Jane’s Paradoxical Journey
Toward Hope
Class Discussion on “My Year of
Meats”
Nov. 21, 2011
Jane as a Person (backstory)
• How does Jane’s ethnicity influence her view
of herself?
• How do her reproductive issues affect her
sense of hope?
• How can we say that she is idealistic before
the beginning of her year of meats/ what is
she idealistic about?
Jane as a Person (backstory)
• “I’ve always blamed my tendency to vacillate on my mixed
ethnicity. Halved, I am neither here nor there, and my
understanding of the relativity inherent in the world is built
into my genes” (p.314).
• “That’s the thing about involuntary infertility-it kills your
sense of future, so you hide in the here andnow.” – “You
equate the loss of posterity with the loss of hope” (p.159).
• She [Shonagon] inspired me to become a documentarian,
to speak men’s Japanese, to be different. She is why I chose
to make TV. I wanted to think that some girl would watch
my shows in Japan, now or maybe even a thousand years
from now, and be inspired and learn something real about
America” p.15).
Jane’s Beginning: Questions
• In her attempt to protect herself emotionally,
Jane indulges in convenient acts of editing.
Where can we see this happening?
• Do we feel that Jane really connects with
people, or does she perhaps keep them at
bay? And if so, how?
• Does Jane feel the need to be in control and in
what ways does she allow herself to lose
control?
Jane’s Beginning: Quotes
• “’Can we cut out the boinnggg?’ ‘No. Anyway, that’s
dishonest too.’ ‘Well, then we can’t send it. If she calls,
tell her the show got canceled.’” (p.30).
• “Why hadn’t I realized? If I’d just dealt with it earlier, I
could have talked them into agreeing, as a subversive
political statement or something. But now it was too
late. Too late… My heart sank. My ghosts. My baby.
Sloan still didn’t know. I hadn’t dealt with this at all.
But then again, why bother? Why make a big deal
about it when the problem would surely go away by
itself?” (p.178).
Jane’s Beginning: More Quotes
• “Few men could make me feel diminutive. Sex
became sleek and narcissistic… I never felt
submissive and certainly never lost control. Until
Sloan. He overwhelmed me… The word
“masterful” comes to mind, but he could be that.
In the motel room in Nebraska … Sloan took
charge. In life, I am the most competent person I
know. It can get in the way. But Sloan was such a
master of sex that my competence in life was
irrelevant. He relieved me of choice. And selfconsciousness. That was the charm of it.
Jane’s Middle: Questions
• Is the dawning of hope the beginning of crisis,
and if so, how?
• The loss of the baby is clearly the true crisis.
What happens to Jane’s sense of her own
accountability at this point in her life?
Jane’s Middle: Quotes
• “It was the first time I’d heard him say the
words. ‘Our baby.’ I had steeled myself against
this notion of ‘our.’ That was the agreement I
had made with myself. I could have the baby,
provided I root out all desire for ‘our.’ This
baby would be mine, no strings attached. But
when I heard Sloan say ‘our baby’… it was like
conjuring. It made me gasp. I didn’t know how
to respond” (p.221).
Jane’s Middle: More Quotes
• “For the first time, I think I was aware of the
danger I’d walked into, the effect it might have
on the baby. I needed to make a choice”
(p.268).
• I cried on and on, fed by the reservoir of all my
dread made real. My thwarted progeny. My
poor hope. I had robbed it of viability by my
lack of conviction. Of course, it was my fault. It
was all my fault” (p.293).
Jane’s End: Questions
• How does Jane feel about her illness?
• How does Jane feel about her treatment of
other people in the course of this year?
• Is hope reintroduced into her life, and if so,
how?
Jane’s End: Quotes
• As a DES daughter, I need hope for my outcome. I don’t
know if I’ll ever be able to bear children of my own, but
still, I’m one of the lucky ones… and I made it” (p.360).
• “I neglected to tell you this before the shoot, probably
sensing that you wouldn’t go along with it… it was too
late… I know these aren’t adequate excuses… All I can
do is apologize and ask you to forgive me and promise
to make it up to you somehow” (p.212).
• “Sloan and I parted in Memphis knowing that we
would try once again to forge our respective
uncertainties into something that resembled a family
and a future” (p.355).
Work: a journey toward truth
Questions
• When Jane accepts the job producing My
American Wife! is she selling out? And if so,
how?
Work: Quotes
• “On the one hand I really did believe that you could use
housewives to sell meat in the service of a greater truth. On
the other hand I was broke after my divorce and desperate
for a job” (p.176).
• “Of course I knew about toxicity in meat, the deforestation
of the rain forest to make grazing lands for hamburgers. Not
a lot, perhaps, but I knew a little” (p.334).
