When I was in graduate school, one of my film classes read an essay by a sociologist named Tony Bennett — who was no relation I know of to the singer — that talked about “encrustation.”
Bennett explained that it is impossible to view certain pieces of popular culture without being aware — at least subliminally — of the predecessors of the items in question. For example, when we see Daniel Craig in a James Bond film, his performance and the movie itself are encrusted, like barnacles on a ship, with previous iterations of 007: the original books by Ian Fleming and the earlier films starring very different actors playing Bond in very different ways.
I would argue that encrustation doesn’t just apply to fictional stories. It also applies to movie stars. And Jane Fonda is a case in point.
When we see her in a film or television series, a fan’s viewing experience is naturally inflected by her past roles. It is also influenced by our knowledge of her personal life as the daughter of Henry Fonda and the former wife of powerful men like Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner. We are also aware, at some level, of Fonda as a businesswoman, a film producer and a fitness icon whose popular workouts from the 1980s are still followed by many today.
For some, the defining encrustation of Fonda comes from her lifelong activism. She began protesting the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Since then, she has embraced numerous causes, including civil rights, feminism and the environment. Last fall, the then-87-year-old launched a new version of the Committee for the First Amendment, an organization her father, Henry, co-founded in the 1940s. Then, as now, it was designed to protect Americans from being persecuted by the government for their political beliefs.
Fonda’s activism is the subject of “Jane Fonda: There’s a Great Deal to Say” (Rutgers University Press, 318 pages, $29.95), a new book by retired journalism professor Marilyn S. Greenwald. In writing the biography, Greenwald made extensive use of Fonda’s papers at Smith College.
The book chronicles Fonda’s activist history as well as the ways in which that history provoked sometimes clearly illegal surveillance of the star by the United States government.
The book also reminds readers of the ways in which Fonda managed to embody her political views literally by producing and starring in films such as “Coming Home,” about the return of American soldiers from Vietnam, and “The China Syndrome,” about safety cover-ups at a nuclear power plant.
Although Fonda is a great deal older than me, I grew up watching her and remaining deeply aware of her activism. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from this biography. Like the recent HBO documentary, “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” the book tells the story of a woman who is always learning, evolving and changing. It also reminds the reader that Fonda tried many lifestyles and many modes of protest as she developed her skills as an actress, an activist and a human being.
I do wish Greenwald had spent a little more time sharing her own opinions of the complex woman she discusses. She notes that for many years Fonda made herself subservient to the men in her life, for example, but doesn’t express the frustration many readers will probably feel about this, nor does she analyze its causes. Perhaps such deep analysis is too much to expect of a journalist; they are, after all, trained to focus strictly on facts rather than personal beliefs.
Happily, the author does manage at the book’s end to address what may remain a mystery to many readers. Greenwald notes that Fonda’s “name still triggers bitter reactions by many people, most of whom aren’t even sure why they have such a visceral reaction to her — they just do because others like them have been reacting that way for decades.”
She suggests that the pigeonholing of Fonda as “Hanoi Jane” after a controversial visit to North Vietnam in 1972 may be the historic precursor to some of today’s quickly spread opinions on social media.
While the biography could have used a little more editing — the author tends to switch tenses in a distracting way when she quotes historical articles about Fonda — it is overall a book that, like its subject matter, will fascinate people who care about film and politics. It adds a valuable layer of encrustation to our overall view of the complex human being who is Jane Fonda.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.
