More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda
Video by Scott Stark, 2006, 20 mins.
www.scottstark.com
Hello Ms. Fonda,
I hope you will watch this video with the sense of humor, playfulness
and thoughtfulness that I tried to put into it.
It is possible that you will find the video problematic, troubling,
incomprehensible or just plain silly. Thus I’ve written a few notes
below in case your interest is sufficiently piqued. If you’re able to
go with it, I think you will see that, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek
critique of your career as an activist and later evolution into an exercise
mogul, it is ultimately respectful, coming from a perspective of admiration,
and engaging of many of your ideas and beliefs, which I share.
I also hope you will not be bothered by the liberal borrowing I made
of your texts and quotations for the piece. In fact I would be honored
if you would consider this a kind of collaboration, or at least grant
me your blessing and permission to screen it. I am not making money
off of this video – it inhabits the world of experimental cinema and
video art, which if you know anything about it, is considered a non-commercial,
fine art form, as well as an economic dead end.
* * *
Briefly about me: I have
been making short films and videos for the last 25 years and have had
exhibitions at many major art institutions across the U.S.
and around the world, including the Whitney Biennial and the Museum
of Modern Art in New
York. You can read more about my work at www.scottstark.com.
* * *
A remake? of an exercise video?
The original idea for the video, which I began
shooting in the early 1990s, was that your exercise video series, coming
as it did at the cusp of the 1980s, was emblematic of a cultural shift
from the politicized, activist climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s
into the me-decade of the 80s. You, as Jane-Fonda-the-activist morphing
into Jane-Fonda-the-exercise-queen, were certainly a symbol of this
cultural shift, and even in many ways one of its driving forces. Some
have seen this shift as a betrayal of a certain kind of selfless idealism,
replacing it with a more self-centered view of changing the world through
self-improvement. More on that in a moment.
The idea of a “remake” of an exercise video, of course, is something
of a joke – remakes are usually made of classic films, updated with
newer stars and a contemporary cinematic vocabulary. In my version,
you see me – a decided non-star – performing the workout while watching
it; your original video is always off-screen, implied rather than seen.
I introduce myself as a male exerciser into what is largely female terrain,
since the original workout video’s core audience was mostly women. I
am seen performing the workout in a variety of public and private settings,
accentuating a supposed public embarrassment I might feel at inhabiting
that feminine landscape, but at the same time acknowledging that I am
a part of the cultural shift that I am critiquing. (In fact for many
years I attended group aerobics classes, in which I was usually one
of only a handful of men, and I have no shame about my place in that
world.)
Add to that mixture the song that is played on the soundtrack of your
original workout, which goes “There’s much more to you than meets the
eye…” That’s certainly a perfect song for a workout tape, for women
who may have a self-image problem and are exercising to improve themselves
and their sense of worth. It’s something I find rather touching, and
it’s partly why your video struck such a strong chord and was so successful.
I think all of these things bring out a certain humor mixed with serious
critique mixed with a kind of droll practicality: one could, in fact,
do the complete Jane Fonda Workout just by watching my tape.
In the process the video becomes a tongue-in-cheek homage to the original.
I have to admit, though, that part of my inspiration for the piece was
in response to a supposed betrayal that I felt: the evolution of the
ideals of an era that had profoundly influenced me, into something I
saw as ultimately self-serving and not doing much good to solve the
social ills that had never gone away, and in fact were getting worse
in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton years. Again, bear with me, as I’ll have
more to say about that.
Thus the title, More Than Meets
the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda, takes on many meanings: a simple video
remake, the remaking of a cultural icon and her personal belief system,
the remaking of the 70s activist-era into the 80s me-era, and an acknowledgment
that there is more to everything than meets the eye, so that you can’t
even take what I’m saying at face value.
* * *
Politics: In an early version
of my video, there was almost no text; the only overt political referents
were the zooms at the end to objects which were already in the background
but previously unseen, including a picture of Malcolm X and an Apple
billboard with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Both of those images represent
personalities of the anti-war, civil rights era who have now been largely
co-opted by media labeling, most obviously by portraying John and Yoko’s
radicalism as a symbol of innovation to sell computers. There is also
an image of you in your Barbarella outfit, a looping reference back to your pre-dissident
days; as you have noted many times publicly, you have become a kind
of cultural icon that is used for a lot of different purposes -- a “lightning
rod,” as you say -- which often have no connection to who you really
are. I think the combination of these images touches upon a personal
and political evolution that you describe so well in your book, and
also obliquely sums up my own complex feelings about the cultural shift
I described above. The fact that these images were always in the background
during the entire video, though previously unnoticed, is a metaphor
for the idea that all of these ideas and images are part of the cultural
fabric of our current world, even though we take them for granted and
hardly notice them. They are what we are made of.
