Shia LeCreampuff
A Reddit retrospective
2016 nostalgia is having a moment right now. A whole decade has come and gone, and that’s enough time for us to look back with gauzy optimism, posting throwback pics and reminiscing about a pre-MAGA America, when Vine was still kicking and killer clowns ran around terrorizing people. The good old days.
There is certainly an extent to which 2016 feels like a different world, and perhaps that’s why it’s easy to feel nostalgic for it. I look back on 2016 and hardly recognize myself. This could be because the gulf between thirteen and twenty-three is incomprehensibly large, and that in the past decade I’ve gone through puberty and moved out and graduated college and started a job. No—it’s probably because I stopped posting on Reddit.
It’s not uncommon for someone my age, raised alongside a burgeoning social media incursion, to have spent much of their adolescence on the internet. But my peers, generally speaking, were crafting Instagram photo dumps and keeping Snapchat streaks alive. By the time I turned thirteen, I was spending all my free time on Reddit. This was because I was smarter and better than everyone else.
I had no interest in taking selfies, and I looked down on those who did. Such frivolities were a waste of time for an intellectual such as myself—someone interested in the discussions that mattered. I wanted to talk about religion and world events and the artistic merits of Twenty One Pilots, and because I never showed my face, my ideas carried just as much weight as anyone else’s. I could mire myself in discourse and no one would realize I was thirteen years old. This was because everyone else on Reddit was also thirteen years old.
The peak of this fixation came in 2016—a uniquely deranging year to be involved in internet discourse. It’s true: I may not have understood what delegates were, but I was nonetheless ready to lay down my life on the digital frontlines in the name of Bernie Sanders. Fortunately, nobody I was arguing with knew what delegates were either, and my tenacity earned me a moderating position on a small subreddit dedicated to anti-Trump memes. “1 upvote = 1 year he spends in jail.”
I loved this position—the vast sense of responsibility. I was fighting the good fight, damn it. I was the last bastion against fascism. Any time an errant troll wandered into my territory and called one of my comrades a “soyboy cuck,” I’d bring down the ban hammer, purging them from our paradise, never to return. Who’s the soyboy cuck now?
But all good things must come to an end. Trump won the 2016 election, and I was shocked to find that there was no correlation between the number of upvotes on my posts and the number of years he would spend in prison. Then one day my mother peeked over my shoulder and saw me typing furiously in a Reddit comment section. “Who are you talking to?” she asked, concerned. The jig was up. Afraid I’d have to explain my internet double life, I took the proverbial cyanide pill and deleted my account.
I stayed on the internet, of course. I eventually caught the Instagram bug (which I still haven’t shaken) and took a brief dip in the cesspools of Tumblr. I still use Reddit, even—but my posting days are long behind me, a mere footnote of an awkward adolescence. As my prefrontal cortex develops, my penchant for political sparring wanes further. Today, the thought of arguing with a stranger online sounds about as appealing as a root canal.
That version of Jeremy is no more. But just as today’s political climate traces back the same fault lines and fractures that existed in 2016, my Reddit history offers brief glimpses of the man I would eventually become. As testimony, I reflect on the other subreddit I once moderated—the one I created from scratch. r/ShiaLeCreampuff.
The concept was genius: a community dedicated to images of Shia LaBeouf’s head pasted onto cream puffs. People would see these images and wet themselves with laughter, then feel compelled to make their own Shia LeCreampuffs, and as the movement’s progenitor, I’d be rewarded with internet stardom—maybe even a guest appearance on The Ellen Show. This was 2016, after all.
Such success felt assured, though my debut post, “The First of Many,” arrived to a middling reception: a mere seven upvotes. I chose not to be discouraged. As the philosopher Laozi once said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” And what a first step this was.
