Maybe there really is no such thing as bad press.
by Ashley Canino
James Franco propositioned a minor last week via social media, maybe. Lucy Clode, a female tourist, who at 17 was half Franco’s age and the minimum legal age of consent in New York State, shared screenshots of incriminating messages exchanged over Instagram and text. Franco sent a couple of selfies, including a picture of him holding a paper that read the girl’s name as verification of his identity, and the images were published widely. However, news of the scandal emerged on the same day the trailer for his latest movie, “Palo Alto”, hit the web, drawing suspicion that the well-supported allegations were a publicity stunt for the film. In the movie, Franco plays a high school coach who develops a relationship with an underage girl. Franco wrote the source material for the film, a collection of short stories by the same title.
The day after the story was first published, Franco confirmed the veracity of Clode’s story in a bashful acknowledgment of what transpired between the two when he appeared on Live with Kelly and Michael. His statement was self-effacing: “I’m embarrassed, and I guess I’m just a model of how social media is tricky.” Though social media may indeed be, “tricky” for some, Franco seems to have a pretty good handle on it. He is the only celebrity I follow on the photo-sharing network because, despite his constant self-promotion, his Instagram persona is diverse, funny and personable. He makes commemorative posts every 100K followers he gains on Instagram (he hit 1.7 MM following the scandal and commented, “WOW—100,000 in ONE DAY—WEIRD”) and promotes his multitude of projects, with grace and thanks for his fans, while speckling his feed with memes, unflattering selfies, and fan renderings of himself and characters he has played. His self-conscious admission quickly went off topic: “[Social media is] a way that people meet each other today, but what I’ve learned—I guess because I’m new to it—is you don’t know who’s on the other end. You get a feel for them, [but] you don’t know who you’re talking to. I used bad judgment and I learned my lesson.” While that point may be true—and in the age of MTV’s Catfish we are all aware of the lies that may be lurking on social networks—in the case of James Franco and Lucy Clode, there was no ambiguity as to who was who. Identities did not come to light after the fact. Franco asked about the most pertinent bit of information about Clode, her age, and he got an answer—that she was a few days shy of her 18th birthday. Whether real or faux, Franco’s social media impropriety and the media’s response give us a few things to think about.
How do we regard relationships between an older man and a younger woman vs. an older woman and a younger man?
We most recently tread this territory when Dylan Farrow made public accusations of sexual abuse against Woody Allen. That story had a particularly dark tone for a number of reasons; it involved a minor who was indisputably a child, Allen has a familial connection to Farrow, and we all know that Allen married his wife’s adoptive daughter who is 37 years his junior, back when she was 19. There is no comparison to Franco’s story, because there are boundaries that we as a society will never consider crossing in real life. That said, we have come a ways in what we are willing to accept in art. Today, there is nothing particularly incendiary about a film or novel plot around a young girl in a relationship with an older man. Perhaps we are accepting of these relationships, like the one between Franco’s Mr. B and Emma Roberts’ April in Palo Alto, because they are to some degree relatable. We largely recognize as an audience that being entertained by the storyline, finding it provocative of thought, or even cathartic and fulfilling, does not implicate us in any sort of scandal. Compare this to the mid-20th century when Nabokov’s Lolita manuscript was rejected by several major publishers and eventually published among a roster that mostly included pornographic material.
Beyond the silver screen, there isn’t much discord—maybe a few skeptical frowns—when older celebrity men enter relationships with young ingénues a la Bradley Cooper and Suki Waterhouse (17 years apart) or Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. We are slightly less forgiving when an older woman dates a younger man. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who portrays title superhero Kick Ass in the film franchise, married and had children with Sam Taylor Wood, a film director 23 years his senior. A quick poll of my friends matches the overtones in news coverage—Bradley and Suki are cute, Aaron and Sam are some version of “gross.” Older women are “cougars,” while older man, at worst, may be having a mid-life crisis, a widely accepted stage of life.
Are we desensitized to a fault?
While Kelly Ripa isn’t known for being a hard-hitting journalist, I was still shocked to hear her blasé response to Franco’s admission: “It happens to everybody.” I would venture to say this is less common than Ripa thinks. One may say there isn’t much room for concern in this case because Lucy Clode met the legal age of consent. However when Franco inquires if she is 18 yet, it doesn’t seem that he knows that 17 makes the cut. Should we dismiss his proposition on the basis that it was likely a stunt? Is a play at propositioning a minor before the public eye for the gain of likes, followers and fans an indication that we’ve gone a bit too far in our acceptance of relationships imbalanced in age, and subsequently, authority? Perhaps we have come to draw so much entertainment value from the spectacle, that we are willing to ignore any ramifications of it.
Is all media now social media?
Now that celebrity stories are published on media platforms that thrive on sharing and interaction, all media that encompasses their work or commentary, over and above their own personal memes and musings, should also be considered social media. Perhaps this is the trickiness to which Franco referred. He engages with this notion of identity through many platforms; all of his Vice articles come with an image of his face superimposed on the figures mentioned in the article, and he played an artist who goes by “Franco,” for several episodes of General Hospital, alongside his real-life mother, Betsy Franco, as the artist’s mother. By all indications, Franco is highly conscious of the malleable value of identity, especially in the places where publicity and privacy converge. His social media profile is not limited to Twitter or Instagram. His public identity, his work, and private life are inextricable from a socially generated and perceived identity. More and more, this is endemic of not just celebrity life, but the lives of average citizens of the web who struggle to maintain privacy while fighting the impulse to share.
Related Content:
Previous Editions of Pop Rivets:
- HBO’s ‘Girls’ In Review ( March 31, 2014)
- Ban Bossy? (March 24, 2014)
Gabrielle Lipton’s personal essay “Darwin on the Lower East Side” takes a different look at age-imbalanced relationships:
- Darwin on the Lower East Side (from Issue 1 of The Riveter print edition)
(Palo Alto film still © Tribeca Film 2013)
