Me old muckers, Senor Chorizo and Signor Prosciutto, wave to me from the continental meats fridge in Somerfield’s. I shouldn’t, but I do and they go in the bag. As does the buffalo mozzarella. And the avocado. And the bag of baby spinach, ‘cos adult spinach is rank. I hopscotch to the fruit squash and help myself to a Ribena. I skate round frozen and pick up some Phish Food for the Doris. I mince past the mince, past the security guard and before you know it, I’m past the door. All paid for with the £0 note, mind.
The germination of my criminal career can be traced back to 2001, as I sat swinging on my chair in Mr Bryant’s Sociology class. Emile Durkheim purported that crime is inevitable, normal and even functional for society. That seed grew into a fully-fledged redwood six years later as, inspired by Naomi Klein’s No Logo and a penury fed by my diligence to indolence, I began to shoplift.
I’m very easily led astray, and seduced further by the works of Oscar Wilde, John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester and lysergic acid diethylamide, I managed to convince myself that I was a poet living the deviant lifestyle of the rake.
This culminated in the summertime in the Peak District where I thought that I was the living embodiment of what every Citiboy wanted to be – a young artisan with a thirst for wanderlust. It must be put into context, however, that at the same time, I was staggering round a field in the genuine belief that my hands were made of paint.
LSD notwithstanding, I genuinely see the job of the artist as living a deviant lifestyle that we as the hoi polloi can vicariously lead. Russell Brand’s conquests are a victory for men everywhere and London’s commuters huff with every puff as Amy Winehouse’s dragon-chasing exploits are detailed in the London Lite. The artist gets into trouble on our account, so we don’t have to, and then they regale the glorious tales in works of song, film and literature.
Oscar’s latently homosexual friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, which in turn inspired The Picture of Dorian Gray, led to us being privy to salacious accounts of steamy romps which were uncovered when Oscar got sent to chokey for being a bummer.
From there, Oscar waltzed across the Channel where he could fill his boots, away from our puritanical shores and off to the liberal and Sapphic-friendly French. Seeing as homosexuality is now legal here (it did take until 1967, mind), it seems preposterous that Oscar was ever sent to jail, further corroborating another of Emile Durkheim’s ideas, that deviance is also a social construct.
The classic example given in Sociology class was that of the soldier who kills in battle is a war-hero, but the Saturday night reveller who kills in a street fight is a murderer. It’s the same action, yet it is treated differently.
Oscar’s defection from here to France is a typical example of how geography can determine the social construction of deviance. London to Calais is 91 miles apart, and London to Manchester is 165 miles apart, yet Oscar could carry on in Calais but not peruse the canals of Manchester.
Parallels can be drawn between Oscar and critically-acclaimed Oscar-winning director, Roman Polanski, as both of them escaped their adopted countries in favour of France’s more accepting shores.
Nowhere is the artist more sacred than in France. Film festival curator and French cinema commentator, Edouard Waintrop reckons that in France “...there's the notion of art for art's sake, a certain leeway that's always allowed to the creative artist. In the 19th century it was elevated into an ideology.” If the rallying around Polanski from the Gallic glitterati is anything to go by, it appears then that the French Revolution succeeded only in removing one set of tyrannical rulers for another set made up of artists and cineastes.
When news first broke of Roman Polanski’s arrest at a Zurich Film Festival where he was, I am ashamed to admit, I was a bit gutted for the man. The rebel in me myopically saw an artist castigated for his minor deviant spirit. Heroes of mine, such as Pedro Almodovar came out in his defence, citing the fact that it’s raking through old mud, the victim, Samantha Geimer, had forgiven him and that it was retribution for retribution’s sake, and also that he’d had a hard life.
Now granted, a Holocaust upbringing is about as grim an entrance as one can make into this world and the brutal murder of his then-pregnant wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson Family was pretty harsh too. Since 1977, he’s had an especially hard time, skipping the country and sentencing, swanning round Europe, winning Oscars and lifetime achievement awards. I must have missed the law lecture which suggested that you get one rape, on the house, if you had a disadvantageous start to life.
If anything is myopic, it’s those who defend a man that groomed a 13 year-old girl by telling her he could make her famous, plied her with alcohol and sedatives, then forced cunnilingus on her before vaginally and finally anally raping her. His misguided defenders would probably argue that he was at least a considerate rapist because he licked her out first such is their fervour to defend the indefensible.
It has got to the point where you’ve got such legal illuminaries as US Chief Justice Whoopi Goldberg, chucking her two cents into the hat by suggesting that he didn’t actually rape her and that a little known subsection meant that in order for him to be convicted of rape, he needed to do more than just rape.
“I know it wasn’t rape-rape,” says Whoopi on American chat show The View. As opposed to what, Whoopi? Rape squared? Or rape-rape-rape? No, Whoopi, he didn’t rape-rape her, did he Whoopi? He just raped her. It doesn’t matter how many times you say it, Whoopi, it is what it is.
He has not even had the gumption to admit it either, with the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor being the charge he was due to be sentenced for. This suggests that it was a love affair that was misunderstood by the masses, and that their forbidden amour could not prosper where there were legal eagles keeping a keen eye out. Samantha Geimer has said many times that she said no, which means it wasn’t consensual. Which means it was rape. Or rape-rape, if you prefer, Whoopi.
The fact he admitted a lesser charge further suggests that he has shown no remorse for his actual actions. Unless remorse means jumping jail, hotfooting it to Europe and dating 15 year-old actress, Nastassja Kinski, and then claim in an interview that "everyone wants to fuck young girls.”
Geimer has forgiven Polanski and insisted that she wants the case dropped. This isn’t a benevolent plea for leniency for Polanski, rather than a desire to keep her and her family’s dignity as the case gets dragged up again. Rape trials are brutal as the rape itself – not only do you as a victim have to retell your ordeal in pornographic detail, but your sexual history is cross-examined which perpetuates the view held by middle-aged, middle-class white men in fancy wigs that if she had a short skirt on, then she probably was asking for it. I don’t believe Geimer wants the case dropped; she wants the way in which legal systems deal with rape revamped.
And even if she did want the case dropped and Roman Polanski exonerated, this isn’t for her anymore. If we had a system where victims decide on the fate of their perpetrators, what would happen to murderers? No, this is for every woman who has ever been sexually assaulted and didn’t have the courage to report it. This is for every woman out there that did have the courage to report it, but inept policing and a laissez-faire judiciary botched her chance of justice. Moreover, this is for every woman who walks the street apprehensive that she might suffer the ultimate violation without reprisal for her assailant as it sends out a message that this will not be tolerated.
We live in a society where in my lifetime it was not a criminal offence to rape your wife. Seventy years after Woman achieves equal suffrage and she finally is allowed by law to refuse sex with her husband. We live in a society that won’t fork out £500 for a DNA test to look into the attempted sexual assault of a young woman ‘cos it ain’t worth it. And it appears now that we live in a society that allows rapists, so long as they direct Oscar-winning films.
Jean Cocteau stood in the dock in 1943 and gave an impassioned defence of Jean Genet, claiming he was the country’s greatest scribe and that his petty offences were to enrich his soul and inform his writing. There are some mishaps that I think it is fair to forgive the artist for. Rape don’t come under that jurisdiction, I’m afraid.
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