A Personal Reflection on the Idea of Shia LaBeouf

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, a process which came to a head yesterday when a friend emailed me the story about Shia LaBeouf being all, “yeah, I did Megan Fox, and have no concern for what this dubious revelation may do to her invariably weird marriage.”

And that’s not even the point, right, it’s that her email just said, “it’s extraordinary to me how little I care about anything to do with this.”

There have been people in the history of humanity who one looks back on and thinks: perhaps this individual is from another time or planet, sent here to shape the course of human events. Because they’re too smart, or their origins are murky, or because they make connections between events that might otherwise have spun out for centuries: the great physicist Ed Witten, perhaps. Or Tocqueville.

But then there are individuals whose presence in our lives seems so inexplicable that there must be sinister design involved.

What I’m suggesting, essentially, is that Shia LaBeouf is a Pygmalion-esque gentlemen’s wager between Steven Spielberg and another party — probably George Lucas.

That, to be blunt, Steven Spielberg twisted his moustache and said, “I say, George. I warrant that I can take a young man, free of any discernible talent, possessing only the most basic level of physical attractiveness, and, by simply putting him in every single movie for a very long time, create a movie star.”

To which George Lucas said, “Steven, I shall take that wager, as a gentleman, and to show my commitment to the plan, I shall consent to have him in our new Indiana Jones moving picture.”

(If you’re not following this, an alternative viewpoint would be that Shia LaBeouf is “fetch,” Steven Spielberg is Lacey Chabert, and American audiences are “making it happen.” With their general admission dollars. Every day.)

Is Michael Bay a victim? Is Michael Bay a perpetrator? I don’t know.

The important thing is to ask these questions. Unless you’re Shia LaBeouf, but perhaps he’s smart enough to look at the career of Haley Joel Osment and keep his mouth shut.

What really happened to your hand, Shia?