As the fortysomething filmmaker Jennifer Fox grew older, she worried about becoming invisible. So she filmed herself in close-up (or had others film her; she called it "passing the camera") for four years while she traveled around the world trying to make sense of capital-w Womanhood in a six-hour documentary.
Ostensibly a film about the international plight of women, Flying became a very personal film about Fox's feelings for her Swiss boyfriend and her South African "lover," her repressive mother and grandmother,
her sexual abuse at the age of thirteen and her desire for a child.
There are so few films explicitly or implicitly about womanhood or feminism today that we felt obligated to check it out. Also, our editor made us. Join us on our journey into the "modern female life" of Jennifer Fox.
— Ada Calhoun and Sarah Hepola
Chapter One: In which she introduces us to her friends.
Summary: Fox films several of her acquaintences and explains their complicated romantic lives. She introduces us to her major problem: she doesn't want to get married, but she wants love. She greets the news of a friend's engagement with, "I wish life were that simple for me." But she is meant for affairs with foreign filmmakers, such as "the Swiss guy." When she gets pregnant, she says, "What about my work?" before delivering a weepy monologue for the camera. But she has a miscarriage the next morning and films the appointment, saying, "All I knew was I had to keep filming to figure out how to survive this modern female life."
Ada: "In the midst of the freedom, it seemed like all of us were struggling to find our way," Jennifer Fox says about herself and her friends. And thirty minutes in, I am beginning to suspect why: they are the whiniest, least self-aware women on the planet.
Sarah: This is the kind of thing that makes people hate New Yorkers. I was trying to connect to these people, but I can't, and I'm a single, thirtysomething woman in New York. How is this going to say anything about modern womanhood writ large?
Ada: The entitlement is shocking. One woman says of her boyfriend who really wanted a baby, "He got really angry at
me for having an abortion." When a divorced friend is only offered $1,600 a month in child support for her two mostly grown children, she shrieks, "There is no justice! They're out to kill you." And the others nod. Fox is surprised when her married boyfriend, who has children, doesn't answer his phone when she calls. "My lover wasn't there when I needed him," she says.
Sarah: This confirms my inherent distrust of people who use the word "lover." If you're Milan Kundera, you can use that word. Otherwise, no.
Ada: And how about this line, which she narrates about a cocktail party where she shows up with Swiss Guy: "I could feel my status rising, from single woman to woman with a boyfriend, maybe even a marriage prospect"?
Sarah: This movie makes me want to be a film editor. Can you believe, a six-hour documentary and no clear narrative? The balls on this woman!
Chapter Two: In which she travels to South Africa and discovers the most fascinating thing about it is her.
Summary: Fox continues to obsess about her married South African "lover" and her Swiss boyfriend. "I'm addicted to the shapes of their dicks, and the way they have sex," she says. As she ponders this, along with the question of motherhood, she introduces us to more "modern female women" and travels to South Africa to visit her married boyfriend. Afterward, she is shocked to learn their affair has been discovered by his wife.
Sarah: Fox calls her technique "passing the camera," but she should call it "passing the bong." Because honestly, I haven't had these kind of conversations since college — "what it means to be a woman," "what it means to be monogamous."
|
"I hate being a woman anytime I see a film starring Kate Hudson."
|
Ada: And she doesn't hear anything anyone says. Here she is introducing us to a woman with a rich life — an immigrant who has children, and is able to travel regularly, and has a rewarding marriage, and instead of asking this woman questions about how she's pulled off this very modern life, Fox blathers on about herself. She has no idea what motherhood is. She's just fetishizing having a baby. I find that repulsive.
Sarah: Earlier, you asked me what movies were good about the modern female experience, and I was stumped. Maybe a better question is, what movies make you hate women? For me it's
The View. Well, that's not a movie, but it makes me hate women. Everything that's about "modern womanhood," I just find so embarrassing.
Ada: I hate being a woman anytime I see a film starring Kate Hudson.
