Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2005

Thesis Director

Parley Ann Boswell

Thesis Committee Member

Robin Murray

Thesis Committee Member

Christopher Hanlon

Abstract

Polish-expatriate film director Roman Polanski's career has been largely overshadowed by the bizarre and tragic events of his personal life. After a horrific childhood that saw him watch helplessly as his Jewish parents were taken away by the Nazis to the concentration camps, Polanski again experienced familial tragedy when his eight-month pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four houseguests were brutally murdered in 1969 by members of the Charles Manson cult. In the aftermath of the Manson murders, the director was further victimized by the American popular press, which, according to biographer Barbara Leaming, unfairly suggested that he unwittingly "brought the tragedy upon himself" by continually producing macabre films like Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1968) (109). Subsequently, Polanski's dual identity as a victim/victimizer was permanently etched in the American consciousness after his statutory rape of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey, which resulted in his fleeing the United States to France in 1978 to escape sentencing.

Polanski's notorious reputation coupled with his macabre storytelling kept his films from receiving the serious critical attention they deserved. Unlike fellow suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, who saw his status elevated from craftsman to auteur in the late 1960s, Polanski has never reached the same level of stature in the film community. By recognizing that Polanski's dark cinematic vision is the semi-autobiographical work of an auteur director, film scholars are forced to come to terms with the thin line separating the roles of victim and victimizer in his life and his films. Just as the director's public identity shifted from victim to victimizer, Polanski's film protagonists typically make the same unsettling transition.

This thesis will explore how Polanski can be evaluated as an auteur director, whose personal and professional world is a never-ending circle of victimization. Polanski is a victim turned victimizer, who finds himself attacked by the critics for challenging his audience to question and evaluate the dual nature of victim/victimizer in both his life and his films. This circle of victimization is most clearly evident in the films Cul-de-Sac (1966), Chinatown (1974), Bitter Moon (1992), and The Pianist (2002). These films are the director's cathartic means of coming to terms with his personal tragedies: his unhappy first marriage to Barbara Kwiatkowska; the murder of his second wife Tate; his statutory rape of Gailey; and his separation from his family during the Holocaust, respectively. While the preceding three films paint a masochistic worldview where evil triumphs and the human spirit is always obliterated, The Pianist offers the first glimmer of hope in Polanski's remarkable oeuvre that emotional survival is possible.

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