I’m Your Biggest Fan! – My Relationship With Vin Diesel & Others

I have something of a love-hate relationship with popular Internet website Facebook – I understand it, and I understand its function, but I’m not that keen on using it. I hate what it presumes of me, which is that I’m inherently interested in other people’s conversations. Except these aren’t conversations; this is “night out with the girlies! much needed lol! see you at 5th ave hun xxx” and “that rash cleared up m8? not goin 2 uni 2moro, cant b arses lol”. It’s the artifacts of a generation that has been raised to compress their interactions with others into bite-sized chunks of text (I think it was Russell T Davies who said that future historians will be puzzled by the era around the beginning of the third millennium, during which we people simply typed at eachother), but you learn to live with it.

Recently, I saw this exchange. Nothing out of the ordinary, I thought – until I noticed who the recipient was. It wasn’t another vaguely-remembered face from old school years, being invited to some appalling nightclub to shove glowsticks up their arse. It was a sincere question posed to none other than baldy-headed actor man Vin Diesel.

Now obviously, when you’re faced with this on your news feed – alongside other such ordinary pieces of news, such as “Michelle Fraser is OMG!!!” and “Paul Capewell is a fan of Ryan Adams” – it requires a few seconds of processing. Then it requires further investigation. Has a friend of mine struck up some kind of close friendship with Vin Diesel? Has the “actor” taken my friend for rides around Lancashire in one of his ludicrous cars? These are all valid questions.

It turns out, my friend had not been rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous – instead, he had left a well-meaning message on Vin Diesel’s fan page. As had approximately three million other people. How peculiar, I thought. Until I clicked on the main page of this digital shrine to see that, apparently, it is fronted by none other than Vin Diesel himself, who uses it as some kind of self-congratulatory blog of his day-to-day life (which at the moment consists of goose-stepping around the world looking all muscly to promote his latest film, which is yet another one of those appalling films about comically oversized cars that only idiots enjoy).

He also uses the blog to occasionally select the least mental comments that are near the top of the list (on the rare occasion he logs on to upload pictures of himself in various locations standing next to cars), and respond to them – a bit of fan interaction. Nothing wrong with that. Apart from the wave upon wave of the clinically insane that are drawn, like moths to a bald actor, to this mecca of idiocy.

My first thought was, “this cannot be Vin Diesel”. I’ve seen joke accounts before – from the excellent Peter Sutcliffe Twitter account to the disastrous Fake Steve Jobs – but something about this one felt different. It looks and feels too real. First of all, the pictures were all way too consistent – not only with his known locations (and I did cross-reference his purported location to confirmed third party sightings, because it’ll be a cold day in hell before I write something for PULP that isn’t 100% fact-checked and solid), but with the kind of person I expected Vin Diesel to be. Here he is in the Dominican Republic, looking at some poor people:

Not waving, not doing anything, just looking. I can only imagine what he’s thinking, and I imagine he is thinking how good he must look to those tiny poor people down there (who, to their credit, don’t seem to know or care who Vin Diesel is, and have congregated to look at the bald white man who arrived especially to patronize them from a rooftop). This is exactly in keeping with my personal image of Vin Diesel – a man easily confused by such things as other countries, acting, and why those people look so small. Then, take this absolutely ridiculous image:

That’s Vin Diesel riding around in a cross between a bike and pineapple stall. Again, to me – a man who knows nothing of Vin Diesel other than the fact he is a ferociously loud moron who has made nothing but terrible films – this is quintessential Vin, as I have come to know him. In a country where such a vehicle existed, I can only imagine a man like Vin Diesel would demand it be brought to him so he can ride around in it to his heart’s content. Of course, this is Facebook, so we’re also treated to shots of him schmoozing in seedy nightclubs with people he’ll never see again, and exclusive pics of the follicly-challenged thesp hugging some black children while simultaneously boasting on his page of his multiculturalism (come on, we’ve all done it):

“Proud to be Multicultural… thank you.”, says Vin. No, thank you Vin. I could go into his personal writings, but they’re similarly woeful – and again, in perfect keeping with my mental picture of Simpleton Vin, which seems to have been a fairly accurate stereotype after all – and further proof, if proof is needed, that we may well be dealing with a man so hugely egotistical that he uses a self-erected Facebook fanpage to interact with those who like films about cars and the bald men who drive them.

