Polanski's God from Serena Bramble on Vimeo.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play is devoting much of its content this week to a study of the films of Roman Polanski, whose new movie Carnage opens the New York Film Festival this Friday, September 30. We will count down to the event by running a new video essay every day this week under the title Life's Work: The Films of Roman Polanski. We're kicking off the series with "Polanski's God," about the pessimistic, bleakly funny world view expressed in the majority of Polanski's films. This video essay is a collaboration by two Press Play contributors. Simon Abrams contributed the narration; Serena Bramble edited.]
By Serena Bramble and Simon Abrams
Press Play Contributors
TRANSCRIPT: "Polanski's God," narrated by Simon Abrams; edited by Serena Bramble
I think people who go to see [Roman Polanski's films] for escapism are not going to be necessarily disappointed, but they're going to have to tweak their understanding of what entertainment is. When you watch a Polanski film, you're watching this sense of abundance in them. They have very cheerful settings — deceptively cheerful. You get the sense that you're watching the seasons change from this brightness to this inner gray that takes over.
Violence in Polanski's film is psychological. It's largely implied and it's rarely explicit, and when it is explicit, it's for comedy's sake. When Jake gets his nostril slit in Chinatown, he looks ridiculous for the rest of the film, with the bandage on his nose.
[Clip from Chinatown]
Jake: But. Mrs. Mulwray, I goddamned near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it. And I still think that you are hiding something.
The aftermath of [the attack on Jake] is constantly rubbed in your face as very this silly thing to look at — whereas the lingering type of violence in [Polanski's] films is always something that's creeping and slow and under the skin that his characters have to deal with, with greater understanding of things. It's like the way that certain (H.P.) Lovecraft stories work. You get the biggest scares out of knowing things you didn't before. Well, that necessarily means that you have to build in stages to an ultimate sense of understanding, an ultimate sense of knowledge that will really destroy you, that will really violently upend you.
[Clip from Chinatown]
Evelyn Mulwray: She's my sister. She's my daughter. My sister. My daughter.
Jake: I said I want the truth.
Evelyn Mulwray: She's my sister and my daughter.
And that's why it's necessarily a creeping kind of violence. It's a kind of series of reversals, and really, implied actions.
Jake: He raped you?
With films like The Ghost Writer and The Tenant, you get the sense that these characters are dealing with their trauma as they're figuring out that it's happening to them. And that's fascinating.
There are no traditional good guys and bad guys in Polanski's films. They're typically much more ambiguous. But obviously there are exceptions that prove the rule. They're just people you don't want to spent time with. But, after a point, you just recognize that you're watching their lives disintegrate, and that's as close as you get to identifying with them, because you're watching them. You're sutured into the degradations of disintegration, and you can help but feel for them. But you don't like them after a point.
I don't think evil, in a traditional theological sense, exists in Polanski's films. I think you've got characters like John Huston's character in Chinatown. They are deeply self-interested. They are deeply self-involved. They are not necessarily out for anyone else's interest but [their own]. But, after a point, that [describes] everyone. The problem is that certain characters have more of an advantage than others, and those are usually the bad guys. Those usually the ones that are able to be more manipulative and exploitative than the little guys that Polanski's film follow with the understand that you want these characters to succeed very badly, even though they almost never can.
[Clip from Chinatown]
Jake: How much you worth?
Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want?
Jake: I just want to know what you're worth? Over ten million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes.
Jake: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat. What can you buy that you can't already afford?
Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!
[Clip from The Ghost Writer]
Former Prime Minister Adam Lang: I've never taken orders from anyone. Whatever I did. I did because I believed it was right.
The Ghost: Even supporting illegal kidnapping for torture?
Adam Lang: Oh for God's sakes! Spare me the bleeding heart bullshit!
[The Ghost Writer] is a Polanski thriller through and through. It may be very similar in content to [Robert] Harris' novel — like the plot beats and everything. But the tone, and the way it moves, and the way the characters are essentially motivated and governed by the powers that be in that film, that's Polanski. Totally.
I think Polanski is not quite an atheist. But, I think that agnosticism is a lot closer to his belief system in many of his movies. You get this idea that [there] is something going on, there is some higher power or powers out there, and they're manipulating the characters in his films. But they're not always following a set plan, beyond the fact that they're gonna screw with these main protagonists. In that sense, for the longest time you can get the sense that there is no one up there, like in the beginning. And then, and then you get the idea that there is [someone up there] — and he hates you.
