Brian Damage
12-05-2009, 12:26 AM
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574570313372878136.html
In a Wall Street Journal column that probably got a B+ when it was first handed in as university coursework, James Franco asserts that what he’s been doing in his guest-starring role on General Hospital qualifies as performance art. With his character “Franco, just Franco,” Franco says, “I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.”
In a Wall Street Journal column that probably got a B+ when it was first handed in as university coursework, James Franco asserts that what he’s been doing in his guest-starring role on General Hospital qualifies as performance art. With his character “Franco, just Franco,” Franco says, “I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain—and this was no exception. My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate. Whether they did was out of my hands.”