Dear James Franco,
Dear James Franco,
I am a well-educated young woman adept at dismantling star identities. I have a large vocabulary, used to be a Mathlete, attended a rather overpriced idyllic liberal arts college, and am months away from obtaining a Ph.D. But I cannot. figure. you. out.
I mean, maybe it’s just too easy. You’re a hack. A good-looking, decently-talented hack who’s decided to up his profile by doing kooky, erudite, and unexpected things. You’re a character actor made movie star through clever PR! You’re not *actually* that interesting or smart or different. They let you into the Ph.D. program at Yale because you’re a celebrity, not because you’re actually smart. You claim that your stint on General Hospital was a form of “performance art,” which is a sure sign of your inflated quasi-academic head. You probably make ample use of the word “problematize.” You did a good Ginsburg, sure, and supposedly you’re good at cutting off your own arm in this weekend’s 127 Hours and HAVE MADE MULTIPLE PEOPLE FAINT, HAVE SEIZURES, AND FREAK THE F OUT in the process, but still, you’re the same guy who just looked constipated all the way through the Spiderman movies. YOU WERE IN ANNAPOLIS, JAMES. Sure, you made me cry like a small child in Tristan & Isolde, but your performance’s high point featured you yelling HOW MANY BEFORE ME? [NONE!] HOW MANY AFTER ME! [NONE!]. You were, quite literally, the poor man’s James Dean — starring in a made-for-TV version on Dean’s life. You were the least funny thing about Freaks and Geeks. And Pineapple Express actually sucked, I don’t care what you say. If I were Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love, which thank goodness I am not, as I hate “dancing like no one’s watching,” I would have left you too. Plus you kinda look like a gomer in these recent Gucci ads, the latest of which is currently staring at me from this week’s New Yorker, which you’re probably pretending to read while taking the Amtrak between New Haven and New York because you like to “be with the people” and “explore their texts” (like soap operas). (NOTE: SNIDE COMMENTS IN QUOTES = NOT ACTUALLY FRANCO QUOTES.)
You’re a pretty face in over your head. Are you going to take comprehensive exams, Franco? Huh!?! Are you a member of the graduate student union? Are you surviving on Ramen? (OH WAIT YOU GO TO YALE, where they pay graduate students enough to buy vegetables). Nevertheless, you are an embarrassment to legitimate graduate students — a bastardization of intellectualism spewing half-baked artistic platitudes stolen from skimmed copies of Harper’s and The New York Review of Books.
OR ARE YOU!?!?
Maybe you’re the new Renaissance man, using your power and bankability to help promote small, struggling productions, including the Ginsberg bio-pic. Maybe you actually really love reading first year theory and you’re actually a sweet dude when you make it to seminar class between promoting films. (Maybe you attend grad student potlucks? I hope you bring the dude fall-back of baked ziti or store-bought tortilla chips with some elaborate also-store-bought dip). I mean, you did your assigned reading in-between takes of 127 Hours, whilst wedged in a small cave, which certainly speaks well for you. [I once read feminist theory on the elliptical machine, James! Let's be study buddies!] You flirted with Terri Gross (okay, Justin Timberlake also flirted with Terri Gross, as did Keith Richards, but nonetheless) and told her you were a true fan of Fresh Air. Me too, James. According to native Yale informant Inessentials, who saw you speak on campus a few weeks back, you were generous with your time, pretty smart, and un-pompous. You have “an unusually high metabolism for productivity…a superhuman ability to focus,” which not only means that you’ve been able to obtain 502 degrees over the last few years, but also makes you THE DREAM GRADUATE STUDENT! I bet you even know how to properly pronounce Althusser! I want to hang out with you; will you take a look at my dissertation? So Yale accepted you because you were a movie star…..they also accepted George W. Bush, just because his parents had money. Just sayin’. And so your own films get accepted at Sundance, even if they’re super self-involved. So are Spike Lee’s. Just sayin’. So you fell asleep during a lecture at Columbia. You know what? Happens to the best of us. I once slept through the entirety of The Plow that Broke the Plains, but there was no one to take a picture of me on his/her phone and sell it to TMZ.
