Writing about Megan Fox as the modern-day Marilyn Monroe, as in, finding elaborate ways to say “people are interested in her because she’s pretty,” is already pretty passé at this point, so if you’re going to do it, you better pontificate, hard. And Esquire’s Stephen Marche doesn’t disappoint in his new profile of Fox, piling on some of the most embarrassingly flowery prose you’ll read outside of North Korea’s propaganda department. But hey, if you’re going to publish a seven-page photospread of Megan Fox in a fancy magazine, you’ll need some lorem ipsum text to go underneath, and Stephen Marche has got you covered. He starts – STARTS – by tricking Megan Fox into agreeing with his metaphor about Aztec human sacrifice.

Deep in her house, Megan Fox and I are discussing human sacrifice. I tell her about an Aztec ritual practiced five hundred years ago in ancient Mexico during the feast of Toxcatl, when the Aztecs picked a perfect youth to live among them as a god. He was a paragon, beautiful and fit and healthy, with ideal proportions.

Fox has been telling me about the toll that celebrity has taken on her, how the only way to keep from bending to the outside is to bend within. [...]

The sacrifice’s year was filled with constant delight, I tell her. He danced through the streets adorned in luxurious clothes given to him by the master, decked in flowers and incense, playing magical flutes that brought prosperity to the whole world. He had eight servants and four virgins to attend to his every need, and could wander wherever he pleased. But at the end of the year, when the feast of Toxcatl came around again, the perfect youth had to smash his flutes and climb the stairs of the great temple, where the priests would cut out his heart and offer it, still beating, to the sun.

Megan Fox is not an ancient Aztec…

Phew, for a second there, I was worried this magazine profile was a time warp. I almost punched a Mexican dude in self defense. “WHO DOES META WORK PHOR?!”

...She’s a screen saver on a teenage boy’s laptop, a middle-aged lawyer’s shower fantasy, a sexual prop used to sell movies and jeans.

“It’s so similar. It totally is,” she says quietly.

“She sat for a moment in reverent silence, awed into a fugue state by the validity of my overwrought metaphor.”

Poor actors. Their “yes-and” improv training leaves them vulnerable to invasion by thought parasites like this, like domesticated beasts bred for their gullibility. Please, elaborate on this hokey parallel, Megan Fox, reall make it your own:

“I don’t think people understand,” she says. “They all think we should shut the f*ck up and stop complaining because you live in a big house or you drive a Bentley. So your life must be so great. What people don’t realize is that fame, whatever your worst experience in high school, when you were being bullied by those ten kids in high school, fame is that, but on a global scale, where you’re being bullied by millions of people constantly.”

At the end of the year, the beautiful youth had to go up by himself. He had to go up willingly. That was part of the deal.

Now she is shaking her head. “Not everyone understands that that’s the deal,” she says.

Megan Fox will not go willingly to have her heart cut out.

They say the shamanistic priest-kings of Toxcatl would cut out your heart and kick your body down the traditional stepped pyramids of the triple alliance, where, hitting bottom, your quivering young breasts would be poked and ogled by Leslie Mann. “Yer so f*ckin’ young!” she’d scream.

Don’t want to melvin this guy yet? Just wait.

The symmetry of her face, up close, is genuinely shocking. The lip on the left curves exactly the same way as the lip on the right. The eyes match exactly. The brow is in perfect balance, like a problem of logic, like a visual labyrinth. It’s not really even that beautiful. It’s closer to the sublime, a force of nature, the patterns of waves crisscrossing a lake, snow avalanching down the side of a mountain, an elaborately camouflaged butterfly. What she is is flawless. There is absolutely nothing wrong with her.

If it’s in perfect balance, how is that a problem of logic? That would be a solution of logic, wouldn’t it? Schrödinger’s Pussy, say. And this… visual labyrinth… what of David Bowie? Are her sublime nostrils Jareth the Goblin King? Her oft-parted lips the farting river?

Megan Fox is a bombshell. To be a bombshell in 2013 is to be an antiquity, an old-world relic, like movie palaces or fountain pens or the muscle cars of the 1970s or the pinball machines in the basement. Bombshells once used to roam the cultural landscape like buffalo, and like buffalo they were edging toward extinction.

Like the buffalo, Indians famously used every part of the bombshell, including fashioning elaborately-beaded yarmulkas from the boob skin; talismen from false eyelashes.

Liberation and degradation both played their part. If you want to see naked women, of virtually any kind, do virtually anything to their bodies, it’s a click away. And women no longer need to be beautiful in order to express their talent. Lena Dunham and Adele and Lady Gaga and Amy Adams are all perfectly plain, and they are all at the top of their field.

Those women are plain, huh? And what do you look like there, Clooney? Did your peyronie’s dick ever keep you from getting writing assignments? It’s amazing what women are doing with talent and less-than-sublime-avalanches-of-beauty these days.

It’s not Johansson’s fault. Today, unfettered sexual beauty is an impediment. To be serious and respected, it is better to be homely or cute. Or else you must disfigure yourself, like Charlize Theron in Monster. Or you must allow yourself to be brutalized, like Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball. Or you must pretend that you’re really just average, like Tina Fey.
There’s no doubt that this transformation has been overwhelmingly excellent. But we’re losing something in this process. Because creativity is, was, and always will be sexual. Some of the very first works of art were figures of hugely fecund women dropped all over Europe tens of thousands of years ago. American movies expressed that great fusion of sex and art, too. They are magnificent pagan dreams, utterly profane and glorious. Such movies need bombshells. They need to consume beautiful flesh in their sacrifices. They need women like Megan Fox.

Okay, not even you know what you’re talking about anymore. Just stop. My bile duct is feeling all bulbous and fecund.

Megan Fox doesn’t particularly want to be famous anymore. Her agent has to beg her to read scripts or do magazine shoots [like this one] so she isn’t lost or forgotten. Her body, her perfectly symmetrical bombshell body, is what makes money and pays her bills, she knows that. She may want to forget about it, but she can’t give it up entirely. Instead she escapes.

Aw, finally, the rub. Too bad that paragraph isn’t long enough to make an entire article. Okay, time to go completely off the rails one last time. Really fill some space with pontiforescent bloviaverousness.

She would much rather be an archeologist exploring the ancient ruins of Israel and Egypt. “I feel like there’s stuff literally buried there and buried where the Maya were,” she says. Ancient aliens who gave rise to ancient civilizations on earth. “I would like to uncover the secrets of the universe. In my fantasy.”

:-|

Megan Fox, the last American bombshell, guides me up the stairs. On the way out, I notice something I hadn’t seen on the way down. In the hallway sits a tall pedestal topped by a red-and-gold Byzantine icon of a crucified Christ and rows of white candles. The candles are usually lit, she tells me, before she leaves to go upstairs to take care of her newborn son.

His name is Noah. In the ancient story of the flood, Noah and his family are the only ones who escape the general destruction of the corrupt world.

Aw, the inevitable Bible metaphor. What would aimless storytelling be without it? Good thing Megan Fox named her son something biblical. It would’ve been much tougher making the flood allusion work if she’d gone with “Braden.”