At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.Good lord. Damnable civilized values, deceiving him into the trap of drugging and raping a child (sodomy, because he couldn't get assurances from her that she was on the pill).
The 20th century was brutal; many people, however, managed to enjoy their newfound sense of freedom without doing what Polanski did.
p.s: There is a complete effacement of agency here: exactly the type of effacement that conservatives accuse liberals of whenever liberals say "statistical correlates of crime include poverty" and that liberals enable when they respond by attack conservatives for saying "statistical correlates of crime include broken homes." The "newfound sense of freedom" is not some Pied Piper. I am as willing as anyone to efface agency, which is both excessively mystified and black boxed in a causal sense and exaggeratedly liberal. But even I have my limits.
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