“How To Be A Jerk”

Actor Shia LaBeouf has two impressive achievements, neither anything to be proud of, but impressive nonetheless. In a showdown with World Champion Hollywood creep Alec Baldwin, LaBeouf, against all odds. managed to come off as the bigger jerk. In the process, he created, or at least gave unprecedented publicity to a new ethical transgression: Twitter plagiarism.

You will recall LaBeouf, if you recall him at all, as the former Disney Channel child star who had movie hits with “Disturbia” and the “Transformers” franchise, as well as gaining a form of lasting notoriety as Indiana Jones’ son in the fourth and lamest installment of that classic series. He also has established a reputation for being trouble, and this week it was revealed that he had been fired (the old “artistic differences” excuse) from what was supposed to be his Broadway debut in the new play “Orphans,” starring Baldwin. The exact reasons are unclear, but incompatibility with Baldwin was part of it.

How do I know that LaBeouf, rather than the famously volatile Baldwin was at fault? Simple, really. Baldwin is the show’s star; he has theater credentials; he’s an established pro. It is part of LaBeouf’s job to get along with him, not the other way around. He could also learn something from Baldwin, who, though it seems hard to imagine, was once an even bigger jerk than he is now—so big, that at one point his career had gone from losing the Jack Ryan franchise (to Harrison Ford) to playing the conductor in the sad and awful movie version of “Thomas the Tank Engine.” Baldwin knows where Shia is headed, and could help stop him from going there.

In the wake of his canning, LaBeouf took to his Twitter feed and posted various e-mails leading up to his fate. One of them was erudite and almost poetic:

“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.”

Hey! Jerk or not, this guy can write! He has a brain!

Well, no, not really: he has a computer, and can cut and paste. His words were lifted from Tom Chiarella’s essay in Esquire, “How To Be A Man.”

Responding to the unattributed theft of his words, the author wrote…

“What can I say? Am I outraged? Of course not. It actually makes me happy that my words were some succor to the kid, that he found them wise enough (or high enough on the Google search, anyway) to foist them off as his own. Any writer wants to be read, remembered, considered. A late-night e-mail, double-spaced, vaguely bullet-pointed — this too is a kind of literary memory, I guess, especially when you leak it on Twitter to evince a magnanimous self.

“And in a clip-and-paste universe, words are stolen like Splenda packets from a deli full of old ladies. One of my students once turned in to me an article that I had written, without a single word changed, nor — of course — attribution. In the next class, I crossed out the student’s name, wrote “By me!” at the top, and handed it back. As I glanced at the kid like she was crazy, she cringed and said, “I didn’t know.” I think she meant it to explain everything, the whole world of what she had yet to learn. I had to get her laughing about it. And when I did, I had to give her an F.

“I can’t really do that to Shia LaBeouf. It’s not a fail. What he said was different; his assertion (the only one that was really his) was about knowledge, not ignorance. What he said was, “What I know of men.” In some way, this at least implies that he learned all that followed somewhere. From me! From Google! From, as he ambiguously implies, his drug-dealer father! From a magazine article he read on a plane hanging over some ocean almost four years ago! In a lot of ways, that’s just fine by me — to have informed the (apparently emergent) manhood of a young guy, caught in a spat with an old guy who intimidates even me. I’m glad the words worked. As a man, I like that feeling. But I also like royalty checks directed to my little house in Indiana, as I’m sure LaBeouf likes getting royalty checks every time he farts. Any man could see that. But over time a man learns: Hope has its limits.”

Pretty magnanimous, that. I think I like Tom Chiarella.

I’m not so sure about Shia LaBeouf.

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Facts: New York Times

Sources: Esquire 1, 2

Graphic: Shias Laboeuf