Dustin Diamond and the Mystery of Behind the Bell
The most popular article on this website this week is not something I’ve written over the last few days. It’s not even something I wrote last month or even last year. Rather, it is an article from 2018 with the provocative title “Dustin Diamond Is an Asshole.”
“Dustin Diamond Is an Asshole” isn’t even really an article so much as it is a massive link to a much meatier article I wrote a long, long time ago for my Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club column at the A.V Club.
The much meatier piece was a four thousand word evisceration of Dustin Diamond’s unfathomably awful memoir/Saved by the Bell tell-all Behind the Bell that found me engaging with Diamond’s toxic tome as aggressively and intensely as possible without going mad or letting its poison seep down into my soul.
Behind the Bell wasn’t just bad: it’s morally indefensible. It’s a crime against literature. It is something that Diamond will have to atone for on Judgment Day. Let’s just say that if I had written my magnum opus on Screech’s sleazy wallow in the depths of human degradation for this website you better believe it’d be going into The Joy of Trash.
Reading Behind the Bell didn’t just make me feel dirty: it made me feel UNCLEAN on a cellular level. I felt like I had to purge myself of the awful experience of reading Behind the Bell by writing about it as exhaustively and extensively as possible.
It’s hard to know where to even begin with Behind the Bell. Do you start with the adolescent bragging about the thousands of women Diamond claimed to have degrading sex with, many on the actual set of Saved by the Bell? Or is Diamond’s rancid misogyny and appalling treatment of his female cast-members more notable?
Behind the Bell is so full of casual slander and libel that I wondered how on earth it ever got published. The response to the book’s memoir was, as you might imagine, one of abject horror.
It’s such a juicily disgusting book that I assumed it’d be the subject of lots and lots of angry/funny dissertations but it seems like I’m the only person in the world who actually read the damn thing and lived to tell the tale.
I wondered how Diamond was able to live with himself after writing such an ugly, sleazy exercise in character assassination. Behind the Bell wasn’t a book so much as it’s a professional suicide attempt, an accidental bid to make Diamond so toxic that not even bottom-feeders would want him.
Diamond blamed the childhood-desecrating nastiness of Behind the Bell on a rogue ghostwriter who lived up to his profession by, in Diamond’s words at least, literally disappearing from his life after they spent some time together shooting the shit, only to subsequently publish a “memoir” for Diamond full of sentiments, scenarios and ideas that do not reflect Diamond’s actual views or experiences.
With no other choice, Diamond gave the Shaggy defense, arguing un-persuasively that all of the bile and ugliness and bitterness in Behind the Bell was the work of an anonymous ghostwriter with a grudge, not the man whose face and name are on the front of the book.
What the hell happened with the writing and publication of Behind the Bell? Did Diamond sit down with his ghostwriter for a weekend of drunken or stoned shit-talking, never imagining that that what he was saying would be treated as the objective truth and commemorated for posterity as Diamond’s factual account of his childhood and experiences on Saved by the Bell? Didn’t Diamond at least have to sign off on Behind the Bell before it went to print? Or did he just assume that whatever his ghost-writer came up with would be fine, and he didn’t have to waste his time reading his own memoir? What happened to the ghost-writer? What’s his story? We’ll probably never know.
Behind the Bell is so morally repugnant that I wondered if Diamond would ever be able to live it down. In a way he did and in a way he didn’t.
Diamond’s final years were troubled even by the exceedingly lenient standards of ex child stars. He stabbed a dude. He was in a prog rock band in Wisconsin for some reason. He beat the shit out of Horshack. He got involved in the celebrity sex tape industry. He was. a comedian, sort of.
Yet Diamond was also welcomed back into the Saved by the Bell fold even after all the horrible things he wrote about his former cast members.
When Diamond died of Cancer at 44 the very same cast-mates that the Celebrity Fit Club villain cruelly mocked in his ugly little book said kind and wonderful and gracious things about him as a man, a friend and an actor. They were able to see beyond the angry, hurt, bitter, broken man whose name is on that terrible, terrible tome to the scared, angry and confused child underneath.
Diamond’s cast-mates all seemed capable of forgiving him for Behind the Bell. To them it was just part of his story and their story, and not a part that particularly mattered.
Death is washing Diamond free of his sins and restoring him to a state of innocence, when he was still just a fresh faced kid who wanted to make people laugh and not a broken, belligerent has been intent on making the world, and particularly his former costars, feel his bottomless pain.
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