The 1993 Yale Banner Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Volume CLII ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CLASS DAY REMARKS JODIE FOSTER--MAY 23RD 1993
I have a couple of orders of business here. The first is there's two very hopelessly lost Yale children, John and Sam, friends of mine. Your mommy's over there; you're supposed to stay over there. The second, I hope you don't mind, I hope you all put on a nice big smile -- ready? (She takes several pictures of the class from the podium). You have to get your priorities straight. This is an extraordinary feeling for me to be standing up here today and looking at this sea of faces framed by these incredibly imposing buildings and filled with nostalgia. You have to understand that this is a dream for me to be here again. This place has meant so much to me and to my life. But don't worry, I'm not going to make the mistake of waxing drearily on about the Yale of the good old days like some horrible alumni bore in a beaver coat, weeping loudly into one of those big old "Y" Co-op hankies:"Ah, for my youth again, for God , for country and for Yale." No, that's not me; I was born in the '70's, its not my style. I also hope to spare you the kind of pompous intellectual rambling generally associated with these events -- no obscure Greek poets, no long-winded treatise peppered by incomprehensible foreign syllable words and a yen for the nasal. Not my way. I also will not stoop(well, maybe a little bit), but I will not stoop to entertain you with insensitive jokes about the coed experience or finely tuned bathroom humor like my 1984 graduation speaker did -- he'll remain unnamed, thank you. So, what's left?More to the point, what exactly do I have to say to you on the eve of such a great, sublime and terrifying moment in your life? And why have I been chosen to comment on the end of something so personal and so unique to you and to your experience? I mean, do I fit the bill of a Yale alumnus like George Bush or William Buckley, huh? I'm not even 10 years older than you and I belong to the entertainment industry, better known in the press these days as "the devil". You know, the source of that evil, liberal elite bent on moral pollution -- that's me. I'm a feminist, humanist and I like very, very spicy food, and I don't even wince and apologize when I tell you that. Regretfully, I'm not much for Yale Club functions or any social events that require leaving the house for more than a couple of hours. Aside from the fact that I've enjoyed a certain amount of success to help color the alumni magazine, what could possibly be this traditional Yale link that binds us together like some secret handshake or some Flintstone moose call? Or to quote Bill Cosby, my favorite person to quote, "Who made me sheriff of Jello today?" I'm not quite sure, but I guess I'm going to plod ahead before everybody wakes up and kicks me off the podium. I suspect that this is an example of the typical Yale impostor syndrome, that identity syndrome, the Yale impostor syndrome. I'm sure you've all become familiar with that by now. It's the one where you hear the clock ticking and you wait for some kind of stewardess to tap you on the shoulder and say "I'm sorry.I'm afraid we've made a terrible mistake in the records department. I'm afraid you're and idiot; you don't know what you're talking about. Kindly remove those potato chips from your mouth and follow me to the dungeon. Wait, wait, wait, am I the only one that ever thought that? How embarrassing, this is terrible. But as long as I've decided to bare all of my insecurities here today, let me be perfectly honest. I don't remember a single fact I learned here. I don't remember a single date or quotation or obtuse reference, but I do remember this. I remember singing at the top of my lungs with my arms around a bunch of friends, wobbling down that street right over there (she points toward High Street), laughing and singing and vowing the loyalty of the truly inspired intoxicated. I still pledge allegiance to that particular flag, although I can't remember anything of that night. I remember another day leaving the most stimulation and enlightening seminar that I ever heard, running down those steps over there (she points toward Wright Hall), seeing my friends who were sitting on the lawn wearing black, laying all over each other. My heart was racing and my head was pounding and I was so excited that I couldn't sit down. I just kept stammering , giggling uncontrollably, looking earnest and frightened at the same time. I guess I just had what's called a "perfect moment," to quote Spalding Gray. That's one of those moments when the head and the heart and the spirit kind of come together in one inexplicable place inside of you. I can vaguely remember it having to do with the Oedipus myth or some such thing but I can't remember the facts. And no matter how silly and ephemeral my epiphany may seem now, the moment itself was huge. It was extraordinary and monstrous. I told my friends what I was feeling that day and they actually didn't laugh. They threw me down on the lawn and hugged me like a big dumb slobbering dog and we were all big dumb dogs at heart and none of us had learned to be ashamed of it yet. I remember crying my guts out, feeling that extraordinary pain and longing at the loss of my first love, seeing those (she points in the direction of Wright) walls more all by themselves watching my feet step slowly beneath me entirely detached from will. They were like zombies in a sci-fi movie and it all felt much too painful to live through and too awful to finally realize that you are, in fact, alone in the world, no matter how often you deceive yourself to the contrary. And, of course, I also remember the assassination attempt of President Reagen, which occurred my freshman year -- an enormously impactful event on my life, not to mention on the life of James Brady, the press