Fresh-faced, 13-year-old Dylan, star of YouTube video diary Dylan's Couch, has scored millions of viewers for his personal stories of pranks, girls, and schoolwork gone awry. But his show, which has aired 13 episodes so far, is written and directed by an unnamed woman he refers to obliquely in interviews as "the director." Though Dylan claims the stories in each episode come from real life, he admits that "the director" writes all of them and he merely edits them to sound more like a real junior high schooler talking.
Dylan's Couch bills itself as part fiction, part real. This is why Dylan reminds me of another comely teenaged boy with a gift for storytelling who was the mouthpiece for a middle-aged female creator -- J.T. Leroy. Of course J.T. was a figment of writer Laura Albert's imagination, but he was just as real as "Dylan," who is simply an actor mouthing the words of an older woman as if they were his own. When you think about J.T. Leroy and watch Dylan's Couch, the whole thing becomes way more creepily compelling. When will Dylan's "director" come out and show herself? Has she shown herself somewhere already? Do tell.
