TODAY IN EXISTENTIAL BUFFOONERY
Shia Labeouf recently left a Broadway production of Orphans over “creative differences” (the producers’ words), with co-star Alec Baldwin. Which wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy in itself, except that The Beef himself posted a bunch of inside-baseball emails between himself and the director, himself and Alec Baldwin, and himself and actor Tom Sturridge on his Twitter account, detailing just what went wrong.
Apparently, it was an “incompatibility” between LaBeouf and Baldwin that led to the departure. Now, I hesitate to paint Shia Labeouf with the “existential buffoon” label – a phenomenon we’re obviously quite fond of here – because having a personality that tends towards sensitive, overwrought, and dramatic is basically what makes actors good at their jobs. Still, I don’t what else to call it when a guy sends an apology email and prefaces it by quoting liberally from an Esquire essay called “How to Be a Man.”
Here’s Shia’s email to 72-year-old Orphans director Daniel Sullivan (which, again, was posted by Shia himself):
My dad was a drug dealer. He was a sh-t human. But he was a man. He taught me how to be a man. What I know of men, Alec is-
A man is good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not his career. His job.
A man can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, he makes you. From your suitcase, from your watch, from your posture. A man infers.
A man owns up. That’s why Mark McGwire is not a man. A man grasps his mistakes. He lays claim to who he is, and what he was, whether he likes them or not.
Some mistakes, though, he lets pass if no one notices. Like dropping the steak in the dirt.
He does not rely on rationalizations or explanations. He doesn’t winnow, winnow, winnow until truths can be humbly categorized, or intellectualized, until behavior can be written off with an explanation.
A man knows his tools and how to use them – just the ones he needs. Knows which saw is for what, how to find the stud.
A man does not know everything. He doesn’t try. He likes what other men know.
A man can tell you he was wrong. That he did wrong. That he planned to.
He can tell you when he is lost. He can apologize, even if sometimes it’s just to put an end to the bickering.
Alec, I’m sorry for my part of a dis-agreeable situation. – Shia. [transcription via Jezebel]
“Look, my dad may have been a piece of shit drug dealer, but at least he taught me that real men eat dirt steaks, unlike that pussy Mark McGwire.”
I’m not sure if it speaks better or worse of Shia that he stole the dumbest parts of that email from a printed pep rally for dipshit finance guys published in 2009 in Esquire. At least he didn’t write them himself? But he still thought they were worth repeating? Here’s the original:
A man is good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not his career. His job. It doesn’t matter what his job is, because if a man doesn’t like his job, he gets a new one.
A man can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, he makes you. From your suitcase, from your watch, from your posture. A man infers.
Oh God, all of the barfs. Only Esquire could print the equivalent of “A real bro judges other bros by their clothes and jewelry” and think it both profound and masculine. Puke me, Amadeus. Need blanket for douche chills.
A man owns up. That’s why Mark McGwire is not a man. A man grasps his mistakes. He lays claim to who he is, and what he was, whether he likes them or not.
Some mistakes, though, he lets pass if no one notices. Like dropping the steak in the dirt…
He does not rely on rationalizations or explanations. He doesn’t winnow, winnow, winnow until truths can be humbly categorized, or intellectualized, until behavior can be written off with an explanation…
A man knows his tools and how to use them – just the ones he needs. Knows which saw is for what, how to find the stud, when to use galvanized nails…
A man can tell you he was wrong. That he did wrong. That he planned to. He can tell you when he is lost. He can apologize, even if sometimes it’s just to put an end to the bickering.
Shia LaBeouf strikes me as the kind of guy who’d get coked up and fire off a hasty email while everything seems important and profound, in the way that coke makes everything feel important and profound (and most of us have probably done something equivalent, if less druggy or publicly). Taking a step back before you fire off an email to the whole world seems to be the main mistake to learn from here. But I think it also goes without saying that you shouldn’t be taking any tips on how to be “a man” FROM F*CKING ESQUIRE. And if you do, for the love of God, don’t tell anyone about it. It’s the tools leading the tool-y out here. We’re all so f*cked, you guys.
[via Jezebel, EntertainmentWeekly, Twitter]
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This production needed a little Peter Dante motivational speech to bring all these guys back on the same page and stop being Stage Bros.
Was it Details where the Beef claimed to have jumped a Taco Bell counter and wrecked a guy who talked shit to him and Megan Fox? Because what kind of a pathetic asshole is Shia to lie about that? And I’m 100% certain he was lying.
Where’s Bumblebee now, Shia? Dude is way more hardcore than his brother Suni.
/I’m all man. Gotta go not winnow.
And yet Mark McGwire has a job and Shia LaBeouf does not.
Shia’s accepting some of the blame because he knows that when you point a finger at someone, two more point back at you.
High 4.5 for that one.
I’m actually with Shia on this one, Alec’s personality just isn’t suited for the stage. Every time the curtains opened in rehearsal, Alec would flip his shit on the crew for not closing.
I totally buy Shia’s explanation, because there are only two places he’d get the idea that it’s a good idea to wear that sweater: either from someone out of their fucking mind on drugs, or Esquire magazine.
