The Lady Doth Protest Too Much

I have been pretty much an agnostic on the subject of Oscar winning screenwriter Diablo Cody. I've written about her (or, more specifically, the passions she inspires) in this blog before. In that blog entry (no links -- we're not about links here, but it was around the time of the Oscars if you want to search for it) I profess my incomprehension at the ire she arouses in what otherwise might seem to be sentient human beings. Why the fury? Why the hate?

But recently Cody (whose real name is Brook Busey) wrote a blog entry on her My Space page that explains a lot about her personality and her feelings about her life and career. An article in Variety discusses the ridiculous enmity that both she and her "Juno" star Ellen Page arouse and Cody elaborates on that subject at great length. I find her post to be very revealing (sometimes unconsciously so) and, as I tend to do here, I thought I would break it down and analyze it so that people can get a glimpse of what's really going on beneath her persona:

A while back, there was a thoughtful article in the above-mentioned publication about Ellen Page and myself. The article was mostly about how passionately some people hate me. As I explained to my therapist the following day (ha) it's kind of weird to read something like that about yourself. On one hand, you feel defensive. On the other hand, you feel puzzled. You feel compelled to identify what it is about you that might inspire such vitriol. (I personally suspect the hate isn't that widespread; it's just loud.)I thought about it. For months. I even wrote a screenplay on the theme. And then, finally, I figured it out.

There's a lot going on in this one passage. I find particularly revealing the defensive "(ha)" when she reveals that she's seeing a therapist -- as if such a revelation will somehow threaten her tough-chick persona so she has to laugh off the fact that, apparently, she feels that she has issues in her life that need to be addressed in a theraputic context. The parenthetical statement is revealing as well -- it's as if she's willing herself to be more popular than she is, like a high school girl who wants the cool kids to like her. It's not really the case that most people hate her -- they're just a very loud minority (as opposed to the silent majority who thinks she's a genius -- it's a very Nixonian rationalization).

I have a response to those who are still boring enough to lob insults in my direction. (Those of you who are friends, fans, enablers, or dislike my writing for legitimate, rational, nonpersonal reasons can tune out now if you like. This isn't for you.)

This is a common ploy on Usenet -- whenever you're discomfited by a particular criticism, profess to find it deeply boring. It doesn't work there and it doesn't work here. However idiotic the people who hate Diablo Cody might be, they're clearly getting to her.

Anyone else? Bend thine ear:I am not Charlie Kaufman or Sofia Coppola (much as I supplicate at their Cannes-weary feet.) I'm not Paul Thomas Anderson. I'm not even Paul W.S. Anderson. I am middle-class trash from the Midwest. I'm a competent nonfiction writer, an admittedly green screenwriter, and a product of Hollywood, USA. I am "Diablo Cody" and if you're not a fan, go rent Prospero's Books again and leave me the fuck alone.

How to unpack this very dense and enlightening passage? From the faux-pretentious language (and just for the sake of the argument, when does faux-pretentious language cross the line and become actually pretentious?), the mention of other screenwriters to whom she clearly feels inferior, the self-contempt apparent in the expression "middle-class trash," the quotation marks around "Diablo Cody" -- it all points to a feeling of, if not exactly unworthiness (although that's clearly there as well), then a feeling of blatant self-inauthenticity.

The following passage points that up, as well as it sets up what follows and makes it more apparent:

I may have won 19 awards that you don't feel I earned, but it's neither original nor relevant to slag on Juno. Really. And you're not some bold, singular voice of dissent, You are exactly like everyone else in your zeitgeisty-demo-lifestyle pod. You are even like me. (I, too, loved Arrested Development! Aren't we a pretty pair of cultural mavericks? Hey, let's go bitch about how Black Kids are overrated!)

Whether it's original or relevant to slag on "Juno" is beside the point, whether Cody realizes it or not. The film is either good or it isn't. If it is, then all the attacks won't matter. If it's not, it doesn't matter either, because they're merely kicking a dead horse. And the sentence "You are even like me" might be the most revealing sentence in this very revealing piece of writing. The questions is not whether her critics feel Cody hasn't earned the awards she's won.

It's whether Cody herself believes that.

