Exploiting the Archives: Dustin Diamond is an Asshole
Terrible book, AMAZING cover
I’ve been writing an awful lot of Literature Society entries as of late, which is not terribly surprising considering my insatiable appetite for reading the very worst literature has to offer, then sharing my unfortunate discoveries with my readers like a cat proudly giving its owner a rotting mouse corpse as a thoughtful gift. It is surprising, I suppose, in that these beautiful fuckers take way more time to research and write than more popular features like My World of Flops or Control Nathan Rabin, Control Nathan and Clint and Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 and as a new father who writes an entire website by himself, time is of the essence.
Oh, but I love to read and write about books that never should have been thought up, let alone written and released! I recently had a blast writing about My Teenage Dream Ended, reality show villain, celebrity boxer and sex tape star Farrah Abraham’s memoir about her tragic romance with the dead father of her child, which was way more unintentionally hilarious than a book on that subject has any right to be.
What a lovely mug shot!
That got me to thinking about what the single most disgusting book I’ve ever read professionally might be. The fascinatingly, unforgivably narcissistic, self-serving memoir by the doctor who killed Michael Jackson is tough to beat for pure loathsomeness, as is Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal.
The book is so toxic and repellent that even Diamond has distanced himself from it, deriding it as a hatchet job perpetrated against him by a sleazy ghostwriter who went out of his way to make the trash culture icon look as bad as possible.
It’s easy to see why even a walking punchline like Diamond would want nothing to do with his ostensible memoir: the disgraced TV star, “comedian” and sometimes criminal spends much of the film bragging about all the women he took to the Bone Zone for the purpose of making the beast with two backs and also fucking, taking time throughout to sling slanderous, libelous insults against his Saved by the Bell cast-mates, none of whom come off even a fraction as creepy and wrong as Diamond.
Sure enough, when Lifetime shit out a TV movie about the making of Saved by the Bell from Diamond’s perspective it looked and felt nothing like Behind the Bell. Indeed, the unrelenting sleaziness of the tell-all was replaced by earnest, almost The Wonder Years-like sense of dewy, nostalgic appreciation for a very special time filming a very special show.
Ah, Dustin Diamond. It’s not easy, but you’ve made Farrah Abraham look like a class act by comparison. That’s almost impressive. Almost .
Honor twenty one years of intermittent excellence in journalism over at http://patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace and join a nice community devoid of people like Dustin Diamond. Hopefully.