Klute and Anne Carson
How Jane Fonda channeled her growing political consciousness into an Oscar-winning performance.
In Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), Jane Fonda plays a Manhattan call girl and aspiring actress named Bree Daniels who gets stalked by a former client turned serial killer. She pairs up with a compassionate, stoic Pennsylvania detective named John Klute (Donald Sutherland) and falls in love with him as they catch the killer together. Fonda won the 1972 Best Actress Oscar for Klute, which also won Best Original Screenplay, and deservedly so. She lends her sex worker character a complex interiority I’ve only seen matched in Sean Baker’s Tangerine and Jeanne Dielman.
Bree has five therapy sessions in Klute where she talks about how sex work psychologically fulfills her and her fear of falling in love. In Fonda’s 2005 memoir My Life So Far, she writes that she spent eight days interviewing sex workers in Manhattan to prepare to play Bree. She also visited a morgue to learn about the violence sex workers face. She made adjustments to Andy and Dave Lewis’s Klute script after her research. Per Esquire’s Anna Lee Grace, Fonda asked that Bree’s therapist be changed from a man to a woman because she didn’t believe Bree would open up to a male therapist and requested that director Pakula shoot Bree’s therapy scenes at the end of production so she’d be fully immersed in her character.
Bree’s therapy sessions in Klute are the most moving I’ve seen on film. In her first session, she talks about how she likes being a call girl because it makes her feel in control of her femininity. The money she makes and her ability to detach from her clients after she sees them makes her feel like she has “some control over [her] life” and that she can “determine things for [her]self.” In her second session, she talks about how seeing her former colleague succumb to drug addiction rattled her. “I was trying to get away from this world because I don’t think it was very good for me, then I found myself looking up its ass,” she says. In her third session, she talks about how falling in love with Klute scares her and makes her want to reassert control. “When you’re used to being lonely and somebody comes in and moves that around it’s sort of scary,” Bree says. “I want to manipulate him in all the ways I can manipulate people. I mean it’s easy to manipulate men, right?” In her fourth, she talks about how her love for Klute overwhelms her and makes her want to end it. “It’s so strange, this sensation that something that is flowing from me, naturally, to someone else, without it being prettied up... I wish I didn’t keep wanting to destroy it,” she says as she puts her head in her hands in anguish.
Bree’s line about wanting to destroy her relationship reminded me of Anne Carson’s idea in Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay that strong desire destabilizes people who pride themselves on self-reliance. “For individuals to whom self-possession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event,” Carson writes. “When an individual appreciates that [she] alone is responsible for the content and coherence of [her] person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat.” Bree’s feelings for Klute terrify her and she tries to stab him with scissors midway through the film to drive him away. Being in love with him puts her at his mercy and threatens the loneliness she feels safe in. In her final therapy session, she says “I know enough about myself to know that whatever lies in store for me, it’s not going to be setting up housekeeping with somebody in Tuscarora, [Pennsylvania], and darning socks and doing all that.” But she still craves connection despite the knowledge it won’t last. She tries to alienate Klute because she’d rather be numb than experience a love she knows will leave her.
Fonda was in a personal transitional period when she filmed Klute and I think she channeled it into Bree’s attempts to leave sex work. She delivered a line in her first therapy session, “You lead [men] by the ring of their nose in the direction that they think they want to go in,” which applied to Fonda’s acting career, too. Prior to Klute, Fonda built her name by giving audiences performances they wanted from her, as a romantic comedy lead in Barefoot in the Park (1967) and as a sex symbol in Barbarella (1968). But in the spring of 1970, she spent two months on a road trip across America and awakened her political consciousness. “She met with students at universities and soldiers at GI coffeehouses, was arrested for passing out antiwar pamphlets at army bases, and attended a speech on the women’s movement that ignited her own personal feminist revolution,” Lee Grace writes.
Fonda tried to quit her role as Bree after her road trip, writing in My Life So Far that she’d “begun to wonder if it wasn’t politically incorrect to play a call girl.” But director Alan J. Pakula convinced her not to. He said in Susan Lacy’s 2018 HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts that Fonda was “at a very transitional time,” and “was absolutely right for a character of a woman who’s trying to change her life.” Fonda bore out this transition in her therapy sessions in Klute. I think she was scared of how her growing feminist and antiwar consciousness threatened her acting career in the same way Bree was scared of how love threatened her ability to do sex work. She channels that into a masterful performance. In Bree’s therapy sessions, you see her wrestle with the fear she wants one life for herself that forecloses another. In another scene, she runs from Klute back to her former pimp. Klute offers no easy resolution to her dilemmas. Pakula, Fonda, and the screenwriters never let you forget that Bree lives in a man’s world. Experiencing both love and freedom, Klute suggests, requires working the trap you find yourself in.
I saw Klute at Auckland’s Capitol Cinema Film Club, which is playing Sofia Coppola’s father-daughter drama Somewhere (2010) on Tuesday, October 24 at 7:45 pm. Tickets are $10 and I strongly recommend going if you’re in town.
What a terrific analysis of Klute! Love the mention of Eros (a book that that sparked a lot of thoughts for me).