Apart from the actual movies, Polanski’s ultimate legacy may be that over the last forty-five years he’s become a sort of human Rorschach test. When we look at him, do we see a peerless creative artist who, perhaps conditioned by an early life few of us would envy, made a regrettable slip in his personal conduct? Or is he conversely, as one newspaper described him in 1977, “a ferret-faced sex predator” who deserves to be hauled back in front of Rittenband’s successors in chains, rather than allowed to live out his days in a chic apartment overlooking the Champs-Élysées?

The Polanski conundrum seems to highlight a fundamental tension between two schools of moral thought. The relativist insists that people have different life experiences and values, and that it’s impossible to say that one ethical code is better than another and, moreover, it’s xenophobic or racist to try. The absolutist holds that certain actions — such as sodomizing a thirteen-year-old child — are just wrong, whatever the extenuating circumstances. To them, cinema’s seemingly perpetual enfant terrible has now become its dirty old man.

[Had he acted like a man and faced the consequences of the crime, I’d be somewhat more inclined to consider his legacy in other contexts. Instead, he ran away and for decades received moral support from his industry colleagues for his sexual predation. Only after the Harvey Weinstein crimes came to light did Hollywood rethink the Polanski question, and to a large extent they’re still ducking it. That is his legacy — and that of the elite powerbrokers in Hollywood too: the Weinstein-Polanski legacy. — Ed]