[The end of ] The Ghostwriter is the perfect example. The Ewan McGregor character gets hit by a car. We don't see it. There is not explicit violence. All the work that he did in the film doesn't matter. All the research, all the knowledge that he's accrued doesn't matter. It's all gone to pot, and he's dead.
Chinatown is another great example because it has that ending where the Jake character's totally resigned. He hasn't quite lost, but he knows he can't win. He has this absolute sense of certainly now that there is no viable way to continue with his investigation. He's not quite ready to throw in the towel, but it's so out of his hands that — that's it. That's the epitaph of his investigation. And beyond that, he just has to accept it. He just has to take it.
[Clip from Chinatown]
Walsh: Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
The interesting thing about The Pianist is that [it's about] a character that just wants to play his piano and be well off, to continue doing it on a steady basis. And he's not allowed that because of the historical context of the times. As Polanski had the impact of losing his wife to the Manson clan, that obviously informs this bleak, agnostic opinion, and that's why when you see The Pianist, survival is enough. Survival is its own victory, and I think [The Pianist has] one of most optimistic endings of any of his films, because you get the sense that [the hero] has won because he made it, as opposed to all the other films of his — especially Knife in the Water, where surviving is that much more hellish because all of these characters have been through a gauntlet and [gained] a greater sense of understanding is that there is no one up there, no entity that they can identify with.
There is something up there. But it's not understandable. You can't discern the motives of God, or of a deity like that. You just have to go with the fact that something's happening, wheels are in motion, and it's just like a giant Rube Goldberg machine, and you get out of it at the end. That's great. It never gets better. It just keeps going. That's life for Polanski.
Serena Bramble is a rookie film editor whose montage skills are the result of accumulated years of movie-watching and loving. Serena is currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in Teledramatic Arts and Technology from Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing, she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in the Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, The Extended Cut.
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So the child rapist speaks!
And betrays himself as unredeemed–which is what sociopaths usually are, unredeemable–and after all this time he uses all of us as…as what?
“She is a double victim: my victim and a victim of the press”
Clever, eh? If she’s a double victim, then he just committed *half* the crime.
And we, the press, half sodomized after a perp search a child someone just off the cusp of being 12 years old.
I think perhaps little Roman understood Noah Cross more than anybody in a filmography which perhaps we can view as an epic distraction from his monstrousness as a human, one that double-times as a way of making him look like the hero.
If you read the literature of sociopathy, this isn’t even close to being far-fetched.
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I always thought the “Is God Dead?” was inserted to make you feel hopeless before the fact. Like, Who You gonna call?
Nobody.
Rosemary’s fucked in every way and I don’t think you can’t exclude black comedy from Polanski’s worldview any more than you can the Coens–the difference is that there’s a vestige of belief. Not much, but a teensy bit of something. Enough to feel even worse about things.
“Not to read too much autobiography into it”
I would totally read tons of autobiography into it! 🙂
The idea that artists create art from this isolated space chamber separate from their lives…I’d argue on the side of utterly impossible.
We know with Hitchcock, Cassevetes, Scorsese, from Cindy Sherman and Lou Reed and Alexander McQueen, any great with control and a willingness to let people know about their deal.
Hell, what I’m typing right now is utterly informed by my needs and desires which are born of the twists of autobiography.
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Upper left hand corner, sorry! Insomniac dyslexics stay up all night wondering if there is a dog.
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Edward, thank you for your comment, but I think the title might have led you to slightly misconstrue the purpose of the piece. It doesn’t posit a God in Polanski’s cinema so much as ask whether there is one, and if so what sort of god, or force, we’re dealing with based on what Polanski shows us. The piece is also concerned with the apparent world view of Polanski himself, and his characters, given the threats they face and the suffering they endure and their own somewhat halting attempts to make sense of both. Under the circumstances I think a verdict of “Evidence: inconclusive” is quite reasonable. So is the observation that Polanski’s take on these issues varies somewhat depending on where he was in his career and his life — aspects of the director’s filmography that the piece does deal with.
I agree that a 15-minute piece on Kieslowski addressing the same issues would be difficult and perhaps impossible. However if you’d like to take a stab at writing the script for such a piece, I encourage you to contact us at the address in the upper right hand corner of this blog.