Lest how dumb of a magazine Esquire is get lost in the shuffle:
that how to be a man article was from a 2009 issue of Esquire which featured a three cover pages with head shots of Obama, Clooney and Timberlake with perforations to separate the eyes, nose and mouth sections, so you could mix and match them, A type of game I have only ever seen in books for small children. [www.esquire.com]
A man picks his nose and wipes the boogers under various seats, never tells another soul, and carries the secret locations of these boogers to his grave.
A man stands up when he pees, and sometimes in public restrooms, when he pees in a toilet that another man has spattered shit all over the bowl above the waterline, will direct his urine stream at the shit and blast it off and pretend he is playing the video game Asteroids.
Are we not men?!
+1
A man accompanies his woman to the grocery store, and bites his upper lip and grunts silently when he sees other women with nice asses walking around wearing yoga pants in the produce section.
If in the presence of another bro- I mean man, a man may also make various ribald comparisons of women’s body parts to produce.
A man knows that the foreign looking kid at the computer store is talking down to him, but he doesn’t get confrontational. He waits until he gets home to tell his wife about the sweaty little hodgie at down at the mall who thinks all old people are too stupid to work a fucking cell phone with one button.
So what I got out of this is that Tom Chiarella is a drug-dealing, sack of shit human being who writes for Esquire and knocked up the sexiest woman Shia Labouef has ever met? Sounds legit.
That Esquire article reads like a deleted monologue from Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I’m going to go ahead and guess it was required by Oliver Stone as research reading for every male actor.
Why does everyone shit on the singer of Sugar Ray?
A man doesn’t winnow until behavior can be written off with an explanation. A man expects you to understand that maybe he was banging your sister simply because she was there. A man wants to know when dinner will be ready, and likes that the chili tastes salty because of your tears.
Shia LeBeouf strikes me as the kind of guy who would say to his assistant, “I need to quit this play. Write me a classy series of resignation emails.” And Shia LeBeouf’s assistant strikes me as the kind of guy who would copy an old Esquire article, then give it to his boss and say “Here you go, fuckface,” under his breath.
“A man is good at his job. Not his work” Because they’re obviously two different things.
Example: “I’m a kick ass doctor. I’m just not so great at setting bones or giving colonoscopies.”
I know girls that still harbor crushes on this dickhead.
There have been plenty of times where I’ve wanted to slap said girls multiple times until they got some sense and recognized who a real man is.
His name is Ryan Gosling.
Danny Trejo would also be an acceptable response.
A Man knows what the woman in his life needs, things like “emotional connection”, “respect”, and “praise”. These things a Man hoards, only giving them as a form of currency in exhange for sexual gratification.
A Man never shows affection for his Father. Lord knows the old Son of a B*tch never did. A Man knows he can never really be a Man until his Father is dead, and the arrival of the blessed day is to be coveted, if not hastened.
Though a Man must be hard, he must also have some measurable amount pity for those genders and races weaker than he.
But he must never, ever let them see it.
So the only specific complaint about the piece is that men shouldn’t judge how other men dress, and their posture? Actually, you said “judge,” he said “infers.” It’s true. It may not be “profound,” but the distinction was subtle enough to get lost on a talented internet film critic.
That was more one small aside from a general critique about how lame articles defining “a man” are. I don’t care if he said judge or infer, the fact that other men’s outfits and jewelry enter into the discussion of what a man is is pretty hilarious. The entire gesture is bankrupt. If you are going to write it, bullet point one should have been “A man doesn’t read about what a man is in a men’s magazine because he has better things to do.”
Ah, now the dig on reading a men’s magazine is on target. But judging a man’s dress and posture is what people do. Everyone. It’s just rational.
Are ALL articles that attempt to define what “a man” is lame? It seems that you’re put off by the very idea of exploring the topic. That accepting the notion that one can “behave like a man” risks plunging society through a vortex back to the 1950s. I don’t think that concern is valid. It’s a cool topic. Real men are pretty damn cool.
“But judging a man’s dress and posture is what people do. Everyone. It’s just rational.”
Fair, and true, but saying “this is what a man does because men” is stupid. “Men trust their intuition” might’ve been a better way to say that. And is that really limited to men? But yes, you are correcting in assuming that I do have a problem with just about any article trying to define what “a man” is. Not necessarily in a political way, I just think it’s not very interesting. If you write specifically about a particular man and why he’s such a man (Charles Bronson, say), that would be vastly more compelling to me. I just find specifics more interesting than broad, weird generalities, like how a man doesn’t get upset if someone drops his steak on the ground.
The steak? Yeah, that was a weird one. A few others. But plenty of them seemed to ID traits of quiet, responsible men. I guess that’s what made it popular. In an age when more and more men feel free to express the shit out of themselves, but fewer and fewer take on adult responsibilites, it’s kind of rare to see an unapologetic ode to the strong, silent type. I also think it’s OK for society to have a generally agreed upon criteria for what a decent, responsible, um, stoic? man is. Good traits should be encouraged. Maybe that’s why I found it interesting, because it was so rare.
“The Beef.” Is that his new nickname from now on?
I have also heard someone call him Shia LeDouche.
As role models go, Shia LaBeouf could have done a lot worse than pick Jaqen H’ghar.
Thank you, I was waiting to read this line: “Only Esquire could print the equivalent of “A real bro judges other bros by their clothes and jewelry” and think it both profound and masculine.”
I wonder what the original Esquire author would infer from Guy Fieri’s clothes.