and it was through 'maîtresse' that we came to read this new york magazine article by sam anderson on the-entire-world-at-this-moment's crush, james franco. it's quite an article, by which we mean that, for a celebrity profile or for otherwise (but especially for a celebrity profile), it's thoughtfully argued and impeccably written. anderson raises questions that highlight not just the man himself, but that wonder around the position of art and publicity in the worlds where franco makes his lives. i suppose that there's enough sensationalism and gossip surrounding james franco that another article in either of those realms would have quickly found its way to the rejects pile. regardless, over the 10,000 or so words of anderson's piece, i only checked my email once.
the passage quoted at 'maîtresse' i'll quote again here, because it turned out to be a deft summary of the article's themes:
Take, for instance, graduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars.
so, as anderson (and then our crush) asks, is james franco for real? as well as anderson does to demonstrate that franco could actually have all the time and energy necessary for all of his projects, i'm still doubting it. that is, that he's for real. you can read the article and decide for yourself, because i'm not interested in critiquing anderson's methods or his conclusions. whether or not franco gets all of his homework done and whether his professors inflate the quality of his performance in exchange for their programs' celebrity endorsement are immaterial fodder for that rejects pile. anyway, franco apparently has a personal assistant who takes care of ALL of his day to day needs -- and i'm guessing that franco is rich. plus, what i know of his art isn't impressive: that short story that esquire printed really was, as salon.com called it, a [heh] "crush killer." the exciting bit is the realness of the reality we're questioning.
that we're even asking is proof of the complicated performance that celebrity has become at the demand of both the high and pop cultures of staged self-reference. james franco is a hall of mirrors. i've never seen him play his kind of self on general hospital, but his episode of 30 rock, on which he played a celebrity trying to dodge rumors that he's in love with a body pillow much as franco himself has (poorly for as gay as that short story was) been skirting rumors of homosexuality, was funny. james franco's art is on the art of being james franco. anderson acknowledges as much, and rounds out an entire section of his article on franco's obsession with "meta" everything. i'd say that's just your typical post-secondary student, but really who isn't now constantly wondering how convincingly -- or calculatedly unconvincingly -- they're playing themselves on the (sometimes actual) television series of their lives?
as an undergraduate, i read as much andré gide as i could find in attempts to better understand the influence of his meta-fictional the japanese master of meta-fiction that was the subject of my thesis adviser's dissertation. (here i have to confess to my crush that i once disdained paris for not having marked any of the site's i visited on my self-guided andré gide reality tour). that investigation was thrilling pursuit, and it opened me to wider interests in other disciplines of the humanities. i understand franco's devotion. but now it seems that what was once a tool intended to elucidate the means of artistic and cultural creation and dissemination has become a final artistic and cultural end. the hall of mirrors is just a fun house attraction. we stare down it (or, more correctly maybe, up at it) just to wink at our reflections with the things we've put on the pedestal at its center. and indeed, anderson reads into the winks and shoulder pats he gets from franco even as he's being scorned by the publicity people that made that illusion possible for him in the first place.
but the fun house is, well, fun, and we all get to be in on the joke. reading anderson's article i, in all the realness of assumed reality, imagined myself dressed smartly (a brown suit and a non-chalantly ported clutch) in attendance at one of franco's gallery shows. james opened with some small talk before pulling me over to introduce me to some people he needed me to meet. one of them remarked on what a dashing couple we were, and i responded in equally knowing jest: "we're all over the tabloids. they're calling us 'christopher'!" in all honesty, i've imagined a similar encounter with miranda july, but in her case we ended up making out in a closet where we'd met after both shying away from a too stressful dinner party. either meeting seems not ultimately beyond my possible reach, but those mirrors can be tricky.
what a world. and where to put ourselves in it? four graduate programs and just go for it, i guess. or maybe just one for a start. thanks for the inspiration, maîtresse. we'll always have paris.
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