College Media Matters

James Franco recently cussed out The Yale Daily News online in response to a student columnist’s tongue-in-cheek critique of his tweets.  In almost three years of maintaining this blog, the previous sentence may be the strangest one I have ever written.

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As most of the Western world is now aware, Franco phoned in his Oscar hosting duties at the end of last month, earning Spiderman-musical-sized criticism from netizens and the press.

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Yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Academy Awards debacle, the actor/writer/soap star/grad student did not publicly acknowledge any of the scathing reviews. Instead, he felt compelled to respond to a random 300-word post penned by a Yale student in a 3 a.m. blogging session focused on “the lame-ness of James Franco’s Twitter.”

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The nut graf of the post that he (and his fans) found offensive, by student Cokey Cohen (now the most well-known Yalie of 2011): “James Franco, your Twitter sort of sucks.”

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As Cohen notes in a subsequent portion, “Look, I get it. Twitter’s hard. . . . And I would usually never berate someone for tweeting inadequately . . . but James Franco is not just some rando on Twitter. He’s a Celebrity Tweeter, which deserves all caps and necessitates a higher quality of meaningless, incessant electronic communication.  So far, he’s been tweeting a lot of random links to pictures and replies to other celebrities. The pictures are okay in that a few are of him: candids are a Celebrity Tweeter staple. On the other hand, a lot of them . . . look like a fourteen-year-old girl with emo bangs and a Tumblr account attacked them with a few of her favorite Photoshop filters.”

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Franco’s odd Photoshopped reply: placing sloppy red letters spelling out “F*ck The Yale Daily News” over a photo of himself in a car, seatbelt buckled, sporting a Terminator-as-a-teenager look.  It is so general that not even Cohen is entirely sure he is responding to her.  But the consensus from YDN and the media at-large is that the pic is Franco’s fight to restore his Twitter honor.

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In a separate follow-up post about Franco’s FU photo, Cohen sarcastically called the incident “the pinnacle of my career as a writer, at least based on the fact that [the original] blog post officially has the most comments of anything I’ve ever written, even if they are all defending James Franco against my typos and general meanness.”

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Ironically, in berating this perceived meanness, the commenters on her post come across as much, much meaner. Their overall sentiment seems to be: Mess with Franco at your own risk.

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A sampling: “This is so sad.  What’s double the sad is that Cokey Cohen was able to get recognition based on a half-assed poorly written article. Can’t wait to get to college and write some half-assed papers about someone I shouldn’t care about.”; and ”While you’re there writing this and hoping, praying you’ll get some attention, James is probably making more money than you’ll ever will and enjoying a sweet life.”

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My Take: The power of the student press is once again on display.  A single student writer has provoked a dialogue of sorts with a Hollywood almost-A-lister.

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A few reactions from my students when shown Franco’s “visual/performance/Twitter art response”: “I think this is his way of indirectly responding to all his Oscar hosting haters”; “This whole thing might be a secret PR agreement between him and the newspaper– maybe they had to agree to publish his upcoming short story in exchange”; and “Franco’s so weird, this might somehow be a compliment.”

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Or it might simply be beyond our comprehension.  In Cohen’s words, “I’m becoming convinced that James Franco’s whole life is a form of postmodern performance art.”