Meet Humbert Polanski

I don’t want to wade into the controversy over filmmaker Roman Polanski’s arrest at the Zurich airport on Saturday for raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977, mainly because I don’t see any controversy. Polanski raped a child; he confessed; then he fled to escape punishment; he deserves prison time. End of controversy.

No, what has caught my attention is the degree to which Polanski’s defenders are unconsciously repeating the involved and sophisticated defense of his “nympholepsy” offered by Humbert Humbert, who did his imitation of Polanski back in the ’fifties.

Thus Polanski is a “renown [sic] and international artist,” say Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, and other film people in a petition demanding his immediate release. “The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets,” Humbert protests—“not crime’s prowling ground.”[1]

“I know it wasn’t ‘rape’ rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was ‘rape’ rape,” Whoopi Goldberg says on the ABC chat show The View. Such men as he, Humbert agrees, “are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet” (p. 88).

“The 13-year old model ‘seduced’ by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies,” Joan Z. Shore writes in the Huffington Post. “I am going to tell you something very strange,” Humbert confides: “it was she who seduced me” (p. 132).

“The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday,” Shore goes on, “which was the age of consent in California. (It’s probably 13 by now!)” “Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces,” Humbert observes learnedly. “Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds” (p. 19).

The difference between them is that Humbert Humbert abandons these lame justifications when, as I have argued elsewhere, he atones for his sin, which he comes to acknowledge as a sin.

And Polanski? “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see?” he told Martin Amis in 1979. “But . . . f---ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f--- young girls. Juries want to f--- young girls. Everyone wants to f--- young girls!”

Not everyone, you monster. Not Humbert Humbert, for example. Not any longer.
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[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita [1955] (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 131. Subsequent references in parentheses.