Chapter Three: In which she tries to get Indian villagers to masturbate.
Summary: Now forty-three, she goes to her friends' house and sees their new baby and hands them the camera to have them interview her. Then she goes to India and is shocked that the women there don't masturbate. After expressing her shock, she pumps them for relationship advice.
Ada: She's surprised that masturbation and pleasure aren't No. 1 on the to-do list for poor women in India. How naïve can you get?
Sarah: Okay, I find these scenes with the Indian women endearing and far more compelling than anything else we've
seen. I'll remember this scene, these Indian widows collapsing into giggles upon finding out how you masturbate. I mean, let's be honest: Two fingers Down There? Kind of funny.
Ada: Yes, true. We're ganging up on this movie, and we should give it some credit. This is a really good scene. They find her funny. Maybe we should start seeing her as funny rather than as . . . whoa, did she just say that "vaginal orgasms" are different, and that they're something to be worked toward? That seems very 1931.
Sarah: But also indicative of the modern female experience. It's 2007, and people are still gunning for that vaginal orgasm! But your comment brings up a larger problem with this documentary, which purports to be about feminism but seems to be shockingly ignorant of the entire canon of feminist literature.
|
"I wonder if narcissism is part of the modern American female experience."
|
Ada: It's true. Also, if she were a feminist she'd have some qualms about sleeping with someone else's husband. And she'd be sleeping with someone more interesting. I'm not feeling this South African "lover." He just texted her that she's a "mysterious whale."
Sarah: She's more of an enigmatic dolphin to me.
Ada: Now she's asking these Indian villagers for relationship advice. Her Indian friend makes her realize that they "shared the same core, as women." I have never had this feeling about anyone. Even you, Sarah. We've known each other for eight years, but not once have I looked at you and thought about our cores as women. What does that even mean?
Sarah: My core is made of chewy nougat. I'm a little hurt you never asked.
Chapter Four: In which she travels to Russia.
Summary: Pregnant again with the Swiss filmmaker's baby, Fox discovers she will have another miscarriage. She goes to Russia to visit a divorced friend, a mother figure who reminds her of the distance she feels with her birth mother. On the flight home, she meets a woman visiting New York from London and lets her come back to her apartment.
Ada: Okay, now she's starting to seem a little unstable. She's pacing back and forth in her bathrobe crying, chanting lines like, "Am I in love with this person? Why am I in love with this person?" It reinforces every cliché about women: give them some freedom and they freak out.
Sarah: There's a sequence I didn't understand — she meets some woman on a plane and brings her back to her apartment and then has a crazy fight with the girl's pimp or something?
Ada: She's in Cambodia. She sees two Western men having breakfast at the hotel with a young Cambodian girl, and she films them from a distance, then goes
|
"She can't see the moral: you can work around a lot of problems if you put your mind to it."
|
back to her hotel room and films herself sulking, saying, "I was so angry at men. . . I was so angry that all my life I had been loyal to them." First of all, if the girl was a prostitute as Fox suspected and the men were her johns, why didn't Fox do anything? Rescue the girl? Give her money? Why didn't she interview the men? Confront them? Why didn't she learn the real story?
Sarah: She's not a journalist. This is a personal diary with very expensive, travelogue scenery. This is a movie that could have been filmed in her giant loft, with a running monologue and a little help from Wikipedia. But apparently she had a lot of grant money to burn.
Chapter Five: In which she gets what she wants, but it wasn't what she wanted.
Summary: The South African lover leaves his wife for Fox, and she's still not happy. She goes to Pakistan to learn about women's rights there. And she says, "I don't think I thought about women until now because when I was younger I was so focused on being free... Now in my forties, I'm realizing how much my life was defined by being a girl."
Sarah: Now, this is an issue we've all dealt with, male or female: wanting something so badly and then discovering it wasn't what we wanted after all. But the revelation is frustrating here, especially coming from a narrator I now genuinely dislike.
