The Lowbrowser

Who knew James Franco could be funny?

I have to admit, at first I didn’t particularly care for the guy. Dude gets mad hype on the UCLA campus, where he attends as an erstwhile English major. Needless to say, every time homeboy decides to get a mocha latte at the campus coffeehouse is a major occasion for female gawkery and ogling.

On top of that, I’ve never been particularly fond with his most famous role. His turn as Peter Parker’s best friend and son of the Green Goblin Harry Osborn in the Spider-Man was alternately self-importantly brooding and unexpectedly goofy. Case in point: the infamous pie sequence in "Spider-Man 3."



On the other hand, if you look back far enough into his resume, you’ll find one project that proves he has good taste, comic chops, and a connection to the Almighty Apatow, that lead to one of the most brilliant critiques of reality television. That project was "Freaks and Geeks," executive produced by Judd Apatow, one of the most criminally underwatched series on television that chronicled the lives, loves, and mortifying adolescent humiliations of high school students circa 1980. Franco played a senior stoner extraordinaire alongside future Apatow superstar Seth Rogen.

But I digress. In choosing this show, Franco shows a glimmer of taste, but proves it in the Apatow funded re-enactment of a particularly vapid scene of MTV’s much-maligned, much-worshiped, "The Hills."

The Re-Enactment


The O.G. (3:18 - 4:39, Pt. 2)

In the re-enactment, Franco plays greazy-haired wannabe d-bag Justin Bobby, while Mila Kunis plays the veneered tabula rasa Audrina Partridge, as the two of them discuss the finer points of meal timing and their relationship.

Apatow, Franco, and Kunis are dead-on accurate in their imitation of the stultifying idiocy of their real-life counterparts. The whole premise behind the video is that now that Hollywood writers are on strike, actors have to resort to performing previously documented reality. The fact that the viewer knows that the two people exchanging lines are actors makes the dialogue’s vapid banality even more painfully obvious than in the original nonfiction context. Also, the thing Franco does with his eyebrows near the beginning of the clip is priceless.

At the end of the clip is kind of a chilling coda: “Without writers, there’s only reality.” Okay, so this clip is actually more of a pro-writer’s strike than just a funny riff on Lauren Conrad and company. Much has already been written about the implications of the strike, greedy writers, oh noes reality shows, etc.

But the bigger statement underneath it all is that reality blows. Reality is lame, awkward, and not entertaining. And as much as that has become a cliché, the "Hills" clip makes it clear. However much that show’s reality may be stretched and influenced, no viewer can escape the fact that those conversations are unbearably asinine.

Any pretense we have made demanding realism in film and television is just a demand for a realism that has been defined through film and television, not defined by actual reality. Because if realism based on actual reality means dialogue like that between Justin Bobby and Audrina, count me, and the rest of America, out. Even though we think of escapism through media as a thing of our Kaufman and Hart Depression-era past, we still crave the zany neighbor, the one-liner, and the chase scene.