As a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone. I was an underachiever and a social outcast, who lived primarily through his imagination, and I read constantly and widely. I’d impersonate my father in order to call myself in sick—my father rarely ever knew or cared when I was sick, but the school secretary had a different impression—then head down to the public library’s central branch to read all day. I learned more that way, mostly about arts and humanities subjects, than I ever did in my depressing cliquey high school.
One of the books I encountered was Dali / Miro: Masters of Surrealism. It was a good read and I thought Dali was weird and cool. Like a lot of teenagers just learning about art, I thought you had to be weird and cool to be an artist. And when I read the book, the idea that artists were different made sense to me on a higher level. They were a unique species.
Both of my parents were serious artists (my father a writer, my mother a painter and sculptor) and they were definitely not weird and cool. They were just mom and dad. I didn’t put them in the same category as someone like Salvador Dali, Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, Joan Miró, Hemingway, HP Lovecraft, Picasso, or Jack Kerouac—all illustrious weirdos on whom I’d developed a teenage obsession at some point.
Also, less illustrious but no less weird: Robert E. Howard, Jim Starlin, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Robert Aspirin, Lynn Abbey, Dave Sim, CJ Cherryh, and many other sci-fi / fantasy people, who were great in pop-culture, but who were a bit too lowbrow to garner respect from anyone in my family.
To be fair, like any teen, I didn’t understand that these “names” were the product of intense cultural mediation, specifically economic and industry concerns, their greatness established and maintained, by multinational media organizations. As Foucault writes in “What is an author?” “an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. . . . [I]ts status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.”
Instead, I mistook marketing for mystery and felt the answer to my suffering was somewhere far away with these special people—maybe in a comic book, a fantasy novel, or whatever esoteric elephant vapor held up Dali’s melting art chateau. I had to Find The Others. But at that time in my life, I would have had to borrow the car to do it.
One day, I asked my mom to explain the weirdness to me and why she wasn’t like that. Her answer was something I’d never forget. You can’t generalize about art and artists because everyone is different. But there are such things as posers and they are numerous.
A poser is someone who takes his creative energy and puts it into his appearance and identity instead of into his work. She added that some people are posers and artists at the same time. Warhol, Basquiat, Hemingway, and Dali are good examples. Others are just framed by the media in colorful ways for author-branding purposes. Hence, the Hollywood image of the artist as a flamboyant weirdo. Hollywood understands this pose because the poser-weirdo artist is an evergreen role that makes conventional Joe Sixpack comfortable.
Artists are people willing to dwell in the imagination. They’re indulgent, often emotionally arrested in some ways and hyper-developed in others, and they’ve given themselves certain inner permissions to an unsettling degree. This might be generally true. But if we can put them in a container, labelled FREAK, we can feel less threatened by their existence.
At least from the standpoint of values and expectations, this is what Hollywood is usually about: reinforcing dominant social attitudes and trends and making lots of money as a result. Sometimes, Hollywood stumbles into art and makes something amazing. But most of the time, it recycles garbage. And one of its often-recycled garbage products is James Franco playing a writer.
It seems like he does this far too much. He’s an actor, so a creative person by definition, and he actually does have an MFA in creative writing (not making him a writer by definition, which is something for a different essay), but he seems to be suffering from the actor who really wants to be the thing he portrays syndrome.
Yes, Franco has published multiple books. And I feel sure it was as difficult for him to find a publisher as it was for Jewel, if anyone remembers her as a literary sensation. Some of his material might be good. I haven’t made a definitive study of the Franco corpus. And I don’t want to bag on him as a writer or as a person. But I do think he does a disservice to the discipline of literary writing by reinforcing Hollywood’s poser-weirdo artist stereotype. Then again, he’s an actor. Posing is his primary skill.
So I watched The Adderall Diaries after a nine-year cleansing period. It has not aged well. The story, in case you wisely abstained the first time around, is that Stephen Elliott has writer’s block. He’s on the verge of a big deal with Penguin for a creative nonfiction book on his late, abusive father and shitty childhood. But it all falls apart when the supposedly dead dad (Ed Harris) shows up at a very posh, exclusive publishing-industry reading and calls Elliott out as a fraud.
Cue Cynthia Nixon, playing a literary agent but really just reprising her Distressed Middle Management Lady role from Sex and the City: no one wants anything to do with Stephen Elliott now that he hasn’t really been chained up in a basement like he claimed and his dad is still around. He’d better produce hard evidence that he was a messed up kid and fast.
Then we get Amber Heard, a spectrum of drugs appearing out of Elliott’s pockets, and multiple S&M intercuts with hookers throughout the greater New York metropolitan region, representing to Joe Sixpack the Decadence And Depravity To Which An Artist With A Wounded Soul Can Descend. In movies, you never see an artist washing the dishes unless she has a needle hanging out of her arm. And yet, the dishes do seem to get washed. Who does them? Maybe “Dobby the House Elf,” since this is about as realistic as Harry Potter.
You never see the high cost of the rock-and-roll lifestyle supposedly led by creative people because, much like me as a teenager, Joe Sixpack must have certain assumptions reinforced. Artists are “other.” The normal rules of human life don’t apply to them. If they debauch themselves, the consequences are largely aesthetic, quickly forgotten by the next scene.
They drink whiskey like it’s apple juice. They’re pursued by modelesque beauties or hunky men, who find them incredibly interesting. They engage in a smorgasbord of extracurricular porn sex. And they rarely need to consider whether such a lifestyle might interfere with their writing. In reality, if you’ve got a headache, you’ll notice you typically write fewer pages that day. If you’ve got a hangover, the manuscript can wait.
James Franco is an attractive man and Amber Heard, even post-Depp, is gorgeous. I have no doubt they are in the right field. They should be looked at for money. But being able to strike a pose is not the same as being able to work with lousy source material or function effectively as a different type of artist. It’s definitely not enough to turn you into the real thing. The difference between Franco and, say, Salvador Dali, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Andy Warhol is simple. They were exceptional because they had enough creative energy to weave self-aggrandizing image-myths while also making real art.
But most artists want to live quietly. They want their energy and attention to go toward one thing. In the meantime, the movie industry (and, to a certain extent, the publishing industry) chugs along, recycling comfortable stereotypes so that everyone can feel a little less bad about the poems they wrote at age 14.