Ada: Now she visits her friend with a baby and a boyfriend, Tyrone, who's accepted the kid as his own even though they met while she was pregnant. Another creatively happy woman! But this friend's hands are occupied with breastfeeding, so instead of "passing the camera," Fox just holds it out and captures her own pained nodding. She can't be happy for her good friend, and she can't see the moral of her friend's story: You can work around a lot of problems if you set your mind to it.
Now this epiphany: "For the last two years I'd been traveling around the world trying to make sense of my life as a woman. Somehow, it was becoming more and more clear that sexuality was the key to the roles of men and women."
Sarah: I love that line. Hey, if I take tequila shots, I might get drunk! I should make a six-part documentary about that. I mean, it takes a special temerity to offer this line as a revelation in the fifth installment of your documentary on womanhood.
Ada: Now she's in Pakistan learning about honor killings and explaining to the man driving her around how she thinks it's okay to have multiple lovers. Slightly culturally insensitive. She's comparing her plight to victims of female genital mutilation. Basically, she's going around the world finding the worst situations and saying, "Me too!"
|
"This occasionally illuminates the experiences of women who might not have the privilege of making a documentary about their hideous angst."
|
Sarah: One thing you cannot fault Jennifer Fox for is making herself look better. It takes courage to portray yourself as this self-absorbed. And I begin to wonder, maybe narcissism is a part of the modern American female experience — especially if you look at the way women's magazines have those stories about FGM sandwiched between pieces about how to lose ten pounds. There's almost an implied message of relief: You may be fat, but you haven't been genitally mutilated!
Chapter Six: In which . . . OH JUST MAKE IT END
Summary: At the age of forty-five, she decides she wants to get pregnant so she spends thousands of dollars on fertility treatments. Also, she goes skiing with Swiss Guy and says, "Slowly we were both healing our wounds." She visits a Bosnian friend of hers, a single working mother, and rather than asking her how she handles being a Bosnian single working mother, she says, "Do you feel I'm holding anger?" She films herself while her grandmother dies. She also visits a bunch of other people whom she doesn't learn from, then finds a happy ending when she and Swiss Guy move in together.
Sarah: Now is a good time to ponder the question: What did this documentary do right? My answer would be that it occasionally illuminates the experiences of women who might not have the privilege of making a documentary about their hideous angst. Women who have been abused, raped, stripped of a voice. This could have been a good documentary. She did the groundwork.
Ada: Good point. A journalist should retrace her itinerary and ask questions. But this is not a person of curiosity. Fox is optimistic about in vitro fertilization. She keeps saying, "Now that I was going to be a mother myself..." Now she's getting drunk.
Yes, that will help the pregnancy. This is the highlight: the scene of her injecting herself with thousands of dollars worth of drugs with a Buddha in the background. Could she not have donated all this money ($15,000!) to some of the women she met around the world?
Sarah: That was my take, too. It's reductive, sure, but I kept thinking, "Couldn't she just adopt kids and save them from FGM?"
Ada: Neal (my "lover") just walked in and started ranting: "If our white upper-middle-class liberal world falls apart, let's hope this is in a time capsule as the perfect example of everything that is reprehensible about everything that's hollow, wrong, classist, racist, narcissistic and disgusting in it. This is the ultimate in post-'60s liberalism — her voice, her deep blinking at people in third-world countries, her IVF, her belief that orgasms are more important than food."
Sarah: Your husband should have made this movie.
Ada: Okay, we're at the conclusion: "Women from all over the world helped me to see how lucky I am. Especially that I'm in control of my sexuality . . . There are so many ways to be a woman. I just have to find my own way." But her big accomplishment in all of this: "I was no longer afraid to see myself as a woman." Funny, I suddenly am.
Sarah: This actually makes me hate women more than
The View.
©2007 Ada Calhoun, Sarah Hepola and hooksexup.com.