James Franco: Friend Or Faux?

James Franco has now filled nearly every role in the entertainment industry, moving seamlessly between acting in, directing, writing and producing films, short films and most recently TV. soap operas. His resume reads as a study in opposites, bearing witness to seemingly erratic career choices as he’s elected to take roles in various genre of film and played characters ranging from the romantic lead (gay and straight) to a hapless, perpetually stoned pot dealer.

Franco’s recent decision to play an intense and slightly deranged conceptual artist named, “Franco,” on the soap opera General Hospital found him actually staging a conceptual art show at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which was filmed for the soap and as well as open to the public and invited members of the art community during shooting. In the weeks leading up to the installation/taping/party of the year Franco (the real James Franco??) commissioned a popular soap magazine to run an entire issue devoted to him, which he then liked so much that he paid for a special re-issue in order to have copies on hand to give to friends.

All of this begs the question, is art imitating Franco’s life, or is he intentionally living his life as an ever-increasing reproduction of the art that he has a hand in making? At this stage, no one can tell. The Soap-MOCA exhibit was beyond meta-cognitive, so many layers of farce call into question what is real and what is unreal. Franco is also unafraid to make fun of himself in the name of confusing his public. And confused we are.

One can hardly forget his turn on Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, in which Franco, as with General Hospital, played a goofier version of himself. The punch line in this satire was Franco’s sexual orientation, which has generated a hearty amount of speculation as he has kept intensely quiet and been unafraid to play openly gay characters, most recently the poet Allen Ginsberg. In the episode Franco’s hidden orientation is neither gay nor straight, he is infatuated with a nearly human-sized Japanese sex pillow named Komiko. We the viewers find this out because he has hired Jenna to be his public girlfriend in order to hide his secret. In a clever visual metaphor, the pillow, which Franco totes along in every scene, acts as a visual stand-in for the proverbial elephant-in-the-room question about his sexuality that so many seem to ask.

There are many unknowns about Franco at this point, the largest of which is where the line between art and his private persona falls. What isn’t so ambiguous is that Franco is having a load of fun at the public’s expense; in what seems to be playing out as the greatest senior prank of all time Franco is continuing in a bright career filled with meaningful roles, pursuing various degrees of higher education, and thoroughly befuddling his public, having a laugh along the way.