secretary of the United States and survivor of that shooting and also and avid champion of gun control. The awful events aside, I remember the bursting of my privacy and the end of my Yale anonymity, or rather, the end of the illusion that I had been carrying of it. I also remember three words that I repeated over and over again and that I'll forever carry into my conscious life and work: "Too much fear." And I suppose that I lost control for one of the very first times in my life, right over there (she points to a spot on College Street side of Old Campus). A valuable lesson in survival -- no matter how far down you fall you can get back up somehow. I remember all of those Eureka moments brought about by love, pleasure, tragedy, dancing, snowstorms, loud music, drugs, surrender and abandon. The big questions :what is pleasure, what is pain, what is trust, what is authentic, what is merely convention? What is a complete and ridiculous lie? Who are my parents? Where do they stop and where do I begin? Who are my lovers, where do they stop and where do I begin? Who are my mentors, my family and my enemies, where do I stop and they begin? What is certainty, what is deception, how do I feel in here, in here, and out here?(she points to her heart, head and around herself) This is beginning to sound a little bit like that game show "Jeopardy" -- I'll take "What is the college experience?" for a $100 dollar bill. The point of all of this dribble is, well I believe this place is a magical place, this often haunting and often haunted place. This is a place of the "I". We're characters revealed as fate, to borrow from Heraclitus. This is the place where I learned to love this life, to curse this life and to claim this life for my very own. And as foolishly and romantic and painfully intellectual as they may seem on this beautiful spring afternoon in this most revered historic hall of learning, there is nothing in this world that I am prouder of than my ability to feel, to survive, and yes to be a fool for what I love and believe in. How does the "I" get better instead of worse? I reveal its character more fully as opposed to set approximate shape? How does the "I" leave its mark as proof of having existed? And in my case, those questions immediately after graduation, after I spent my requisite of depression, lying in my bed for 14 hours a day, not wanting to ask the next big question that I couldn't answer, like what the hell am I doing lying in my bed all day? And somewhere in alot of naps an some late-night reruns, I found something very passionate about -- my work. I often say that in life there are only three things; love, work and family. And I've been lucky to occasionally find all three in my job. So let me tell what I do for a living (I include all my confessions in this analogy). I put all my stuff -- my history, my experiences, my passions and taboos and personal weaknesses and unconscious agendas and eccentricities-- I put them delicately and precisely on the tip of a proverbial arrow. I take careful aim, keep the target in my sight and try to communicate all that is me in a straight line towards an audience. But I'm only human: my eyesight is faulty, my hands are shaky, a million things will distort the goal. And no matter how well I aim that arrow, I never completely connect with the other. But its the process of trying that's significant. That's where all the messy beautiful human stuff lies -- in the space between the "you" and the "other" between the "you" and the "I". This creative process depends entirely on hope. I hope the next time I take aim and shoot, now that I'm more conscious of previous misfirings, that I'll aim straighter and cleaner and I hope more of me will find its way connecting intimately with more of you. Please don't misinterpret this sentiment as a call for some sort of commercial formula in filmmaking. On the contrary, by connecting, I'm telling a story, by telling your story, revealing yourself in the telling, reading , and being read back. I learned how to read in this place. Now, not literally, that would be very bad P.R., I realize that. By reading I mean trying to go deeper, trying to go beyond the obvious explanation, beyond the historical analysis, beyond fact, logic and certainty, beyond all those neat little unquestioned boxes the world puts in front of you like so much cold stone. The process of reading, of finding the self in the other, of searching for the human dimension, for the essence ,and yes, of failing miserably at that task and finding instead the searcher, the self, the questions , once again. I see this unending process of reading as a kind of Nautilus series, designed to muscularize the brain, the senses, the heart, the spirit, and these organs grow in strength and breadth throughout the years and beyond these college years until perhaps one day, when you're old and gray and stop trying so hard, they can embrace virtually every text, every experience, every "other". And maybe one day they'll analyze, synthesize and accept entirely without judgment. At least that's what you hope in your mess of human foolishness. You hope that the subject should come to know the object so intimately that they become, in fact, one. That hope we hold is like an anchor in our lives, an anchor safe and sure. (I've been carrying around that quote for 10 years, in memory of the Anchor Bar here in New Haven). This is where I learned to hope and to set blindly on a path already paved that leads towards becoming. And when I stand here today looking at all these actual walls and these gowns and funny hats and clay pipes and these beaming professors and libraries filled with poetry, music and inspiration, what I read beyond the garnish is hope. That hope is like J.D. Salinger's "Fat Lady". she lives inside these gothic monuments, she peeks out, smiles and applauds at your discoveries -- a big, bright loving, accepting smile -- and it doesn't really