Today Buzzfeed reported that Shia not only plagiarized Dan Clowes in his short film, and Yahoo! Answers in his apology for plagiarizing Dan Clowes, he also plagiarized Charles Bukowski and several other writers in his original comics. And then he plagiarized Tiger Woods in his apology for plagiarizing Bukowski. Is Shia for real with all of this? Here at WWAC we take such questions very seriously.
Here are our Top Ten Shia Theories:
1) Trolling
Maybe, like so much on the internet, all the plagiarism and plagiapologies were just a social experiment.
2) Magnificent narcissist
Shia likes the attention. Shia likes Shia. In Shia’s world, Shia is incapable of plagiarism. All roads lead to and from Shia. All words are Shia’s words. It’s Shia’s world, and we’re just living (and plagiarizing him) in it.
3) New Age writing technique
Maybe we’re all being too cynical. Maybe. The thing is, maybe Shia is just wondrously opening his eyes to the new and exciting technique of subconscious total recall. Many famous plagiarists have tried it! Last week the WWAC staff got together and, as one, subconsciously recalled Moby Dick. No, that’s a lie. We’re still recalling it …
5) Evil clone
The real Shia was imprisoned by an evil clone from the future, who wants to destroy the joyous memories we all have of Transformers. In the future, Transformers is the the ONLY MOVIE, and our joyous memories have transformed into bitterness. Surely this can’t be the sum total of cinema? Of human creativity itself? But it is. The 66th US President president ordered a series of Shia clones to be sent back to various points in Shia time, hoping to derail his horrible future. This clone, Plagiaclone, is the most successful so far.
6) Died after Indiana Jones
Shia ceased to exist when he sucked SO HARD in Indiana Jones. What is left is a chatbot who has access to a higher end database to pull its responses from. They CGed him into movies after that which explains all the nononononononos.
7) Trollfaced Onionman
At first we thought, this is obvious! Shia is going to kill James Franco and assume his life, only to discover that Franco is a fraud too. But then we dug deeper. Or rather, we pulled the layers of misrepresentation back, one at a time, until we realized that Shia isn’t Shia at all. He’s the Trollfaced Onionman. Shia is Trollfaced Onionman, but so is James Franco. And so are so many others in Hollywood. Come on now, keep up. We unzip the trollfaced celebrities until there is nothing left but, at the very center, a small rotten onion.
8) Robot
An acting droid originally built by Disney and Michael Bay, SHIAmulacrum-01 is programmed to spout only unattributed Charles Bukowski and Esquire quotes and publish white boy vanity comics.
9) Illuminati
I think he raised a diamond that one time. The Illuminati doesn’t appreciate artsy comics.
10) Character in a Bret Easton Ellis Novel
Perhaps Shia LaBeouf is a living Bret Easton Ellis character, meant to tell us something about the narcissism and amoral vapidity of young Hollywood. After several fucking pages listing Transformers toys individually by year and make, and an entire chapter written in French (plagiarized, of course), Shia gives Twitter his best fauxpology yet: “In 1997 Daniel Clowes published Eightball, featuring his most accomplished story yet: Ghost World, a work so cynical and witty that most people probably don’t look at the art, but they should! LET’S FUCKING PARTY!”
Then he axes Jared Leto in the face and stars in a Lars Von Trier movie.