The defensiveness reaches fever pitch in what follows:

I'm sorry that while you were shooting your failed opus at Tisch, I was jamming toxic silicon toys up my ass for money. I get why you're bitter. I took exactly one film class in college and-- with the curious exception of the Douglas Sirk unit—it bored the shit out of me. I also once got busted for loudly crinkling a bag of Jujubes during a classroom screening of Vivre Sa Vie. I don't deserve to be here. We've established that. But I'm here. Five million 12-year-olds think I'm Buck Henry. Accept it (Incidentally, if you were me for one day you'd crumble like fucking Stilton. I am better at this than you. You're not strong enough, Film_Fan78. Trust me.) I'm sorry to all those violent, semi-literate fanboys who hate me for befriending their heroes. I can't help it if your favorite writer, actor, director, or talk show host likes me. Maybe you would too, if we actually met. I know my name is fake and that it annoys you. What, do you hate Queen Latifah and Rip Torn, too? Writers and entertainers have been using pseudonyms for years. Chances are, you're spewing bile under an assumed screen name yourself. I'm sorry if you think I'm like some inked-up quasi-Suicide Girl derby cunt from 2002, but I like my fake name. It's engraved on an Oscar. Yours isn't.

Is it my imagination, or is there a truly extraordinary amount of self-loathing packed into this passage? What I find most interesting about it is the extent to which Cody has clearly internalized her hate-mongers to the extent that she actually identifies with them (as in the "we" in "We've established that"). As Auden once said of Yeats that "He became his admirers," it seems that Diablo Cody has become her critics. Or, as they say nowadays, her haters.

It seems to me blatantly obvious that Cody is suffering from an advanced case of The Imposter Syndrome. Here's how it's defined (I snagged this off a Caltech website):

Imposter syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.

It is basically feeling that you are not really a successful, competent, and smart student, that you are only imposing as such.

I think they mean "posing" instead of "imposing," but you get the idea.

It is very common for people who become suddenly and unexpectedly famous to feel as if they are a fraud on the verge of being exposed -- and Cody clearly feels that way. It really comes out in the following passage, which sounds like a genuine cri de coeur. Here Diablo Cody practically begs her critics to understand her (and, possibly, love her?):

Listen: I've been telling stories my whole life. Even when I was a phone sex operator, I was the Mark Twain of extemporaneous jerk-off fiction. I took every perspiring creep on a fucking journey. I don't know how to do anything else.I'm going to make more movies and shows. I doubt they'll all be good, but that's the nature of this life. Even though the public only knows me from one book, one movie, and several aborted blogs, I've spent the last few years hustling like Iceberg Slim out here to prove myself professionally. The people I currently work for, and with, are more than pleased with my post-Juno output. My pilot was so good (thanks, Toni Colette!) that it got picked up for series. That is rare, children. That is blue-rare. In summation: you try it.This is the last I have to say on the subject, unless I'm provoked by a journalist in which case I'll gladly reload. With relish, as Betty Rizzo might say. That said, I'm a 30-year-old woman with a dwindling interest in blog culture, and I don't have time to address this bullshit every time one of my projects comes out. I'm in love, I just bought a house, and my boss made E.T. I kind of have to focus on reality.And drinking. I have to focus on drinking.

The last two sentences speak for themselves. When you feel like a fraud, drinking helps to hide it. Until that becomes even more of a problem than your feelings of fraudulence. I don't know when that will happen to Diablo Cody but I'm pretty sure it's inevitable.

So what do I think of Diablo Cody? I think she's a moderately talented writer. I found Candy Girl, with its let's-see-how-many-inane-pop-cultural-references-we-can-stuff-into-one-sentence prose style, to be a little annoying. And I thought I would hate "Juno," but much to my surprise I didn't. I thought it was an overblown ABC Afterschool Special that didn't deserve to win an Oscar (which was more a tribute to the money it grossed and the perversity of Academy voters -- let's not forget, this is the same Academy that voted Stanley Shapiro the Oscar in 1960 for writing "Pillow Talk" over Ernest Lehman for "North by Northwest," Ingmar Bergman for "Wild Strawberries" and Francois Truffaut for "The 400 Blows"), and I found its politics to be both mildly racist and more than a little reactionary, but the woman clearly has talent. How much talent, and whether she will write anything that has permanent value, has yet to be determined.

But the kind of whining and self-pity that her blog entry represents is really beneath her -- beneath anybody, for that matter. It's just unseemly (and the "my boss made E.T." stuff is just pathetic). It reminds me of that outburst that the novelist Howard Fain spews at Youngblood Hawke in Herman Wouk's novel of the same name. Cody would do well to read that book, if only for the sake of that passage. In it, Hawke and his publishers have convened a meeting to discuss how Hawke should defend himself against a vicious attack by a famous and influential critic who has a grudge against him. Into the meeting walks (or, more accurately, staggers) fellow novelist Howard Fain, who, in the words of the old song, is all lit up like a Christmas tree. He tells the group that "Of course he's been unfairly attacked!" and then goes into a pages-long rant that I think Cody should not only read but learn by heart. It might help her get through this passage in her life with her dignity intact.

I don't have the book on me, but I'll boil the rant down to its essentials:

Keep writing, and don't bother to answer your critics.

To which I would add one personal comment:

Stop drinking. Now. Before you do something you'll regret.

Tom Moran