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It’s always problematic when someone posits God as a hidden but active principal in a film. What kind of God is the film or filmmaker referring to? Is it the Judeo-Christian God of Western civilization – the creator of the universe who is both omnipresent and beyond and who passes judgment on us all, promising either eternal salvation or damnation. Or a God more like an unseen hand that guides a character’s (or characters) fate, ultimately directing him, her, or them on a path to their destiny. Or is the God the filmmaker is invoking something else all together. Even though Simon titled his essay “Polanski’s God” he doesn’t tell us who or what that God is in Polanski’s films. All he can tell us is that this God is not understandable nor is this God’s motives discernible, which is really not telling us anything. I do agree with Simon when he suggests that Polanski is for the most part agnostic, but saying that Polanski is agnostic is admitting that in the great scheme of things that God, however Polanski would define He/She/It, doesn’t matter one way or the other in Polanski’s films. Simon wrote an essay on Polanski’s God only to tell us that there’s nothing to know or say about Polanski’s God. Why bother?
If one wants to write about God in a filmmaker’s oeuvre – and I’m referring more to the unseen hand type – then I suggest taking a look at the works of another great Polish director, Krzysztof Kielowski. There’s a lot to explore in “The Double Life of Veronique” and “The Three Colors Trilogy.” There’s also a mother lode of material in “The Decalogue” but given its volume, depth, and complexity probably way too much for a 15 minute video essay to do it any sort of justice.
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1. Why would Simon say that Evil doesn’t exist in Polanski’s films? If Noah
Cross isn’t evil, Evil, then I really don’t know what is.
2. I wonder why people don’t ever contextualize the fact that Polanski is–or let’s be generous, was–a rapist pederast and an epically horrid man when in his, uh, ‘prime’.
I lived in West Hollywood in and around the film/music industries when he searched out/drugged/sodomized that 13 year old.
I can only report that nobody was even faintly surprised when news of this broke. What’s known for certain is that he was horrid to women, and a pretty horrid egomaniac in general, pederast/rape issues aside.
Anyway, I think that, over the years, a sense of self-horror emerged–it’s always been there–a sense of him trying to come to terms with his own monstrosity. A redemption thing.
So many films start making more sense through this lens.
I’m sure the Sharon Tate horror twisted him deeply, and the horrors of his childhood as well–but there was something bad there waiting to be twisted.
But most people who suffer as bad don’t end up raping kids, you know?
Point is, I don’t see how one says “This is irrelevant and has no bearing on the type of art made.” What does he have to do, gut a nursery?
And yet people LOVE looking at Hitchcock’s every quirk and oddity for clues about whatever.
But there’s more–and I’m empathizing with Polanski as a human and an artist here.
Conveniently forgetting–which is what most everyone does–ultimately robs Polanski of his battle with his significantly lower angels and his work of depths and contexts.
His ‘dark’ side seems random. The change in his films in his later years seems to be something it might not be at all.
But the whole lalala-nothing-amiss-here approach–and again, that is *not* just you, it’s basically everyone–it’s…I don’t know. It’s just so strange I can’t wrap my head around it. It’s so intrinsic to the Polanski legend, to what he was and is, to what tortures his work…
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I’d say less God than an absent watchmaker. Purpose or progress are at best meaningless phrases, at worst cruel jokes, in Polanski’s worldview, but the brutal determinism is unmistakable. It’s how so many of his films wind up inscribing a circle, but you don’t recognize the pattern until the clasp snaps shut. Polanski imposed this on Shakespeare, so no chance he’d allow Robert Towne to break the cycle. It’s not just that it’s Chinatown, it’s that it always will be.
So many of Polanski’s characters are forced to their corners by circumstance: education, family, chance encounters. But also by themselves. I became obsessed with Polanski in my teens, in the ’80s, catching up on so many masterpieces via VHS or revival screenings. And, as a result, I picked up a curious misconception: That The Tenant was his first film in exile, and something of a commentary on that. I didn’t learn the correct chronology for about a decade, and wonder to this day how much Polanski sensed his own future in the air, knew that even with all the madness behind him, it wasn’t over. Because you can trip yourself up as easily as anyone else.
Which make the films something more than random but less than pre-ordained, a series of events and characters’ responses that lead to endings inescapable, though God has nothing to do with it. Chinatown, Transylvania, the road from Dunsinane; caught resting at Stonehenge or cowering under a bed; performing in concert or attending one and catching the eye of your old torturer. Welcome to your destination.
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Roman Polanski has known things none of us can so much as imagine. His mother was taken away to the extermination camp and killed on arrival. In the Krakow Ghetto he saw people shot at point blank range right before his small child’s eyes. Years later when he was enjoying enormous success, Manson happened.