What I really want to get to is Vin’s fans – 2.5 million people have signed up, and apparently every single one of them has popped a few words on his wall, in hopes that the man himself will read it. I soon saw my friend’s entry – which was already ten entries down a mere thirty seconds after it had been posted – and soon realized that it was entirely possible that my friend is the most intelligent Vin Diesel fan in the entire world. Some people acted with decidedly less composure than my esteemed acquaintance (whose names and faces I blocked, a courtesy I almost didn’t extend to the following terrifying bastards in the hopes that their local mental health authorities are not delayed in finding them and scooping them up in a big net before they can hurt themselves or others). Some of it was fairly harmless, like this from Zeel:

Most messages are in the Zeel ballpark, but a few too many are slightly stronger in their sentiment than Zeel’s. They are, if you will, a little overzeelous (and if you don’t like puns, fuck you).
Kevin here is so dumbstruck by the idea of digitally communicating with Vin Diesel that he forgot his message and simply stated his name and location, perhaps in the futile hope that any day now Vin will kick his back door in (not a euphemism), have a few drinks with him and then kick his back door in (a euphemism).

Tiffany here is so desperate to get her message to Vin that she didn’t even have time to correct her spelling as she fueriuosly mashed the keyboard with her closed fists, before some other 100-pixel-high image of an indistinguishable young woman got in before her in the race for Vin’s affections.

This is from Cassandra – who is well known amongst her social circle for having a little beard and a foot-high tattoo of Vin Diesel’s head on her back – who, with her desperate desire to know the exact details of Vin Diesel’s daughter, may be the first person ever to be subject to a restraining order that prevents her from coming within 25 feet of the internet.

Mohammed here is one of a vast legion of people who operate on the assumption that celebrities are aching to be invited round to theirs for lunch – I was astounded by how many people were offering Vin Diesel meals at their home, seats at work dinnerparties, trips to the movies (his movies, one can only presume, as I imagine he has a hard time understanding anything else), and toothless, gummy blowjobs behind the Biffa bins round the back of the Lidl in Longsight. Among other things.

The winner so far, however, must be Liz, and I needn’t say why (protip: it’s practically child abuse):

I’m betting that ‘Chevelle’ probably won’t live long enough to treasure those cars, as her parents will simply forget to feed her between days-long sessions of feverishly writing to Vin Diesel on the internet and having sex with the exhausts of their cars after all the neighbours have gone to bed.

It was around this point that I began to realize the magnitude of what I had discovered. I have seen the true face of the internet, and I fear it – more than I fear Anonymous, more than I fear Chris Hansen, more than I fear Dani Middleton. No other internet entity frightens me more than the collective braindribble of these absolute nutters, because I genuinely fear what these people are truly capable of. Imagine if, say, Vin Diesel casually dropped into conversation that he’s not too keen on the opinions and ideals of pompous art-prat Charles Thomson – no further reason would be required, the consequences would not be considered, and Thomson would be dead by sundown. Of that I am absolutely certain.

As the days progressed, I became obsessed – not with Vin, but with the people who admire him. As they followed his jaunts around the world, looking at the poor and hugging black children, I followed them – I tried to follow all of them, but the tide of demented messages is simply too much. I tried to take in all I could, but it’s like trying to catch all the water from Niagra Falls by opening your mouth; there’s only so many of them you can pick up on, and you know that for every great one you catch, ten better ones elude you. It was at this point I felt something I had never felt before – pity. Pity for Vin Diesel. By attempting the not ignoble gesture of interacting with his fans, he opened the floodgates for mentalists with far too much time on their hands. Stephen Fry did the same thing with Twitter, but unfortunately for Vin Diesel, his work does not have the same intellectual cattle grid that Mr. Fry’s does. Vin Diesel can never be Jeeves, and if his writings are anything to go by, he will never write one of the great modern autobiographies. As a result, his page has become synonymous with mentalists, the delusional, and people who are only allowed to use Facebook for ten minutes at a time on day release from Arkham Asylum. The poor, poor man.

For that, I will forever be Vin Diesel’s #1 fan.

Vin Diesel’s Facebook page can be viewed here.

John Tucker