Marketing Insanity
I won’t deny checking out Diablo Cody’s MySpace blog, at first for more fodder in my crusade against her career, and boy does she ever disappoint. Like 90% of blogs on the Internet, it’s a haphazard assortment of embedded YouTube videos, links to shit nobody cares about (but the comment sycophants sure fake it well!), mildly interesting anecdotes, and pop-culture vomit. I lost interest shortly after she stopped making disingenuous self-effacing remarks around Oscar time, but I still keep checking it…because of Rodney.
I don’t know what to make of Rodney. I’m fascinated in a trainwreck kind of way, because I can’t seem to figure out what’s happening with his blog and MySpace page [the link’s broken, but I included it on the off-chance it returns]. Sometimes, it feels like an elaborate prank/self-promotion, not unlike what I’ve attempted (and failed at — clearly raging insanity is more entertaining than incest jokes and Skip Press parodies). Other times, it feels 100% legit.
When I first started looking at the comments on Cody’s blog, Rodney’s stood out. Not strictly because of the total insanity — just because his comments almost never had a thing to do with the actual content of Cody’s posts, or any of the other comments. It sort of reminded me of The Onion’s “Ask…” columns, where you have the standard “Dear Abby” questions with totally unrelated answers. Even then, I didn’t notice Rodney too much at first…
…until the stalking started.
If you follow the link to Rodney’s blog, the early posts detail a film allegedly based on the life of his (ex?-)girlfriend. The last post on his blog chronicles stalking/death threats/etc. against the girlfriend and himself. He pastes everything in there — text messages, e-mails, whatever — and for some reason attributes it to a psychiatrist. He left several comments on Cody’s blog flat-out stating the man lost his medical license because he sexually abused patients, but in blog posts on his MySpace page (now removed), he elaborated that the shrink lost his license for alcoholism, but because of the graphic nature of the text messages, Rodney assumes alcoholism is a smokescreen.
(On a semi-related note, after reading through all the messages, I can’t figure out how they narrowed it down to this guy — who is a real, Googleable person — when it could be any random person. The dude posts his e-mail address, websites, and phone number all over the place.)
Most people on Cody’s blog just ignored him, until last night. He received two responses — both from the same person — chiding Rodney for posting such depressing, crazy stuff in a place she visits for joy and happiness. Fair enough, but I should also mention that yesterday’s comment included a very specific reference to murdering this psychiatrist, which apparently resulted in MySpace banning his account.
Since MySpace is terrible, I have to assume Rodney’s space received specific complaints in order for this ban to take place. On MySpace, my fictional characters have made extensive references to committing murder, jailbreaks, incest, and pedophilia — and my account was only banned once. For using a bot. (Even though I state it was because of this map for street cred. Buy the t-shirt!)
Whatever happened, I still find myself puzzling over what Rodney is really up to: crazy and crying out for help, crafty and marketing himself, or maybe a little of both. I guess “a little of both” could explain why he’s marketing himself in the most alarming, misguided possible ways. This whole thing is fascinating, and I’m disappointed he’s been cut off from MySpace. Hopefully he’ll pop up again soon, or make better use of his Blogger account…
Posted by Stan on April 16, 2008 9:30 PM | Permalink | Random Musings | Digg It
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