Then came the Honey Trap and the showboating Rittenband. And then Steve Cooley’s pathetic attempt get himself elected by giving the public Roman’s head. He didn’t get it.
Roman continues on.
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@Jim: “That’s one reason I particularly like the title of this essay. I would lean toward reading it (in terms of the films themselves, I mean) as a contraction, not a possessive: “Polanski’s God.”
I like that a lot.
We actually thought of it the title as having two meanings — “Polanski [the director] is God because he’s in such total command of his craft” and “Polanski’s theological viewpoint, if in fact he has any.” But you’re right, there could be a third interpretation that I don’t think we consciously thought about: “Polanski the director is the god of his own movies.” Which of course is accurate, not just for Polanski but for any storyteller.
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On the one hand, you have an artist whose signature title is probably “Cul-de-Sac.” Very Polish, this bleak/black comedic emphasis on the terminal fact that nobody gets out of here alive. In noir (like “Chinatown”) that sense of overriding control is commonly referred to as fate or destiny. These are for the most part “closed-ended” films — deliberate dead ends (with the notable exception, as Simon and Serena note, of “The Pianist”). We can’t escape our personal hells, our private traps (Norman Bates and Simone Choule say the same things in different ways).
Matt: I like what you say about comparisons to, say, Kubrick or the Coens. For them, the force that is imposing “order” (at the characters’ expense) is that of the filmmaker. Kubrick and the Coens (“Barry Lyndon,” “A Simple Man”) sometimes seem to take delight in torturing and frustrating those presumptuous enough to think themselves protagonists of a Kubrick or Coen film! Polanski does that sometimes, too (notably in “The Tenant,” where he plays the character himself) — toying with the character like a cat with a helpless cockroach. I don’t see much room for god in the universe of Polanski — BUT (and this is a big “but”) there is always the dead certainty of doubt.
That’s one reason I particularly like the title of this essay. I would lean toward reading it (in terms of the films themselves, I mean) as a contraction, not a possessive: “Polanski’s God.”
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I got the feeling from Simon and Serena’s piece that they think Polanski is open to the possibility that there are forces at work in the universe — perhaps random/mathematical/scientific, perhaps purposeful and intelligent — that affect the lives of individuals and societies, but that he is unwilling to attempt a definition of what they might be, choosing instead to show how the effect of these forces consumes and impacts his characters, and always leaving open the possibility that there is nothing up there/out there, that it’s all an attempt by humans to impose order on chaos.
Polanski is temperamentally very different from Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick and the Coen brothers — all of whom are of course very different from one another — but like them, he seems to have both an interest in exploring those forces, and a humility in the face of them, whatever they might be. And as Simon alludes at one point in the video essay, he wavers between thinking there is nothing beyond the world we can see, thinking there is something out there/up there that the human mind cannot comprehend, and thinking there is an intelligent, purposeful force out there that is wantonly destructive and maybe even sadistic. That’s very human, too. At various points in my life I’ve embraced all three of those POVs and all sorts of gradations in between.
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I don’t think it’s outside the realm of his concerns; learning that there isn’t some entity, some order to the universe that Polanski’s protagonists can understand–that is a gnostic search for God, I think.
But yes, the “Is God Dead?” cover is essential because it gives you the idea that, well, maybe it’s not a God that’s in control of everything. Real evil is not human beings, I think–it’s man’s ability to basically screw each other over so vigorously. It’s like a bureaucratic worldview: there’s no one person to blame here. The world is too complex for there to be a singular God, though some system is clearly in place in his films to approximate divine control.
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I appreciate Simon’s take that Polanski is an agnostic — perhaps the idea of “god” is entirely outside the realm of his concerns — but I’d say it’s because his world is one in which the absence of god is a given, a precondition of human existence. The question is most famously posed with the inclusion of the TIME “Is God Dead?” cover in “Rosemary’s Baby,” but the plot of Ira Levin’s novel requires the (mostly off-screen) presence of Satan as the embodiment of evil. But perhaps the real evil is simply the ambition of Rosemary’s husband Guy (John Cassavettes). Not to read too much autobiography into it, but perhaps the survivor of the Krakow Ghetto whose parents were taken to Nazi concentration camps (his mother died at Auschwitz) knows something about where real evil comes from: human beings.
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Hi, mentioned this series on our site screen comment
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