them.
And Deneuve is certainly nerve-racking. She is so physically flawless that she often seems half human: An anemic girl, she can barely lift up her arm, yet at the same time she is highly sensual, an ample, heavily breathing woman with more than a glint of carnality in her dreamily vacant eyes. Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery -- she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain. What Polanski finds intriguing and revolting is perceptively female, making Repulsion a woman's picture more than women may want to know, or care to face.
Read more Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun.
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Why isn't there a statute of limitations on this. I am not condoning what he did but is it really helpful to bring all this up again when that woman hse had this many years to work through it and now has to be put to testimony again. How ill is THAT? You all want to bash Ms.Morgan and misinterpret her atricle as you have his movies. The point is, do not use his movies to point the finger at him and say they are an example of how sick he is, they are a seperate thing, he is a good filmaker and no that doesn't make him less guilty but it also doesn't say he is a sick $@#$% because he was good at making disturbing movies. They are not one in the same. Many of you are misdirecting your anger because your views on what he has been accused of are different. As a result you are pointing the finger at the wrong things to justify your feelings that is all. Just agree to disagree. This world is made up of people with differing opinions, talents and priorities or even agendas. so voice your opinion and move on. Everyone won't agree on this issue but arent there other things going on that are unjust in our country alone that you could use your efforts on and stop attacking ech other over something that happened DECADES ago????
If Charles Manson made great movies would you be sad he was arrested?
Yeah, why didn't Polanski testify on Mason's behalf to help him plea down? Mason is obviously mentally ill and was high as a Mfer when he and the Family hacked up Polanski's wife so he shouldn't have been held completely responsible for his actions.. Polanski should have tired to get Charles into a psych facility because so many things were beyond Charles' control. Maybe if he had exercise some form of sympathy towards the folks who tourtured and murdered his wife he wouldn't have been so racked with guilt that he he had to vent it on a thirteen year old's bum.
We're talking about Polanski and how his criminal tendencies showed up in his films. But how many here are repulsed by Chaplin, who also had a thing for young girls, but who managed to keep his art and his perversions separate? He once remarked that he was disappointed that a young girl he liked had developed because he found it repulsive. Twice he married girls aged 16 just to avoid statutory rape charges. Do you turn in outrage against Chaplin films?
Polanski is easy to hate. His crimes are recent. his films are disturbing. There are other powerful people out there who do the same thing but are harder to hate. In that sense, the scene at the end of Chinatown says more about us, than it does about Polanski. Do we accept that this just sometimes happens? Unfortunately, yes, we do. Especially if it's someone we like, or someone close to us. Crime against children is all to often the crime of enablers.
If Mr. Chaplin had been charged with rape, I would not have supported letting him evade jail time because he made good movies. And if I were that girl's father, he would not have made any more movies.
I love the way you manage to glorify his hideous perspective one the female psyche…
Yes I am sure Roman has seen many times the look of repulsion. I am sure he knows it well.
so true.
Polanski's work gives one a window into the character of a man who would drug, rape and sodomize a thirteen-year-old middle-school child.
However, Polanski-apologists cannot see how his work reveals his character, because they're too busy falling all over themselves pretending that they "get" what is, apparently, impenetrable to them.
Go watch the last fifteen minutes of Chinatown ten times and see if it gets through. (Hint: The raped woman who would protect her child from her serial rapist is killed in cold blood and the child she feebly tried to protect is handed over to the rapist to do with as he will. The rest of us are told to shrug it off as ... yawn ... just the way it is. Nothing to be done. Oh, well. That's life. Don't get involved or you'll get hurt. These Great Men will have their way. They're too powerful to stop.)
HE is the rapist, HE is the one who sees women and girls as weak dolls to be used and abused at any Great Man's will. HE is the one looking at the suffering of his female victims with a mixture of avidity, blase amusement and clinical detachment, like a goat-eyed boy pulling the wings off of flies to see what happens.
He's confessing in his work, over and over, if only the viewer will open their eyes, stop fawning over the monster, and see him for what he is.
Great post!!
excellent!!!!
My feeling exactly when I watched Chinatown. I was repulsed by it, because I totally reject projections of powerlessness. Before Chinatown, the first Polanski movie I saw was "The Tenant", another terrifying story of madness.
Great reply, very articulate.
i really wish men would stop projecting their own neurosis onto women.
He raped a 13-year old. He drugged and raped a 13-year old.
If you don't see any problem with that, then you are mentally ill beyond all hope.
I don't care how many "wonderful" films that he may have, in your opinion, made - that does not excuse what he did - either the rape of a child or his fleeing from justice.
Who ever said his prowess as a filmmaker excuses his actions?! What I don't get about the anti-Polanski crowd is how they make these leaps from someone saying how much they enjoy Polanski's films to "well, if you enjoy the films of a paedophile, therefore, you endorse paedophilia."
