Greg Stewart is a film and television producer based out of Toronto. His most recent production was the HBO series Telemarketers.
The new documentary Slauson Rec follows the rise and fall of Shia LaBeouf’s defunct experimental theater company, which was based at the James Slauson Recreation Center in Compton, California. LaBeouf’s effort to build a creative family while enriching the local community quickly veered into chaos. According to Variety, the film documents “a descent into ego-driven insanity, complete with physical violence and harrowing screaming matches.” LaBeouf reportedly goads one actor into a fistfight and, on another occasion, slams someone against a wall.
One might expect LaBeouf to be filing a lawsuit to prevent the film’s release. Quite the contrary. LaBeouf introduced the film at its premiere in Cannes last month, noting, amongst other things, that the screening would be his first time seeing the movie.
“I think, at heart, I’m a good guy,” he said, “Am I fucked up? Yes. Is my process ugly and disgusting? Yes. Have I done horrible shit in the past that I’m going to have to make amends for the rest of my life? Yes.”
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In recent years, when one thinks of artists who have made “ugly and disgusting” work and need to make amends, the first name to come up will likely be Ye (né Kanye West). Almost certainly so in the aftermath of his notorious recent single, “Heil Hitler.”
The reaction to that song, as one might guess, was swift. The top music streaming and social media platforms all banned it, with the notable exception of X. There, the video has over 10 million views and seems to be on course to become the most viewed video of any sort in the history of the site.
ChatGPT summarizes the mainstream media consensus: “Kanye West’s controversial song titled ‘Heil Hitler’ glorifies Adolf Hitler and has faced widespread condemnation for its antisemitic content.”
Ye is a confirmed antisemite and has, in fact, spoken positively about Hitler. This song, however, doesn’t have a single lyric about Jewish people; its ostensible glorification of Adolph Hitler is limited to the titular phrase, and every time the phrase is used, Ye pairs it with the word “n*gga.” The video, meanwhile, consists of a group of Black men in pelts and masks chanting in a block formation. It is ritualistic, defiant and culturally coded.
One might have suggested that embedding Nazism in a distinctly Black context debilitates or at least subverts its power, but this is not a conversation that the public sphere was in the least bit interested in having. I struggled to find a single article or social media comment that attempted to step beyond simplistic declarations and address the meaning of the song. People made their points, but did they actually listen to the song?
The meaning of “Heil Hitler” is, in fact, articulated explicitly in its lyrics, which recast Ye’s years of hateful speech. Ye says that he is unable to effectively express his feelings, primarily his deep frustration with not being able to see his children. “I got so much anger in me / Got no way to take it out,” he sings, “N*ggas see my Twitter / But don’t see how I be feeling / So I become a Nazi / Yeah bitch, I’m the villain.”
The message isn’t hidden. Shouting a taboo, a symbol of murderous hatred, is the closest Ye can come to expressing his rage. He is telling us that he is desperate to find a way to tell the world to fuck off, and by God, he’s done it. The song is simultaneously an attempt to be seen and understood and an extreme act of provocation that he knows can only lead to further rejection and ostracization.
Shia LaBeouf has his issues. Looking for a way to tell the world “Fuck off” doesn’t appear to be one of them. He knows that he’s flawed, and he wants the world to see it.
As a documentary producer, I’m disheartened, if not surprised, that every celebrity documentary in recent years is controlled by that celebrity. Dont Look Back (Bob Dylan), Gimme Shelter (the Rolling Stones), The Carter (Lil Wayne) and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work are all masterpieces of the form, and they have no contemporary equivalents.
They are two rarities: Ye, deliberately cultivating a villainous persona; and LaBeouf, seemingly rejecting modern image-control altogether.
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This is not an anti-censorship screed. If Spotify didn’t ban Ye’s “Heil Hitler,” how could they justify banning less morally complex Hitler songs? I don’t want the whole world to become 4Chan.
What I have a problem with is the desertion of art as a subject worth considering in our collective conversation. What’s the song about? People simply do not care. It’s not that they refuse on principle to give Ye the attention he so clearly craves. Rather, the song was immediately commoditized into fuel for the culture war fire. Every gesture is flattened and weaponized in the chatterverse that the Internet provokes. My side (perfect) / their side (evil).
You might think that a discourse so eager for extremes would be exciting. Perhaps it was briefly; now it is a source of unending banality. There has been a strange convergence between outrage culture and the algorithmification of our brains in the vein of Spotify or Netflix. Whether through outrage or through comfort, our dopamine is released by an endless flood of mediocrity.
