The Bane that is Jane

DOES Jane Fonda feel remorse? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. But there have been some interesting developments of late in what Fonda refers to as “the last third of my life”: First she found Christianity, and now she tells Oprah in an interview in Winfrey’s new magazine O, “I will go to my grave regretting the photograph ofmeinan antiaircraft carrier which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes … It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done.”

Forget for a moment the malapropism of antiaircraft carrier, which recalls her famous spoonerism on The Dick Cavett Show in the ‘70s—in which she said that U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia had its roots in our ungodly desire for “tung and tinsten.” Forget, too, other parts of this interview, in which Fonda betrays an unregenerate pride in having participated in the conscience-driven New Left along “with people like Tom Hayden who were living for more than just themselves.” The fact is, it’s hard to read her chat with Oprah and not feel that what Fonda finds horrible about her famous trip to North Vietnam was the photograph and “what it would look like,” not the trip itself. “It was just thoughtless,” she says of her impulsive decision to put on the helmet and get imaginary U.S. pilots in her gunsight. But couldn’t this sentence stand as a judgment on all of her frenzied activities in the Movement? And doesn’t her weird odyssey in radical politics warrant a much broader apology?

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Peter Collier

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DOES Jane Fonda feel remorse? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. But there have been some interesting developments of late in what Fonda refers to as “the last third of my life”: First she found Christianity, and now she tells Oprah in an interview in Winfrey’s new magazine O, “I will go to my grave regretting the photograph ofmeinan antiaircraft carrier which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes … It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done.”

Forget for a moment the malapropism of antiaircraft carrier, which recalls her famous spoonerism on The Dick Cavett Show in the ‘70s—in which she said that U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia had its roots in our ungodly desire for “tung and tinsten.” Forget, too, other parts of this interview, in which Fonda betrays an unregenerate pride in having participated in the conscience-driven New Left along “with people like Tom Hayden who were living for more than just themselves.” The fact is, it’s hard to read her chat with Oprah and not feel that what Fonda finds horrible about her famous trip to North Vietnam was the photograph and “what it would look like,” not the trip itself. “It was just thoughtless,” she says of her impulsive decision to put on the helmet and get imaginary U.S. pilots in her gunsight. But couldn’t this sentence stand as a judgment on all of her frenzied activities in the Movement? And doesn’t her weird odyssey in radical politics warrant a much broader apology?