Whatever happened, though, to those provocative ideas about revolution
and radicalism and social injustice and racism and the criminality of
war that you and so many others spoke of, that provoked such anger and
outrage but also helped lead to some powerful changes? Have those been
invisibly subsumed as well into the cultural fabric? Are they simply
tag lines for advertising campaigns, colorful backgrounds for situation
comedies, nostalgic retro-fashions like paisleys and bell bottoms? Was
there ever a real power and meaning to those words, and does anyone
remember them?
* * *
Bringing it on home, Jane: In
early 2006, nearly three years into another criminal and ill-planned
war, I started thinking about the video again, and thought it would
be interesting to try and revive some of those provocative statements
of yours and place them over the images, making the ideas I’d had about
cultural and political shifts over the last 20-30 years a bit more overt.
I decided to use contemporary anti-war quotes of yours that you’d made
back in the early 70s, adding another voice to the your voice which we hear on the soundtrack, providing a
stark contrast between the 70s and 80s. At the same time I’d be able
to cherry-pick the quotes, using your words to voice my own feelings
about the Iraq War and highlighting the lessons that were never really
learned and mostly ignored from Vietnam. I wanted to use quotes of yours
from the Vietnam
era so they’d be in the present tense, with a practical urgency to them.
I first started scanning the internet, finding a few 70s-era Jane Fonda
quotes (often on websites run by people who hated you); then I started
looking into some of the biographies that have been written about you,
again picking out actual quotes from the time; and I even found a poorly
dubbed copy of FTA which had
you speaking articulately to Air Force pilots, asking them to stop their
bombing of North Vietnam.
Then I came to your autobiography. At first I wanted simply to find
some more 70s-era quotes, but of course it’s mostly written from today’s
perspective. As I started reading it, however, I realized there was
a lot being said that fed into my ideas about women’s self-esteem (e.g.
your accounts of bulimia, your own self-worth), the many cultural shifts
I was interested in, and, not least, your own blossoming activism and
involvement in the anti-war movement. I must say, I found your explanation
of how the U.S.
became entangled in Vietnam,
and why we stayed there, and why it was all
so wrong, one of the clearest and most profound
documents I’ve read on the subject. Really, I think this book should
be a must read for anyone wondering about what the hell we’re doing
in Iraq or Afghanistan or Central or South America or you-name-the-third-world-country;
unfortunately I doubt anyone who’s mind really needs to be changed about
it will bother to read it.
Anyway I decided then that the “remake” should have two additional
elements to it: a running commentary excerpted from My Life So Far (which runs horizontally across the screen), and provocative
quotes of yours from the Vietnam
era (which scroll vertically). As you, Jane Fonda, are not specifically
identified as the author of the texts until the end credits, I was interested
in how the “I” of the narrative could easily be confused with me, the
male performer (a friend told me she at first wondered if I really did
buy Kotex as a teenager); thus a feminized (as in “feminine,” not “feminist”)
representation of my masculine form becomes a part of an exploration
of female adolescence, sexuality, denial of self, acquiescence to men,
and an acknowledgment that I as a male inhabit the same world as girls
and women who are struggling with these ideas. The video, even with
its music and exercise noise going on in the background, charts a spiritual
growth of one person’s evolution into an activist, which in turn informs
a very perceptive view of both the criminality of war, and what shapes
women’s attitudes about themselves and their place in the world.
The political becomes deeply personal.
In the process of making this video (and reading your book) I developed
a deeper understanding of your motivations for developing the exercise
videos and came see them as extensions of your own evolution as a feminist
and activist, as a way of empowering women, of personalizing the political.
The video then becomes, for me, an exploratory essay; and it allows
me to give voice, using your very public statements, to my own complicated
and somewhat chaotic feelings about the world.
* * *
Thank you for taking the
time to read through this, Ms. Fonda. Again, I hope you will approach
the video with the sense of humor and thoughtful exploration that I
intended. If you have any comments about it feel free to contact me
at the above email address.
Scott
Stark
April 2006
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