Protecting One’s Own: Letterman and Polanski

Colleen Claes — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:42:31 +0000

Like I said in my lengthy Roman Polanski apologists’ post (here ), most of society feels that Hollywood directors, producers, and actors are in the wrong for petitioning the arrest of Polanski because – among the most repetitive of reasons – he is a talented director and has gone through a lot in life. But the biggest part of the defense of their beloved Chinatown director has to be the simple fact that Hollywood is Polanski and vice versa. Why wouldn’t they defend him? He is ONE of them. The rest of us outside of Hollywood wouldn’t “understand” that. (See, I’m still bitter about it.)

Then I read an article on Vanity Fair’s website by Nell Scovell – one of the few female writers to ever work for David Letterman. She writes that after Letterman announced on his show that he’d had sexual affairs in the workplace…:

Most media stars responded by defending one of their own.

That’s when it hit me.

Despite how Hollywood felt, all of us “ordinary” people in society became re-outraged by Polanski’s sexual crimes. But Letterman? We shrugged it off, appreciated that he “handled it so well,” and felt relieved that his sexual affairs with female staffers were not “as bad” as what Polanski did to an unwilling 13-year-old girl.

Then again, the timeliness of the two cases was undoubtedly convenient for Letterman. As Kate Harding parenthetically wrote in a Jezebel article on the subject, “Letterman should probably send Roman Polanski a big fruit basket for ensuring that this scandal came with built-in perspective.”

Don’t misunderstand me here: the two sexual cases between Letterman and Polanski are NOT – I repeat, NOT – in the same boat. Just as a reminder, Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl and fled the country to escape charges in the U.S., and Letterman had affairs with some of his female staffers.

However, after reading the articles by Kate Harding and Nell Scovell, I’m starting to ask myself…Didn’t we end up doing the same thing for Letterman that Hollywood did for Polanski? After all the sympathizing we did, and after all the “let’s not jump to conclusions” kind of statements we made, I believe we let Letterman off the hook as a society. I mean, he still cheated on his life-long partner (and now wife), and created awkwardness and inappropriateness in the office with his affairs. And what did we say in his defense? You know, without REALLY saying it? Something like this: “Well, he’s funny, and we’ve always loved him, so…what’s the big deal really?”

As much as I love film, I think we relate more to television as a culture. We feel that it’s almost a part of us because we grew up with it and we spend time with it daily. Maybe that’s why we united with the media on the Letterman case and protected one of our own. Much like Hollywood did with their own.

Maybe I’m grasping at straws here too, but I’d like to think I’m on to some kind of connection, one that unconsciously happened within our society.

Cultural Voice-Over » Letterman

Protecting One’s Own: Letterman and Polanski