We started talking and I thought, Here’s the kind of person who can revitalize the study of literature.” As the chair—Ji-Yoon, played by Sandra Oh—visibly blanches, I guessed gleefully that the “new blood” she would be forced to award the prize of delivering her department’s prestigious lecture would be James Franco, Ph.D.
Recently, he’s published four novels, and put out three albums. The latest of those dropped this week, just as The Chair, with its cameo featuring a little bit of Duchovny’s singing and guitar-playing, hit Netflix.
Look at this fun guy! He’s game for a little visual humor at his own expense: when he’s introduced, after Ji-Yoon goes to his McMansion to try to talk him out of doing the lecture, he gets out of his indoor pool and stands in front of Oh, at age 61, with only a tiny Speedo on—a callback to an iconic moment from The X-Files.
He is willing to let Ji-Yoon tell him, in no uncertain terms, how outdated his scholarship is—to hear her out as she lists off developments in the field since his time in school: “Affect theory, ecocriticism, digital humanities, new materialism, book history, developments in gender studies and critical race theory … When’s the last time you picked up an academic journal?” He even listens as she makes a moral argument, insisting that his plan of going back to school to get a Ph.D.
The deans and trustees and the whole world ask the professors in The Chair why anyone should care about what they do, as the motley crew of colleagues struggles to get students to sign up for their courses.
As Twitter digested The Chair, writer Patrick Radden Keeffe shared a photo of a flyleaf of a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, which Keeffe said he had purchased in a used bookstore in New Haven a few decades back.