You keep buying rights to films that you hope to make; you wrote a script about poet Hart Crane which you’re about to start directing. You’re putting your ideas into practice, mixing theory with production, which is something that we media studies folk love to talk about but seldom have the guts (or means) to do. Admittedly, this is also probably why you’re hard to stomach — jealousy takes many forms — but objectively speaking, when I compare the way that you spend your leisure time with that of, say, Tom Cruise, I cannot help but be impressed.
On that note, let me add that your juxtaposition of really cheesy/brooding/half-constipated Tristan and method acting is TOTALLY HOT. The fact that I can justify my love for that melodramatic mess of a movie by thinking of how good you are in Milk — thank you, James. It’s like you’re Ryan Gosling but make films and take classes instead of collaborating on singing projects with small children’s choirs. The fact that you can alternate roles as Ginsberg with that of a gnarly, smelly, gutsy outdoorsman…..again, this I like, and not just because I’m from the Pacific Northwest and own three pairs of Chacos. I think we call that “talent.”
You’ve also managed to change the conversation about you from one of potential romance and gossip - which is where things seemed to be headed with your early career — to one of intellectual endeavors and explorations. Do you realize how difficult that is to accomplish? Most stars try really hard to deflect attention from their personal lives; with you, the attention’s still on your “personal,” but that personal just seems to be filled with books, thoughts, writing….KINDA LIKE ME, JAMES!! We live the life of the mind!
Turns out living the life of the mind is HARD WORK.
I take back what I said about the Gucci ads, even though I’d like you more if you were reading some Gramsci while wearing those Italian clothes. (You can do that for the next shoot, but make sure you footnote me. My last name is with an “E.”) And you do actually kinda look like James Dean. But Dean was actually somewhat of a hack — following Brando around, not nearly his equal, aping his style. But you, James — I can’t think of someone you’re copying, or a career you’re emulating, or any sort of antecedent for your behavior, and no, Brando’s turn of crazy in the late ’50s onward is not the same as completing multiple graduate degrees. You’re so weird, so cooky, so much more invested in your work as a site of play and experimentation than for purely financial gain….you could only be a graduate student. Get some anxiety, some long-term poverty, a pair of grad-student thick frame glasses, add in a modicum of awkwardness, and you would fit in with any media studies program in the nation. You’re inscrutable because no one can imagine why a good-looking star with a string of potential blockbuster roles would choose to sit in seminar rooms and spend time on projects that will reap little critical or popular acclaim. But isn’t that like me, senior year in high school, full ride to the University of Idaho, where I could’ve totally rocked an MBA and become a high powered accountant and/or lawyer and/or Mathlete, yet choosing to pursuing a liberal arts degree in Rhetoric-Film Studies, a Master’s in English, a Ph.D. in Media Studies? We are slaves to our passions, James. I so understand. Do you want to do a guest blog post at your leisure?
Turns out, I do get you, Franco. It’s pretty simple. You’re a graduate student, just like me. Ultimately, it’s up to all of us to decide whether that means that you’re awesome or awful. For, as Liz Lemon made all too clear, “graduate students….they’re the WORST.”
8 Responses to “Dear James Franco,”
Excellent post and a very subtle way of implying that James Franco is the poor man’s Matt Damon. Bravo!
I’m not convinced he’s a “grad student,” though he is darn interesting. I think Franco might be something more obvious-a (wannabe) artist. I put “wannabe” in parentheses because I don’t want to evaluate his success here, though one might want to get him together with Lady Gaga so they can talk about living-your very existence-serving as some form of performance art.
I have a theory that an artist must live on the outside. Generally we see artists that enter the mainstream, be that mainstream Hollywood or simply mainstream life (no drugs, nice family unit), tend to lose their edge. People always wonder what happened to Coppola-well, he’s no longer hungry. The most interesting art offers a commentary on life-it is an art of critique. An art produced only by outsiders. One an artist gets too comfy, blamo-the art is emptied of its drive, its intent, its sincerity.
