In The Pianist, the artist as an exceptional individual stands passively defiant to the lie of the antagonists. His very existence challenges the Big Lie of the Nazis. He is the greatest pianist in the world, a Jew, a member of the outcast and inferior group.
Similarly, Polanski himself feels this way about his own life. Whether he feels his predations on young girls are aberrant or not, I do not know, but I am certain he believes firmly his skill at making movies and whatever else he believes about himself and his own abilities make him somehow exceptional when it comes to responsibility or culpability for rape and pedophilia.
Because of his feelings about himself, he can present this view of the piano player elevating him to The Pianist. Even as a true story, it needs a lens of utter certainty in certain respects to make the film what it is.
Władysław Szpilman, Polish Pianist
The Pianist is an exceptional individual – in a sense, the mirror image of the Übermensch or the anti-Superman of the Nazis. He can survive and is helped even by his enemies because they see his excellence in some twisted fantasy which, perversely, is a reality – or so I believe, says Polanski. I do believe it through his lens.
There are many ways in which persons are aided for obviously irrational reasons. Most often happen without the recipient being aware of it, at least at first. The same applies with hostile bias. It can take a while, often a lifetime, to map the contours of favoritism and ostracism in one’s own life, let alone the intricacies of microaggressions across communities, among our species – even in a family.
For example, the fact that taller children score higher on IQ tests because they are perceived as closer to adults and so their answers are interpreted in a different way indicates the principle, the bias, I am suggesting here, and which The Pianist presents in a very particular true-life case.
Privilege is what it is, a kind of basis. The Pianist is largely about how privilege works. It is both cultural and biological, but it is not logical. It is easy to see this as us/them, the Nazi side and the Jewish side, how one group asserts and imposes dominance, regardless of any actual superiority of all individuals in one group over the other.
Hierarchal relationships are interesting enough to be studied across species. We have, however, an unscientific habit of then imposing what we see in very different creatures back on humans without really thinking about it clearly.
We all have to put up with a certain amount of bias working both for and against us all the time. At some point, though, it ought to become annoying, all this credit and guilt for nothing, and the subservience or admiration, let alone the baselessly asserted dominance by arrogant fools, or the smarmy forced equality, the kind of attention most of us, as we mature, sanely learn to eschew.
What we get in The Pianist, and particularly in the protagonist, the piano man himself, is an exceptional person who everyone it seems knows to be exceptional, except perhaps himself. If at any time he were to embrace as natural or right that he should be treated exceptionally and favored, his condition, his mental state, would move into entitlement.
The fact he does not seem to be aware he deserves better or worse treatment is his saving grace, not in the sense that it is his being unaware that saves him from others but in that it is his lack of awareness and absence of consequent behavior of accepting his own superiority which save his character from becoming what is wrong with superior characters and a whole hierarchical way of fictional portrayal and of looking at actual human relationships.
For this kind of privilege and acceptance of favor, and the consequent behavior, saying, Yes, I do deserve to be treated better (or worse) than anyone else, this acceptance of dominance and submission, spills over into life itself unjustly.
Although not the same as the Nazis, who assert their superiority and the inferiority of others in the most extreme manner, the pianist is portrayed as being actually, genuinely superior and deserving. Sure, he gets beat up and suffers along with everyone else, including ultimately the Nazis, but at key moments he gets singled out and elevated, protected, and there is never really any doubt he above all others deserves this, because he is a great artist.
He may not be aware of his highly favored condition but Polanski is. That separation is what makes the movie and its message worth watching or perhaps watchable at all. Polanski himself is annoying and disgusting, but he is good enough at filmmaking to create a separation between himself and his character, to represent his own secret sense of himself sans the insufferable entitlement he himself holds so dear.
I Dwell In Possibility 