An Open Letter to James Franco

Dear James,

Everyone here is talking about you—myself included. Most of it is the expected back-and-forth, will-he-won’t-he sort of thing, though, personally, I like to imagine you will, and that (because you are, I assume, exactly like your character on Freaks and Geeks), you’ll be slumped over in the back of Intro to Doctoral Studies carving something like “Disco Sucks” into the faux-wood desk with a penknife. We look over at each other all like “whatever” and after class we get some beers and talk about the Astros or Hart Crane or Anne Hathaway (Coming to visit? Really? That’s awesome! I guess we can all get together and go bowling or something). On the other hand, fantasies of us being best friends aside, I have what feel like legitimate fears of you stealing my girlfriend or having no one ever want to talk to me at parties. Either way, for better or worse, the idea of you coming here seems to imply that if you do everything about being here is going to change.

Why is that? I mean, you seem pretty cool and I like your movies, but you’re really just some dude like everybody else, right? Being in workshop with you isn’t going to make me famous, nor am I going to end up on Judd Apatow’s speed dial, no matter how good the on-screen chemistry between me and Seth Rogan might be… So, again, I ask, why does it feel like you are about to change everything for all of us just by showing up? And why do we all care so much if you do?

The obvious answer, James, is that you will bring each of us a little closer to a world we can’t help but feel simultaneously excluded from, enchanted by, and critical of, that is, the world of celebrity. Like you are going to show up and give each of us a membership card and some dark sunglasses and we’ll all have to start dodging paparazzo on our way to have lunch or to teach comp in a windowless room somewhere on campus. And sure, I think everybody wants this a little bit, that is, to be recognized, but at least in my mind as writers we are inclined to want this a little bit more.

Of course, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think I’m safe in saying that writing is a public endeavor, especially the writing we do here; we write for our friends and our teachers, the members of our workshop, journals and presses, and even when we write for ourselves, we often write with some public image of ourselves in mind. Perhaps more than any particular aesthetic or literary tradition, we are a generation of writers struggling with the legacy of self-mythology, of having to construct—intentionally or unintentionally—a public identity for ourselves as writers in a culture that seems largely uninterested in the construction of our identities as writers. This “tradition” goes back, to my knowledge, at least as far as Whitman, who staged photographs with cardboard butterflies, posed with children, grew a beard, dressed to fit the image of the “everyman,” the version of himself he wanted us—yes, us—to remember. And when we read Leaves of Grass we can’t help but feel like the task was to build a self so deeply into the culture surrounding it that the two became completely inseparable.

Lyn Hejinian has a great essay about this—maybe you’ve read it—called “Who Is Speaking?” In it she reminds us that, “At stake in the public life of a writer are the invention of a writing community; the invention of the writer (as writer and as person) in that community; and the invention of the meanings and meaningfulness of his or her writing.” Here, Hejinian suggests we have an awful lot of responsibility as writers to be the masters of our public selves, which is surely something that’s been on your mind recently, hasn’t it? Maybe more than anyone else I can think of, James, are you confronted with “the relentless necessity of inventing [yourself] anew as a writer every day.” We already “know” you, or at least the “you” that you’ve chosen to share with us; we cried and cringed with you in 127 Hours; we laughed with you when we watched you laugh as you watched episodes of 227 in Pineapple Express; and we made our serious face when you made your serious face at Toby Maguire in Spiderman—“Now let’s see whose behind the mask”—right?

So, to be honest, I don’t know why I’m even telling you any of this; I’m sure when you get here we can have a long conversation about post-confessional writing and the conflation of autobiography and self-mythology or J.D. Salinger and how refusing to participate in the creation of a public image can become a public image in itself. You already know, I’m sure, how we have become so aware of ourselves as potential members of this mythologizing that we are completely helpless to our participation in it. I saw you the other week on The Colbert Report, you said it yourself, we need to be skeptical of celebrity, there’s something seemingly dangerous about it; we might lose sight of ourselves, get lost, or take advantage without ever really intending to do so.

I think the real reason why we all care so much about you is not that we all want to become famous writers, but that we have all been struggling to accept that we won’t, not because we are not good enough, or that we are not deserving, just that it’s improbability is a part of our everyday lives. Even just in terms of this program, there are a ton of super-talented, brilliantly gifted writers here, but are we all going to “make it”? Will each one of us make our mark in literary history? Will any of us? How could we?

America is filling up with post-MFA-ers (I am about to become one myself), small presses, journals, blogs, and people generally convinced that their decades of diary writing qualifies them to be the next Emily Dickinson; which is to say, now, more than ever, is there an abundance of people interested in writing, no matter how (relatively) small the writing world might sometimes seem. The writing community we are responsible for inventing, and inventing ourselves within, seems to be constantly growing and in every direction imaginable.

The response to this is that we have started to accept that our ideas about “making it” will have to change. Success can no longer necessarily mean having your poems or stories in The New Yorker or getting a teaching gig at Iowa; it’s become about finding (or even inventing) a community in which your writing has meaning and is meaningful. So, maybe we’re all so interested in you coming here because we’re worried your presence will remind us of the thing we’ve been struggling with the most; our continual extinction within our abundance; our wanting to “make it”—whatever that means—and knowing we can’t, at least not in the way that we once believed we could, and that you, James Franco, already have.

And I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. It’s pretty normal to get a few MFAs and PhDs, ones that have landed a story in Esquire, poems in Lana Turner, and published a collection of stories on the same press as unknowns like Vonnegut and Hemmingway. We all want to be students forever, James; no one can blame you for that. If anything, the person most implicated in all of this is me; I am writing this hoping that you’ll actually read it, that you will send me an email saying something like, “Hey, I read your letter. Let’s get together sometime and drink beers and talk about the Astros and Hart Crane.” That one day I’m flying out to California on your private jet, book deal in the works, and everybody, and I really mean everybody, will be talking about me.

Sincerely Yours,

Eric Kocher