Celebrity Skin

On Sept. 2 of this year, friends and acquaintances of James Franco such as Aziz Ansari, Bill Hader and Seth Rogen gathered to share playful jibes and bon mots at the actor’s expense on broadcast TV. The Comedy Central Roast series, in which polarizing celebrities are made to endure faux-insults and backhanded tributes in lean, has been a mainstay on the network for over a decade.

Though the program’s previous choices have been easy targets — Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, William Shatner — Franco is the most left-field subject yet: an Oscar nominated PhD candidate who stars in stoner flicks and directs artsy documentaries that screen at film festivals. After a series of hit-or-miss barbs about Franco’s writing and his air of pretentiousness, he ended the roast by boasting, “This isn’t a roast. This is my greatest art installation yet.”

Why do we, as consumers of media, feel like Franco is denying us something? As a public figure, he’s impossible to pin down. After star-making turns in the high-school dramedy Freaks and Geeks and in the Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man series, Franco took a role in the popular ABC soap opera General Hospital as Robert James “Franco” Frank, a character he helped originate (and one that he’s legitimized as ‘performance art’). Since then, he’s published short stories, taught classes in literature, and been named Salon’s Sexiest Man Alive.

The secret behind Franco’s buzz-worthy status is that he defies our expectations of what a celebrity should be.

At this point, there’s very little he could do that would surprise any of us. Best friends with Marina Abramovic? Of course he is. Directing two feature-length literary adaptations, both due for release this year? Wouldn’t put it past him. Just released his new novel, Actors Anonymous, that may or may not be autobiographical? Sounds reasonable. But the secret behind Franco’s buzz-worthy status — and the reason he was chosen to be roasted this year — is that he defies our expectations of what a celebrity should be, and what the nature of celebrity is.

In the Western world, we tend to cling to public figures that espouse certain moral, social and cultural values we may or may not realize that we have. We idolized Marlon Brando because he was rugged, good looking and masculine; we idolize Michael Fassbender today for essentially the same reasons. Young, fresh-faced actresses are admired for their purity and scorned for their promiscuity.

Celebrities — especially movie stars — tend to be white, thin, young, cisgender and straight, and those that don’t fit into that narrow box are tokenized for their differences. Some of them gain popularity by virtue of tumultuous personal lives, scandalous sex tapes or outspoken political views, while others climb the ladder by way of acting talent or good looks.

The popularity of tabloids, talk shows and celebrity snapshots tend to contribute to experiences we place under the umbrella of the Dark Side of Fame, one that’s been fictionalized and mythologized to the point of self-parody. We know that being a celebrity requires constant performance, not just in the sense of acting but also in the sense of creating an image: the “real” Matt Damon, the “real” Jennifer Lawrence, the “real” James Franco.

Of course, these are as much performances as anything on a film reel: as Franco’s recent comedy This Is the End satirizes, the gap between the personal lives of celebrities and the personas that they create through interviews, public appearances, Instagram profiles and Twitter accounts is a wide one. The latter media have fostered a sense of personal connectivity — and a new means of promotion — between artist and consumer: each tweet is calculated and micromanaged in order to support a carefully crafted image, a euphemized version of an actor’s self.

It’s clear why so much attention is paid to these representations. Anyone who’s sat through an episode of Entertainment Tonight knows that even the slightest deviation from the status quo can earn you enough bad PR to sink your prospective film career. Word gets around.

Fatty Arbuckle, the silent film comedian who inspired Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, never recovered from the accusations of rape which ruined his career, even after he was acquitted and offered a formal apology by the jury; Michael Jackson, whose accusations of child abuse ended in ambiguity and an out-of-court settlement, suffered a similar fate. The truth is obscured by good copy, and talented performers fall into obscurity because of tiny, insignificant misdemeanors.

We tend to cling to public figures that espouse certain moral, social and cultural values.

Why, then, is James Franco still so popular? Surely he’s broken enough rules by this point. His low-culture appeal clashes with his high-art aspirations. Fans of his popcorn flick fodder decry his art installations as snobbish, while his high class followers see his big screen pursuits as banal. The actor doesn’t fit into any established box, and any attempts to put him into one — his Academy Award nomination, his Sexiest Man Alive moniker — have only hardened his eccentric resolve.

Whether or not you think that James Franco is a misguided idiot or an avant-garde genius — and it’s entirely possible that he’s both — it’s hard to argue that his envelope-pushing public image raises some valuable questions about our culture of celebrity. In lieu of an omnipresent religious figure (or set of figures), our Western society casts its eyes towards the rich and the famous: cookie cutter archetypes in the shape of human beings, held up as the prime example of what it means to live a successful life.

If nothing else, maybe Franco’s greatest art installation yet is himself, arguably one of the strangest celebrity figures in Hollywood, and one that makes us question why “celebrities” exist in the first place. Like his bestie Abramovic in her installation The Artist Is Present, Franco looks our modern society straight in the eyes. Guess who’ll be the first to blink?