Add to this situation the new censorship. Once the realm of formal authority, the role of idea suppression has been taken on by the people, all too often from the artistic community itself. The art critic Dean Kissick delightfully coined our artistic era “the long 2017” – an extended reaction to the rise of Donald Trump smothering culture with moralism, navel-gazing, and conformity.
The cost of this smothering has been profound. Politically, it would be hard to overstate the magnitude of the online left’s failure to achieve its goals. In no small part due to a backlash against it, we live under a regime that is actively setting social policy back 30, 60, maybe 100 years.
But the damage is creative as well. What art “matters” today? The golden age of prestige TV is long since over; the musical conversation is fixated on hyper-produced pop; I can’t remember the last painter, sculpture, or museum exhibit that so much as grazed the mainstream; no one watches the Oscars – indeed, barely anyone goes to the movies at all. Meanwhile, about two out of every three Broadway musicals released the past 10 years have been adaptations of movies and music from more fertile times. With due and sincere respect to the hundreds of artist contributors to this site who are far more creatively talented than I, does anyone believe the past decade produced a body of culturally lasting work in any field?
In video games, maybe? Or perhaps art historians of the future will find greatness within the explosion of folk art that is meme culture and TikTok. In other words, to the extent that things are happening, they are happening in the areas with the fewest gatekeepers and the youngest audience. The areas least susceptible to pressure.
Will these new art forms monopolize the future? Are we ready to accept all of the creative fields rooted over centuries being swept into the dustbins of history? Indeed, will we midwife their irrelevance through a combination of fear and exaggerated civility?
The way to reject the moral scolding and ambient pull toward moderation that dominates the arts community is not to nibble around the edges. It is to reject it as clearly as possible. We desperately need subversive art. We can’t cede the mantle of transgression solely to the President of the United States. In an era of irresistible change, to do so is to surrender.
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I am not a teenager who equates bad behavior and ideological transgression. LaBeouf’s history of violence is inexcusable. Ye traffics in misogyny, threatens and manipulates, and is in a marriage that appears from the outside to be cruel and coercive. Most importantly, he is by far the most famous American to be openly bigoted in more than 50 years. He has broken ground that hurts society. He has created hatred. His past actions, including naked antisemitism (e.g. “I DON’T LIKE OR TRUST ANY JEWISH PERSON”) and association with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, make a simplistic reading of “Heil Hitler” very easy to make. My reader might suspect that I have picked quite the wrong hill to die on.
Whether one should separate the art from the artist is a very old debate, and like most old debates, it has long since calcified. In a recent post on his Red Hand Files, though, the musician Nick Cave offered an unfamiliar take. Addressing friends and fans dismayed by his public appreciation of Ye’s music, Cave wrote:
The idea of an artist being divorced from their art is absurd. An artist and their art are fundamentally intertwined because art is the essence of the artist made manifest. The artist’s work proclaims, “This is me. I am here. This is what I am.” … The great gift of art is the potential for the artist to excavate their interior chaos and transform it into something sublime. This is what Ye does. This is what I strive to do, and this is the enterprise undertaken by all genuine artists.
In this sense, Ye – mentally ill, at the center of celebrity culture, and dumbfoundingly narcissistic – may be uniquely suited to reflect our era back at us.
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While LaBeouf may be seeking to make amends, we can safely say that the online ecosystem’s reaction will not be absolution.
“When this thing comes out,” he said, “It isn’t any worse than what’s been said about me previously. Maybe it reifies people’s ideas about me.”
I looked up “reify” in the dictionary. It means “to give definite content and form to a concept or idea.” LaBeouf recognizes that people seeing his behavior will have a visceral impact that reading about it does not. The status of his career is already precarious. He is perceived as a risk to work with, and a civil lawsuit accusing him of sexual battery, assault, and emotional distress is going to trial in September.
Why then, is he promoting the film?
“While my teaching methods may be unconventional for some,” he said, “I am proud of the incredible accomplishments that these kids (in the Slauson Rec Company) achieved… Does this movie change any of (the things I have done)? No. Does it also allow my people to get a foot into this fucking industry? Yes. So gas pedal down, green light go.”
In other words, he’s doing it to promote fellow artists. He’s doing it because he believes in the importance of art.
Who is going to care?
