The postmodern James Franco

This is one for Pseud’s Corner. James Franco is having a bit of a Joaquin Phoenix moment. He wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday about his love of performance art and how this led to him taking a role on long-running daytime soap, General Hospital.

In a piece that is lumpy with earnest chunks of undigested critical theory, the actor wrote:

“I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade—ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of General Hospital as the bad-boy artist "Franco, just Franco." I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.”

So – wait. An actor who is largely famous for appearing in mass-cultural bilge (the Spider-men flicks, Pineapple Express) appears in some more mass-cultural bilge and all of a sudden he’s creating a playful meta-discourse with the audience? I do love this. First off, he’s pretty recognizable but he is just a B-list actor. It’s not like Stephen Hawking or President Obama is making an appearance on a soap. And I think we’re all pretty au fait with the concept of a real person pretending to be someone else by now. (Like Cameron Diaz. She is a real person but sometimes she pretends to be, like, an ass-kicking super-vixen! Hold on for a moment to let me wrap my head round that. That is food for thought. )

He then says: “Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world.” R-i-i-i-i-ght. Unless the rest of General Hospital is staffed by real nurses and doctors, tending to real patients, I think they might have already beaten to you to that one, Mr Franco.

He also quotes his performance art teacher on the subject of context: "If you bake some bread in a museum space it becomes art, but if you do it at home you're a baker." So, when an actor acts on a set, surrounded by other actors, is it art – or baking? (This stuff is baffling.)

In any case, this is not Mr Franco’s first brush with the postmodern. In 2008, he starred in the experimental film, Erased James Franco, in which he re-enacts every performance from his career. Don’t believe me? Check it out here:

All of this raises a fascinating new question. Is postmodernism the new irony? A massive get out of jail free card that can be waved about in answer to any given question. For example: “Did you like my performance/ action figure/ tanning spray?” Erm, no. “Well, that’s good. Because I was being postmodern.”

You can read James Franco’s article in full here.