Please Stop Trying to Break the Internet, You’ve Broken James Franco Instead

At this point, James Franco is hardly even a human. Instead of being made from flesh and blood and thoughts and feelings, he’s rather an amorphous collection of pretentious quotes, vague flashes of sexual deviancy, obscure references, and stylish beanies constantly caked in ten levels of irony. For those playing at home, he’s now bald with a ’70s pornstache. It’s too exhausting to analyse. Trust us, we’ve tried.

In an unholy union of ALL OF THE ABOVE, he’s now taken part in Paper Magazine‘s latest attempt to #BreakTheInternet — a bizarre follow up piece to the ongoing hysteria and carnage caused by Kim Kardashian’s butt. Holed up in a Beverley Hills hotel for close to an hour, Paper invited people to talk to James via Google hangout and boss him around like a beleaguered, real-life Subservient Chicken.

Throughout the exhausting 47-minute film, a jaded and visibly irate Franco is asked to tenderly make out with a sock puppet, create peanut butter portraits of Seth Rogen, twerk, sing, and talk to a turkey sandwich as if he’s a college-educated ’50s house wife pandering to a distant and emotionally abusive husband.

Though it sounds wildly entertaining — what is the internet for if not shaming celebrities and compiling random collections of unnecessary shit? — it’s just not. There’s the occasional moment where a total creeper makes things interesting by sounding like an A-grade sex pest (I’m look at you 36.30 lumberjack lover). But on the whole, Franco is so un-involved in the whole thing he looks like a middle-aged uncle who’s been forced to play dress up with his young nieces and nephews.

You’d think Franco would have a major art-on (art hard on) for the whole thing. Theoretically, it’s an interesting experiment. There’s issues of celebrity and power and technological interaction to be considered. Franco should have already penned a piece in The New York Times about his role as the next Marina Abramovic. WHERE ARE THE OP EDS?

At this point, there’s nothing we can do but pray he gets through this okay. #FixFranco