Franco has looks, money, and success. There was no way for him to work within the industry without falling prey to the trap of the insider. So he went to the place perfectly suited to create an outsider-academia. Now he is truly on the edge, on the sidelines, desperate to be heard but silenced by a gauze of quasi-academic obscurity. From here, perhaps he can do some good work.
Well let me start by saying that this is, like all chapter drafts I read by candle light at bars with you, a delight.
Next, I would have to say that I agree with the overall sentiment that Franco has many of the qualities of a true grad student, which is why I kind of buy it (him) as one. Grad students are essentially self-oriented: other than the money, it’s not actually a huge sacrifice to spend all of your time thinking about your own ideas and advancing your own intellect and career, even if those ideas are related to social justice causes (though even if they are, are they really?). Acting and grad school are not as far apart than we might think, is what I’m saying.
Also, I’m endeared to him because he makes all the classic grad school moves (theory theory have you noticed that I know some theory?) and does it, necessarily cause he’s already cute and famous, in a public venue. Like, I don’t think I would have turned down publication offers as a grad student (ahem, still wouldn’t), but what if someone had published me “discovering” postmodernism? Oh geez! Later he’s going to have a long, trail of intellectual panties behind him to clean up. But MAYBE-AHP, what do we think about this?-the short attention span of celebrity culture will trump the long, bitter memory of academia and he won’t be punished, or even remembered, for the cringeworthy bits, the novels, the articles, et al? Also, let’s be honest, he’s not trying to get a teaching job and is already financially set for life, so isn’t he actually the most ideal budding academic there can be? Har.
And also: the cover of Candy magazine didn’t read as a stunt to me, but as a way to use his star power for some good publicity. But can we just be done with gross old Terry Richardson PLEASE? His aesthetic is so easily copied, surely someone with fewer allegations of sexual assault can be used in his stead.
And finally: http://whatjamesfrancodidtoday.blogspot.com/
Way to make our dissertation reading group sound super sexytime, KFK.
As for whether or not Franco’s embarrassing first year discoveries will be forgotten — the press is fickle. Sometimes a star can never live a moment down — think of poor Jessica Simpon’s mom jeans — and sometimes they can change the conversation and enact magical media amnesia when it comes to their most embarrassing/self-indulgent moves. Most of the time the people who get away with this are a.) male, b.) hot, and c.) still popular/valuable/”hot” in Hollywood. He’s not like, oh, Kate from Jon & Kate, getting new haircuts so that US Weekly will put her on the cover. The moves that he makes can’t be easily flattened into paparazzi photos — even the Candy cover begs a conversation that goes beyond “look at him!” Or “he’s gay!” It demands more than 5 seconds of thought, whereas picture of Jessica in mom jeans do not.
Does this make sense? Maybe this is part of the grad school-ness — he’s deliberately making himself inaccessible to the mainstream, which makes it harder for the mainstream to make fun of him, ‘cus “they” don’t really get it. Whattya think?
OKAY. I see where you’re going here. But what if all the wider public takes away is the pretentiousness? He doesn’t seem worried about coming off as a douche, which means he either is a douche (as is so often the case with people not worried about this problem), or that he is able to weigh the grad-school-ness against a sense of down-to-earth-ness in his public persona. Why are his actions not alienating people? Not saying they should, just wondering how he’s maintaining wide appeal. Spiderman movies? That face? It’s a pretty good face.
Franco is a darn interesting fellow and that’s one of his great appeal because he isn’t wholly consumed by Hollywood and his “graduate student” doesn’t seem to be an act at all. Looking forward to his upcoming film 127 Hours for which he is likely to receive wide acclaims as well as some serious hardware this upcoming award season.
“[...] but still, you’re the same guy who just looked constipated all the way through the Spiderman movies.”
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!
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