A brief history of Jane Fonda fighting the power
As you no doubt saw on social media Jane Fonda, the lifelong silver screen queen known in 2019 for Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, has been arrested outside of Washington DC’s Capitol Hill as she demonstrated against climate change. Fonda made her intentions clear during an interview in the Washington Post, in which she announced her protest plans. “I’m going to take my body, which is kind of famous and popular right now because of the [television] series and I’m going to go to D.C. and I’m going to have a rally every Friday.” Continuing, she said: “It’ll be called ‘Fire Drill Friday.’ And we’re going to engage in civil disobedience and we’re going to get arrested every Friday.” If this sounds like a similar approach to a certain teenage climate activist and her “Fridays for Future” campaign, you would be right. Fonda cited Greta Thunberg as the inspiration for her political action, stating: “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis. We have to behave like our houses are on fire” (hence the “Fire Drill Friday” name).
However, this isn’t her first brush with the law – nor is it the only time she’s spoken out in the face of perceived injustice. She was famously arrested in 1970 on drug smuggling charges (anticlimactically, the pills on her person were vitamins, not illicit substances) whilst touring Canada to speak out against the Vietnam War. Fonda claims that the police officers who arrested her claimed to be “getting orders from the White House – that would be the Nixon White House,” suggesting that she was being targeted as a political agitator. Whilst anyone would be pissed at getting put in jail for multivitamin possession, she has a sense of humour about it – having even released merch (as spotted on Grace and Frankie co-star and BFFL Lily Tomlin) emblazoned with her vintage mugshot to raise funds for charity.
Yet Fonda’s activist credentials don’t end there. She took part in Standing Rock protests in 2016, even penning an op-ed for Time in which she characterised the two sides involved in the Standing Rock stand-off as: “greed versus a habitable planet” whilst discussing the ongoing effects of colonisation and cultural genocide upon the United States’ Indigenous Peoples. However, this is not to say that she can do no wrong. Earlier, in 2009, she spoke out against Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature Tel Aviv in its City-to-City Spotlight strand. Alongside the likes of Noam Chomsky and writer Alice Walker, she took the view that the curatorial decision colluded with the Israeli state’s efforts to distract the international community from the atrocities of the Gaza War via “cultural rebranding“. The inflammatory language of the open letter that Fonda and other creatives signed (as well as the overlap between anti-zionist sentiment and anti-semitism that can sadly emerge in protests of this kind) led to her stepping away from the campaign and admitting fault in an article for Huffington Post.
Yet her ability to admit fault, learn from her mistakes, and apologise, is as important as her willingness to use her platform to take a stand – particularly as a privileged white woman. Her political affiliations have also infiltrated her acting career, with roles in Coming Home, a film that raised awareness of trauma suffered by war veterans, and The China Syndrome, an exploration of the possible dangers associated with nuclear power.
Head over to Fire Drill Friday’s official website for more Jane-Fonda-getting-arrested news.
