James Is a Giant Douche

When you’re writing gets noticed solely because you happen to already be famous, I suppose it makes sense to attract interest by writing about someone else famous. James Franco, who made the recent attempt to resuscitate his critically panned short story collection, Palo Alto Stories, by allowing Gia Coppola (one in the endless arsenal of Coppolas) to adapt it into a film, has showcased the height of his douche-ness by 1) writing for VICE and 2) writing a short story about Lindsay Lohan for VICE that amounts to a retaliative smear campaign.

A response to Lohan’s allusion to the fact that she slept with Franco while the two were both staying at the Chateau Marmont, Franco’s latest short story, “Bungalow 89,” rehashes the events of the night in question that Lohan was “deluded” enough to think amounted to sex. Irritatingly enough, this story appears in the “fiction” issue of VICE–though it seems quite deliberate and obvious that nothing about it is embellished.

Mocking Lohan for being susceptible to the charms of being read J.D. Salinger, Franco writes in his annoyingly faux experimental point of view shift, “Once upon a time a guy, a Hollywood guy, read some Salinger to a young woman who hadn’t read him before. Let’s call this girl Lindsay. She was a Hollywood girl, but a damaged one. I knew that she would like Salinger, because most young women do.” First of all, every Hollywood girl is damaged, and secondly, it’s actually every young man who is known for liking Salinger.

Playing up her stalker vibe, Franco describes how she essentailly tried to break into his room, in prose that is laughably ineloquent: “I heard her put the key into my front door and turn it, but I had slid the dead bolt and that thing—I don’t know what you call it; it’s like a chain but made of two bars—that kept the door from opening.” A real literary powerhouse of a description, Franco.

Franco’s attempts to artfully dissect Lohan’s persona come across as juvenile and forced. This is a 36-year-old man who has written a high school level essay at best. Referring to Lohan as, “This dragon girl, lion girl, Hollywood hellion, terror of Sunset Boulevard, minor in the clubs, Chateau Demon,” only serves to make Lohan more interesting and himself more shallow. In fact, Franco may have actually revealed a higher level of depth by just sleeping with Lohan instead of writing a Burn Book entry about it.