I think Polanski is a brilliant filmmaker, and, yes I also think he's a pervert who committed an atrocious act. I'm perfectly capable of holding both thoughts in my mind simultaneously without any cognitive dissonance.
Why is that so hard for so many others?
I think the author said, "But in short, I'm not happy about his arrest." Perhaps there's something exculpatory about Polanski's situation? Has he apologized? Offered restitution of some kind? Apologized for fleeing the country, an act that seems to confirm he sees himself as above the law?
Drugged her, eh? How did you find out?
"...like a trauma victim floating above the pain, he is personally impersonal."
I can see that with some of his other films but in "Repulsion" I saw Carol's descent into madness as very personal. The audience was hooked into her madness, as though we were a part of it.
I thnk this movie was a brilliant piece of work but I can't say I loved it because it scared the pants off me. Actually, scared is not the right word but I can't seem to find the right one. I felt as though I needed to take my psyche to the cleaners - as though the madness was slime that had dripped into my mind. That's not very eloquently put but it's the best I can come up with.
You were looking into the back of Polanski's mind.
Of course you felt soiled afterwards. Any normal person would.
Please don't take my comment about a film as evidence of an opinion I might have about a person. The two are not related.
How can anyone use Polanski's work as a defense against his crime? Let me demonstrate how silly that is: Polanski made great films, ergo we should forget that he drugged and violated an underage girl. Watson was one of the great innovators of modern science, but that doesn't allow him to be shielded away from his actions (i.e. insinuating that different ethnicities have different IQs). Roman Polanski understand women alright....how to drug and violate them.
"But in short, I'm not happy about his arrest."
In short, I'm not happy about the crime he committed against a girl:
In 1977, a 44-year old Polanski plead guilty to "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor", a 13-year-old girl, after drugging her with a combination of champagne and Quaaludes. Polanski then skipped the country before the U.S. justice system could sentencing him for the statutory rape.
With those horrible truths as the facts underlying Polanski's arrest, I don't doubt the author would "rather discuss one of his greatest pictures"
-- MrJM
Against her will and despite the alcohol and drugs, he compelled her to engage in oral sex. He raped her vaginally and he sodomized her. He was 47. She was 13.
Thank you for reposting this, Kim. When I read it on Sunset Gun it inspired me to dive into watching repulsion again - we made a Polanski Paranoia double feature of it with THE TENANT (probably my favourite of his films).
It is indeed a sad world when people try to defend the indefensible.
I'm fascinated/disappointed/appalled by the artistic community rallying around this cause - maybe because I'm used to having them on my side (Obama, healthcare, Iraq, Bush, etc.)
Thank you. I have been so shocked. But you know, if you believe even a fraction of the stories about people in the entertainment industry, these people are drinking, doing drugs, and having indiscriminate sex starting at very early ages. Looking at it that way, the folks championing Polanski were probably similarly abused, even if they think they wanted to do those behaviors, and believe dismissing and agreeing to genius as an excuse will also elevate them artistically and professionally. That's the only thing I can make of it. Otherwise, it's just too unbelievable.
I'm not sure that's the reason so many have come forward for him.
Remember when John Landis was in deep trouble for the deaths of actors on the set of his "Twilight Zone" movie? He'd ignored child labor laws and the advice of his stunt experts, he'd pushed things past where his experts thought he should, and three people, including a child, died.
Hollywood's directors came out to defend Landis en masse.
Actually, I think they came out to defend themselves. They were worried that laws and regulations resulting from Landis's depraved indifference would be forced on them, and that they wouldn't stand for.
I think the Polanski response is similar. These people want that their status should insulate them from the law, from accountability, from the rules that the rest of us peasants are supposed to follow. 'Polanski is a great artiste and should be above the law.'
All the more reason that Polanski should be sent back to jail.
Mr, Polanski should have become an anthropologist prior to engaging in underage sex.
A faculty colleague, of mine, (an anthropologist) "married" a 12-year-old "third-world" child -- when he was about Polanski's age; then he wrote a book about it -- and was given a tenured university position -- where he "works" two days a week -- for a total of six hours -- for 32 weeks a year -- and he sells the book he wrote about his romance and marriage to this chlid -- to his students -- and then teaches them -- that marrying children is a legitimate form of anthropological research,
When i complained, our University arranged to have the NJ Attorney General investigate ME -- and the American Anthropological Association refuses to do anything about anthropologists becoming sexually involved with research-subject children.
This would be a great "story" to run along side of the Polanski saga. "Anthropologist under--age sex -- OK, in the US -- but for film directors -- go to jail.
Who is this anthropologist?
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