Sexual Humiliation in Polanski’s Bitter Moon and Venus in Fur

Abstract Roman Polanski’s films are master classes in entertaining an audience and keeping them engaged, but they are no mere popcorn movies. Bitter Moon and Venus in Fur excel as studies in sexual humiliation and degradation. It is a leitmotif that runs through the filmmaker’s work, from Knife in the Water to Death and the Maiden. Both Moon and Venus invoke the earlier Cul-de-Sac, ramping up the humiliation that permeates the latter and presenting it in a more provocative and titillating fashion. Polanski’s proclivities almost certainly reflect his Eastern European sensibilities and his penchant for the Theatre of the Absurd, and appear to be autobiographical as well.