Actor Shia LaBeouf (whose name is pronounced “Horrible Person”) has apologized for extensively plagiarizing the work of graphic novelist Dan Clowes.

LaBeouf made a short film, Howard Cantour, that utterly copies Clowes’s comic Justin M. Damiano. Buzzfeed, which broke the story, quotes Clowes: “I saw that he took the script and even many of the visuals from a very personal story I did six or seven years ago and passed it off as his own work. I actually can’t imagine what was going through his mind.” Even the opening narration is identical: “A critic is a warrior, and each of us on the battlefield have the means to glorify or demolish (whether a film, a career, or an entire philosophy) by influencing perception in ways that if heartfelt and truthful, can have far-reaching repercussions.”

The film is no longer online. Except at Buzzfeed.

Last night, a few hours after the story broke, LaBeouf apologized in a series of tweets. (Read the whole sequence at Buzzfeed.) He starts off saying, “Copying isn’t particularly creative work. Being inspired by someone else’s idea to produce something new and different IS creative work.” Unfortunately, he copied that, nearly verbatim, from a Yahoo Answers user named Lili. And he wasn’t “inspired by someone else’s idea”; HE COPIED CLOWES’S WORDS AND IMAGES EXACTLY. Not owning your sin is not apologizing well.

LaBeouf went on to tweet:

Yes, you are just a wee babe in the woods, Shia, innocently clueless about how to make fire or use ethics. Or accreditation. Like any true artist, like any true HUMAN with no experience in the entertainment industry who has only directed four previous films and written three in addition to starring in multiple blockbusters, you couldn’t possibly know that calling yourself the producer and director of Howard Cantour but not taking a writer’s credit on the film, or indeed, crediting anyone with the script, would seem a little fishy to your equally naive fellow outsiders. Or insiders. Or people with ethics. Because we know how it feels to lose oneself in the creative process and get swept away in the tide of ART, man! It’s like the way Bernard Madoff got swept away in the joy of finance! Or the way Ed Gein got swept up in the joy of making lampshades out of human skin!

Transformer LaBeouf

Before concluding, “I fucked up” (the only part of his apology that’s actually decent), LaBeouf continued:

I deeply regret the manner in which these events have unfolded and want @danielclowes to know that I have a great respect for his work

Please. Stop.

“Deeply regret the manner in which these events have unfolded”? Passive voice much? Where is Shia? What are the “events”? Are they revelations of plagiarism, or are they the plagiarism itself? Why does the tweeting personage not name the offense, as is essential in a good apology? Why is he apologizing for the “manner” and not the TRANSGRESSION ITSELF? Is this some kind of deus ex machina thing, like a Cate-Blanchett-dissolving portal opening up from another dimension? No. First person is required. Mensch it up, man.

Drooly LaBeouf

LaBeouf has had trouble with apologies in the past. As reported by Gawker, when the actor abruptly quit the play back in February that would have been his Broadway debut, citing “creative differences,” (i.e., he and Alec Baldwin on the same stage could have created enough nuclear ego-energy to take out Times Square) he sent an email with the subject line “Apology” to the director and Baldwin. He immediately shared that email on Twitter. It contained the sentiments: “A man owns up…A man grasps his mistakes. He lays claim to who he is, and what he was, whether he likes them or not. ..He does not rely on rationalizations or explanations…A man can tell you he was wrong. That he did wrong. That he planned to.” Sadly, this particular man plagiarized all that. From an essay by Tom Chiarella in Esquire in 2009 called “What Is a Man.” O, NON-MORISSETTIAN IRONY.

To get back to that original quote from Clowes’s comic: A critic is indeed a warrior. And everyone’s a critic. Which means, according to the narration itself, we all have the power to demolish a career.

In this case, let’s hope so.

Aerial LaBeouf. He actually thinks he can fly.