matter whether she exists or not. It's the hope she holds for you that matters. And it's that hope that's changed me, that lives within me and that makes me move towards getting better, going deeper and wanting to understand more completely. The "I" touched by the discovery of other "I's" -- that's the intangible prize , I think. The brochures kept telling you it was the landscape that would last forever. So it's been 12 years since I first stepped on to this campus and we all know what the last 12 years in America have meant. When the presidential elections rolled around in the beginning of my freshman year, I was still too young to vote. And by some unbelievable, sick twist of fate Ronald Reagan was elected president that November. I remember crossing Elm Street the day after election with this overwhelming sadness. I could barely talk; I just kept saying "Wait a minute, this isn't fair, I couldn't vote." and it felt like the end of something and effectively, it was actually the beginning of something, too. Twelve years of a national philosophy cruel, bad and indifferent that shaped the following Yale generations in reaction to it.By the middle of the 80's a distinct minority stopped being obsessed and manipulated by who was the head of the basketball team and started paying attention to and identifying with who's left out of the basketball team. And the dissatisfaction and frustration my class lived through in the early '80's helped empower one silent and indifferent generation of students who realized they were now going to have to fight for the voice of human dignity. They knew they were going to have to speak out for alternatives to a historically insidious disrespect for the individual's rights. So, as you all remember the media quickly seized an opportunity to characterize these few symptoms of real consciousness as a gigantic monster: political correctness. Soon everyone from Time magazine to your aunt Gladys was promoting fantasies of this bogey man swooping into college campuses, brainwashing their little white babies and goose-stepping to the music of the liberal elite. "Oh why?" they kept saying, "Why can't those kids just be quiet and do the hustle to the corporate elite like we did?" And of course, you were all on the inside of this debate and knew perfectly well that very little had changed. But one thing is for certain, the world you are entering into has not gotten better in the last decade. Every in justice and intolerance you can think of is becoming more and more inflamed by hard times -- racism, sexism, homophobia, to name a few. You are facing problems and crises every day that your parents couldn't even imagine. Let's not forget that this decade has been about living with a plague called AIDS. Your parents generation will never know what it is to stand here today in this crowd of brothers and sisters who you have known and loved and held and laughed with like big, dumb, slobbery dogs. You stand her knowing that a lot of you are not going to make it past 30. That's our generation, that's our reality. And if they want to call it politically correct to care about the things that touch our lives, then let them. You have a right and a responsibility to lay claim to what touches you and affect change for your future. And that's what this incredibly privileged education is all about. You get to have a choice so that maybe in the wake of it, other people can have choices too. You get to have a voice and be an advocate for people who don't have a voice. Now does that sound patronizing and elitist?Well, it kind of is. Over the weekend you will hear this a thousand times. "You are the top 1% of this nation. You are the hope, the pride, the creme of the American elite, the ones who will change this country by virtue of education and a new-found adopted class and status of the mind." And if you are anything like I was, that idea will make you histerically ill in disbelief, cynicism and disgust. What a bunch of arrogant, elitist, patriarchal bull. You look at your friend's around you, goofy from last night's revelries, passionate and undisciplined, angry and confused, and rich and poor and black and female and short and loud and eternally stoned and full of beans and you'll say "Yeah, who's gonna let them be sheriff of the Jello? All of these unfocused ideas and no clue as to how to direct them. Who's gonna listen to us?" Being 20-something is all about taking it in, eating it, drinking it and spitting out the seeds later. It's about being fearless and stupid and dangerous and unfocused and abandoned. It's about being in it, not on top of it. So I'm sure you'll laugh at these condescending , clueless alumni faces like myself calling you to salute an Ivy League-assumed superiority. Or maybe you'll simply say, as I did, "Who are they kidding? We can't possibly be the ones who will shape this nation, who the hell's going to shape us?" But the weird thing is 10 years down the road, you're thumbing through a magazine in a doctor's office, there's your buddy, helping formulate policy decisions that can make your life miserable or tolerable. You walk down the street, there's your buddy heading and enormous Fortune 500 corporation that's just instituted spousal health care. Your kids turn on "Sesame Street" and there's your buddy singing "The Shadow Song" with the Cooking Monster. Suddenly they're everywhere -- challenging old ideas, giving their lives for peace, discovering medicine, making you laugh hysterically on a cable show, getting indicted for felonies. They’re selling out and squeezing in, you can't escape them, Yale graduates keep affecting your world no matter how loud you turn up the MTV. They’re out there, wreaking havoc for eternity. And in 20 years you guys are going to be making and breaking all of our lives whether you like it or not. And I for one, am happily fastening my seat belt. It's going to be a bumpy ride. But for the time being, since