Shia LaBeouf vs 4Chan: the depressing story of ‘He Will Not Divide Us’
Never has there been a more perfectly loathesome “I just hope they both lose” situation.
In one corner, we have insufferable Hollywood asshat and alleged domestic abuser Shia LaBeouf, the ultimate “former child star” in all the most cringe-inducing ways and a man driven so mad by the desire to be taken seriously that he never, ever will be.
In the other corner, we have 4Chan. The online message board is essentially the petri dish from which a surprising amount of the world’s evils have come. When QAnon might not be the most damaging thing a website has done to the world, you know something’s terribly wrong.
It takes one hell of an opponent to make people root for The Beef in any dispute, but at least before FKA Twigs detailed the fresh hell it was living with him, 4Chan made the star of Even Stevens and Transformers look like the good guy. The trouble was that it started with an artistic stunt that, and he really would need to get used to this, made Labeouf look like an insufferably pretentious Hollywood lib. It’s name? He Will Not Divide Us.
In the beginning, the project was actually pretty inspiring. At least to a world still clinging on to its vision of Obama-era optimism despite 45 (the “He” who was, in fact, dividing us) recently taking office. On the day Donald Trump was inaugurated, January 20th, 2017, LaBeouf’s performance art collective LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner set up a camera outside the Museum of Moving Image in New York City. The camera would stream for the next four years and was pointed at a sign bearing the name of the piece of art, and people were invited to step up to the camera and repeat its name into it.
Christ, we were optimistic back then, weren’t we?
How did this project go wrong for LaBeouf?
Within days, everything went wrong.
The camera started to be targeted by trolls, racists, Nazis, all manner of scum and villainy who’d find the camera and say whatever horrific thing they wanted to into it. All in the name of the president. It took five days for LaBeouf himself to get arrested for assaulting a 25-year-old man who said “Hitler did nothing wrong” into the camera. The things you have to say to get people to root for Shia LaBeouf, my God.
On February 10th, the Museum of Moving Image put its foot down. The scuffles and violence around the project were happening multiple times a day, and they demanded that the project be removed from their site. LaBeouf and his troupe acquiesced, moving the project to outside the El Rey theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was moved again within days due to gunshots being picked up by the camera, this time to a mystery location with nothing else in the stream other than the sky and a flag bearing the name of the project.
This is where 4Chan came in. By analysing the chemtrails of passing flights, the stars in the night sky, and a tweet that LaBeouf had posted from a diner in Tennessee, the location was found to be Greenville, Tennessee. Within hours, trolls had found the camera, taken down the flag and replaced it with a MAGA hat. At first, the project attempted to continue broadcasting nothing but the empty flagpole, but then more trolls set fire to the field the flagpole was in, and the search for a new venue was on.
LaBeouf and his team reasoned that the States was too dangerous for the project to continue and thus, the project travelled to Europe. Being shown in Liverpool, England, Nantes, France, Łódź, Poland and finally Paris, where, shockingly, the project saw out the rest of Trump’s (tragically) first term, the stream went offline the moment Joe Biden was sworn in as president.
An honourable project, sure. One whose existence did show something vitally important, but not what its creators would have wanted. He divided us then, and depressingly, still does today. While he may go away, sooner rather than later, it seems, the people he’s energised will not. We will always be divided from his maniacal followers, and we will not be able to reason with them or convince them they’re wrong.
However, just as this project had to weather a storm to continue, so will we.