Is Shia LaBoeuf more important than Meryl Streep?
Why we should be paying attention to the actor’s live-stream art project
On the morning of Donald Trump’s inauguration, actor Shia LaBeouf announced he was launching yet another live-stream video art installation. LaBeouf had previously set up a camera in a New York City movie theatre that filmed his face as he watched each one of his films in reverse-chronological order.
The new project, which LaBeouf created with Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner, is called He Will Not Divide Us. (LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner were behind the previous live-stream project, too.) It consists entirely of a single wall-mounted camera next to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens that will livestream for the duration of Trump’s term.
In the early hours of the project, the camera captured Jaden Smith repeating the phrase “He will not divide us” over and over. As people gathered at the camera during the day to join in, the words were at times morphed into loud chants, songs, or whispers.
Then some Nazis turned up.
A day after the livestream launched, a young man wearing what looked like an SS field cap appeared on camera and uttered “1488” over and over again. The numerical phrase is considered shorthand for two white supremacist slogans. LaBeouf confronted the man, shouting “He will not divide us!” into his face in an effort to drown him out.
Four days later, LaBeouf was arrested following a confrontation which an unofficial Twitter account for the exhibit described as a fight with a Nazi. “For those of you who don’t know what happened. Shia was attacked by a nazi,” the Twitter account said. “Shia got arrested. Nazi got away. #FreeShia”.
But in the long hours between those high-profile dust-ups, the camera has captured something else, too — not Nazis, but Trump supporters, venting.
In the early hours of January 23, a Facebook page called Uncle Tony Redpill went live and three videos were uploaded. In each one, two men are seen interrupting the quiet chanting of “He will not divide us” with loud proclamations of love for Donald Trump.
The men’s names are Uncle Tony Redpill and Greg the Greek.
The “Redpill”, by the way, is a reference to a scene in the Matrix where Neo is asked to decide whether to take a blue pill or red pill — the latter being the one that will allow him to awaken to the ‘real’ world — that has since been co-opted by the men’s rights movement as a metaphor for their awakening to their persecution by a feminist/liberal/politically correct society.
For the last week or so, the duo have filled their Facebook page — adorned with their own slogan, ‘Old School Astoria’ — with videos and live-streams of their pro-Trump and anti-liberal diatribes.
It only took four days before mega-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (and Trump friend) to pick up on the duo. On January 27, he shared one of their videos on his Facebook page. “Video footage from Shia LeBeouf’s [sic] infamous ‘he will not divide us’ live stream shows old school New Yorkers laying the smack down on libtard logic,” Jones wrote. The video was shared from there again over two thousand more times.
“The moment you want to start saying ‘he will not divide us’ you’re going against your own country… What is this bullshit, man?” Greg the Greek asks the livestream camera in the video Jones shared.
“I got a message for Chelsea Handler, you dirty drunken whore” Uncle Tony pipes up. “How dare you insult our first lady? … And Madonna, you’re a whore… You should be in jail for threatening to blow up the White House, you stupid bitch. Yeah, and oh, George Clooney, Mr. Let’s Be Tolerant. — ”
“We’ll stick some cigars up your ass, Clooney!” Greg yells over his shoulder.
“Yeah, when they said they were sending Syrian refugees to your place in Italy, to your neighbourhood, you had a shit fit, huh? Why don’t you open your door and let them in, bro?” Uncle Tony continues. “And Shia, too bad you didn’t go to central booking last night to get your butt cheeks divided… Things are going to change in our country for the better, and most of you people that are against [Trump], you’re going to end up loving him and worshipping him, the way I loved Ronald Reagan.”
Toward the end of the video, Uncle Tony and Greg lead a small crew of younger men in a “Trump! Trump! Trump!” chant.
“We love you, President Trump. We love you President Trump,” Uncle Tony says. “All you dirty libtard pigs of Hollywood, you can all suck it, all of you.”
The video ends.
“Horrible examples of art Bolshevism have been brought to my attention,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in June, 1936. “I want to arrange an exhibit in Berlin of art from the period of degeneracy. So that people can see and learn to recognize it.” Just over a year later the Degenerate Art Exhibition premiered in Munich, featuring hundreds of works the Nazis had collected in the interim from museums all over Germany.
Donald Trump is not Joseph Goebbels. His disdain for, and mockery of, art or artists has usually been limited to reaction against perceived slights on his own ego; it’s not an ideological attack built around a cohesive vision for what art should or should not look like, generally.
But the Degenerate Art show wasn’t just about ridiculing Weimar-era modernist art, or getting visitors to hate certain artists, specifically. It wasn’t even about what offended Adolf Hitler (though he did hate modernism).
It was about more than that.
“Carola Roth, a friend of the artist Max Beckmann, noted how while older visitors went round the exhibition shaking their heads, young Party activists and brownshirts laughed and jeered at the exhibits,” Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich in Power. “The atmosphere of hatred and loudmouthed ridicule allowed no dissent; indeed it was an essential part of the exhibition itself, turning it into yet another mass propaganda exercise for the regime. Like much else in Nazi culture, it allowed ordinary conservative citizens the opportunity to voice out loud prejudices that they had long held but previously been hesitant to reveal.”
“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” Meryl Streep said during a speech at the Golden Globes in January.
This is the real threat Donald Trump represents — not authoritarian, but existential.
His attacks on women, refugees, people of colour, people with disabilities, or on artists, are symptomatic of the deeper, underlying threat against what something like art often tries to establish: a more tolerant, open, and thoughtful society.
The threat that Trump presents is the idea that as long as you back the winning side, the rules no longer apply to you — that established norms not only can be forgotten, but should be.
This is why the casual sexism and misogyny, as well as the instant idolatry, exhibited by Uncle Tony and Greg the Greek should be as disturbing as the coded language of a shit-disturbing Nazi.
For, Tony and Greg didn’t spend the bulk of their time talking about jobs or the economy or national security. When given the opportunity to speak their minds, they took aim at the people who represent elements of modern culture they disagree with and suggested they ought to be silenced and punished for it, no questions asked. Because their guy won.
It’s even why Shia’s own actions, including his arrest, are important to note. Whether he meant them to or not, they prompt questions about what it takes to enforce or defend the society we have.
Taken purely at face value, the slogan ‘He Will Not Divide Us’ seems trivial, or at best naive in the present day. It even might seem as though the verbal arguments that have occurred in front of the camera have undermined the message. But that’s only if you think division means the sight of two people disagreeing.
Real division, not just of competing thoughts or world views, but between those who want to destroy accepted societal ideals — the behaviour that dictates our lives, and the rules we have created to enforce it — and those who seek to uphold them, occurs at a much deeper level.
That is where LaBeouf, Rönkkö, and Turner’s message is aimed.
Meryl Streep was widely celebrated by liberals for much of what she said during her Golden Globes speech. The rebuke she received via Twitter from Trump himself — calling her “over-rated” — seemed to validate her words all the more.
But there is an old axiom that it is better to show than tell. LaBeouf, not Streep, is the one doing that.
This piece was corrected to specify that He Will Not Divide Us is a project created by LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner, not just Shia LaBeouf.
Colin Horgan is a journalist and writer in Toronto.
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