you're stuck in you seats listening to me and since I have you captive and you can't move, well, I might as well take advantage of you, of your audience. To use my earlier analogy, I'm going to pull back my bow and arrow and cut out the noise and distraction and focus on sending what I believe in , what I've come to know while living in this mortally diminutive body, send my stuff flying towards you, no apologies, no hesitations. You may discard and evade at will, as I said before, control is not my goal. I spent my early 20's just doing things. Not asking why. Just testing different muscles and never internalizing the consequences before I started. And that felt like an impossible hunger, indiscriminate and wild. I just kept putting stuff in my mouth, in my head, in my life, without ever asking myself "was it good for me? was it good for my career? was it good for the union?" For example, when I showed up on the set of "The Accused" I only read the script once. I just kept procrastinating, going out dancing and exercising and barbecuing chicken and things like that. I knew I was desperate to play the part but I still couldn't bring myself to really know what I was getting into. That's a good thing, because if I had thought about it for five minutes, I'd have let fear and the old left brain get a hold of me. I'd have decided it just wasn't my Olympic event, that it wasn't what anyone had told me I was capable of. I would have been too scared of all the things I didn't understand. And instead I forged ahead blindly because, quite simply, I was compelled. I had the confidence to listen to my own voice, to choose the process of becoming without really knowing what it would lead to. No stopping, no picture taking, no souvenirs. The 20's for me were all about learning to trust my instincts above all else. Being inside the dance without continual awareness of the choreography. That's the most essential quality you can have as an actor and a director. The ability to dive head first into an unknown body of water and commit to the current with a lot of faith, no hesitation and a big, fat smile on your face. Now somewhere along the way I starting looking over my shoulder and noticing a pattern and my work starting to take shape. It wasn't just about being hungry for more, it wasn't about being richer or having whiter teeth than the guy before. It was about completing a recognizable spiritual and psychological agenda. So yes, I recognized method to my madness. For example, I was compelled to play characters who have been overlooked, misunderstood, marginalized, victimized or labeled as freaks. But they survive in the end. I wanted people to recognize the humanity of these characters and decide for themselves , to redeem them, and in turn, simply get better because of that self-acknowledgment and self-acceptance. Now that's perhaps very foolish and naive -- so what? That's why they call it movies. My Yale experience has given me the luxury of choice. I've chosen to make my life, my work, my love, my characters stand for something, however small and insignificant that legacy may be . And each one of you will have your own way, your own battles, your own processes. But ultimately, it's up to you alone to find the way that's appropriate for you. No one can tell you what that is, because no one else has ever been there before. You find your way home alone. My way has brought me towards a narrowing focus at the beginning of my 30's . I want to change the system from within the system, and that means focusing and specializing. I can't fight every monster, every ogre anymore. I've got to be precise. So you know I don't read three newspapers a day, I don't know alot about music anymore or important current events that are shaping our nation. I don't know very much about some very basic things. But if you start talking about French films from the 70's or the latest studio merger, I'm liable to go off and get all sweaty and indignant and passionate. Telling stories -- that's my Olympic event. That's the revolution I choose to fight in. And you're no good to the revolution if you're dead or unprepared. So, what exactly did I want to pass on to you? What personal agenda do I bring to this sort of throwing of the caps and smoking of the pipe and donning of the gown. I want you to continue living. Continue searching harder, deeper, faster, stronger and louder and knowing that one day, you'll be called upon to use all that you've amassed in the process. With that wealth of self-knowledge, you hold all of our futures in your hand. So you better make it good. You better keep your eyes an your hearts open and find out what's beneath the surface. What moves you, what repels you and what compels you. Become human first and identify what exactly that is later. Let how you live your life stand for something, no matter how small and incidental it may seem. Because it's not good enough anymore to kill for a living and then go give $100,000 to the symphony. It's not good enough to put change in the meter without questioning what the meter's doing there in the first place. It's not good enough to let life pass you by in the name of some greater glory. This is it. This is all you get. So love this life, curse this life and claim this life for your very own. Do it for yourself, do it for the "Fat Lady", hiding in the Ivy. Smiling and waving and laughing at the absurdity of all this. She'll be dancing with you tonight, jiggling her body this way and that to some funky, hip-hop graduation haze. She'll go on following you year after year, sitting in the back rows, beaming proudly, loving you unconditionally, and all she asks is that you choose the becoming. And you do that alone, but in her gaze. Now you have fun, breathe deeply and kick ass in the process. (Just kidding). Thank you, Yale Class of 1993 and thank you for letting me share this moment with you.
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