• “Although my heart was set on being a documentarian, it
seems I was more useful as a go-between, a cultural pimp,
selling off the vast illusion of America to a cramped
population on that small string of Pacific islands” (p.9).
Work: early disappointment and hope
Questions
• How can we describe her early
disappointment with the show?
• Is there any hope associated with this
disappointment?
Work: early disappointment and hope
Quotes
• “I was learning. This was the heart and soul of My
American Wife!: recreating for Japanese housewives
this spectacle of raw American abundance” (p.35).
• “The BEEF-EX people are very strict. They don’t want
their meat to have a synergistic association with
deformities. Like race. Or poverty. Or clubfeet. But at
the same time the Network is always complaining that
the shows aren’t ‘authentic’ enough. Well, I’ve been
saying if only they’d let me direct, I’d show them some
real Americans. So this is it, Sloan. This is my big
chance…” (p.57).
The show takes a turn: Questions
• Once Jane begins directing, how does that
affect the narrative of the show? Is the focus
still on the meat?
• What does Jane realize about the truth in
documentaries?
• Is there a truth in documentaries, and can
there be such a thing?
• How does the discovery of the toxic chemicals
in meat affect Jane’s work?
Work: the show takes a turn. Doubt
and conflict
• “I’d never get another meat like this, so beautifully
integrated into the core of the family narrative.
Documentarians are suckers for good narrative, since we
have to wait patiently for them to happen and can’t just
make them up from our imaginations” (p.137).
• “I wanted to make programs with documentary integrity,
and at first I believed in a truth that existed – singular,
empirical, absolute. But slowly, as my skills improved, and
I learned about editing and camera angles and the effect
that music can have on meaning, I realized that the truth
was like race and could be measured only in everdiminishing approximations. Still, as a documentarian, you
must strive for the truth and believe in it wholeheartedly”
(p.176).
Doubt and conflict: Quotes
• “When Miss Helen blurted out that remark
about chicken necks causing Mr. Purcell’s voice
to change and his breasts to grow, I was
shocked. I knew about antibiotics from the
cute doctor in Oklahoma, and I guess I knew
that hormones were used too. I just never
gave it much thought before… It was a
discovery that ultimately changed my
relationship with meats and television. It also
changed the course of my life” (p.123-4).
Jane goes rogue: Questions
• When Jane was producing the show, was she
being a documentarian? If not, what
happened to change this?
• How do narrative and truth intertwine in the
making of her first “real” documentary?
• What is Jane’s new attitude toward her own
pillow book? What are the similarities and/or
differences between her and Shonagon?
Jane goes rogue: Quotes
• “Ueno wants beef, and beef he shall have… The DES
stuff was only the tip of the iceberg. Why didn’t I
pursue this? I call myself a documentarian, but I’ve
learned nothing about the industry that’s paid for
these shows” (p.202).
• Editing my meat video was hard. It was not a TV show,
which was what I’d become accustomed to. It was a
real documentary, the first I’d ever tried to make, about
an incredibly disturbing subject. There were no recipes,
no sociological surveys, no bright attempts at
entertainment. So how to tell the story?” (p.334).
Jane goes rogue: more quotes
• “There’s no denying, I thought. In the Year of
Meats, truth wasn’t stranger than fiction; it
was fiction… Half documentarian, half
fabulist… Maybe sometimes you have to make
things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes”
(p.360).
• Whatever people think of my book, I will make
it public, bring it to light unflinchingly. That is
the modern thing to do” (p.361).
Jane’s Worldview: Questions
• How does Jane’s worldview expand from how
we saw it at the beginning of the novel?
• How does Jane’s increasing awareness of
widespread ignorance motivate her to act and
think at the end of the book?
Jane’s Worldview: Quotes
• “Akiko’s fax threw me for a loop… up until now
I’d never really imagined my audience before…
Now it hit me: what an arrogant and
chauvinistic attitude this was. While I’d been
worrying about the well-being of the
American women I filmed as subjects,
suddenly here was the audience, embodied in
Akiko, with a name and a valuable identity”
(p.231).
Jane’s Worldview: more quotes
• “I would like to think of my ‘ignorance’ less as a personal
failing and more as a massive cultural trend, and example
of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterized the end
of the millennium. If we can’t act on knowledge, then we
can’t survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the
ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The
faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood
must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news,
we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are
paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is
playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it
enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a
political statement. Our collective norm” (p.334).
Conclusion: Questions to Ponder
• EDITING – If the truth is subjective, how much of
her early “editing” was unethical?
• CONTROL – How does relinquishing control
and/or learning to share control improve Jane’s
life?
• TRUTH – What have Jane learned about truth and
its representation?
• ACCOUNTABILITY – How does Jane’s ability to
take responsibility for her own detrimental
actions help her hold the world, the meat
industry and the people in her life accountable?