I figure the work speaks for itself—the thesis rendered with an economy of means rarely achieved by artists so early in their practice—but I’m nevertheless happy to dissect it. The composition is disarmingly simple, almost provisional, reflective of a budding artist introducing a new formal language to both himself and his audience. And yet a fascinating tension emerges: LaBeouf’s expression, subtle and carefully withheld, exists in dialectical opposition to the cream puff behind him, which oozes with creamy indulgence. What first presents as a visual gag reveals itself, upon sustained engagement, to be a rigorous study in contrast, a negotiation of excess and restraint which, arguably, says something very deep about society.
The following two posts capture the variety inherent in the medium. In Creamy x4, the repetition of LaBeouf’s face—multiplied and staggered across the pastry’s seam—signals an early preoccupation with fragmentation, wherein the self proliferates, destabilizes, refuses containment. True Love, by contrast, shifts the register from structure to expression: a tearful face set within a cream puff filled with piped whipped cream rather than custard. The ridged texture of the cream heightens the image’s emotional charge, lending the piece an almost unbearable intimacy.
It’s at this point that I should probably mention that, as a 13-year-old in mountain town Colorado, I don’t think I had ever eaten a cream puff. I also don’t think I had ever seen a movie with Shia LaBeouf in it. I didn’t let this stop me from breaking new ground; how nobody had ever thought to combine “Shia LaBeouf” with “cream puffs” was completely beyond me. They almost rhymed.
I soon became emboldened to make stronger statements with my art, letting my tortured artist’s mind roam free. I considered pastry as a site of existential introspection—a memento mori, the face a distorted, intrusive reminder of our mortality. In his late paintings, Goya renders the human figure trapped, degraded, and consumed by madness; in my cream puff images, I also did that, I think.
Finally, I reached my artistic apex, the true potential of the cream-puff collage wholly unlocked. My works were challenging and surreal and rife with political and social commentary, and—even so—I left room for play. Play has always been very important to me. I even found the time to celebrate Easter, which carried added significance because I, the artist, am Jewish.
This accelerating momentum of genius was impossible to contain. I was flying toward the future I deserved—gallery openings, red carpets, and even more appearances on The Ellen Show, as I would make such an impression the first time that I would be immediately invited back, and perhaps become a regular player on the daytime television circuit.
Then it was over. My mother caught me arguing with strangers online, I deleted my account, and r/ShiaLeCreampuff fell into ruin. With no one to moderate it, traffic dwindled, and the subreddit was soon locked. My posts were no longer attributed to me—they now belonged to [deleted].
Opaque, my final creation for r/ShiaLeCreampuff, shows two wistful Shias fading gently into their puffs, as if a memory. It received six upvotes.
Ten years go by. It turns out that Shia LaBeouf is actually kind of a horrible person. The Ellen Show is cancelled too, after it turns out that Ellen is actually kind of a horrible person. I try my first cream puff, and it turns out that I like them “fine.”
I had such optimism for the future in 2016. Now I realize that the r/ShiaLeCreampuff concept doesn’t make much sense, that it’s not particularly funny, and that his name is spelled “LaBeouf,” so I couldn’t even get that right. Is it any wonder I’m nostalgic for what once was?
But I believe my time has not yet passed. I still wait for my work to be recognized, for my art to find its audience. I think of van Gogh, who was not celebrated until decades after his death. I think of da Vinci, who, despite an indelible and lasting impact, left behind fewer than 20 paintings. I made only 10 Shia LeCreampuffs. Could history not remember me the same way?
Most of all, I think of my loyal fans. A decade after my retirement, the Reddit sidebar tells me that r/ShiaLeCreampuff retains seven weekly visitors. I choose to believe this is not just idle traffic or stray clicks, but that there are seven people who check their computers each week, waiting for the unnamed artist to return—to comment on society with biting wit, to deliver them from this modern hell of our own creation.
Who knows? I may not care much for cream puffs, and I certainly don’t care for Shia LaBeouf. But perhaps the version of me who made subreddits and argued online still resides within. Perhaps he’d be pleased to find out that I’m still interested in silly food media, cultural commentary, and amateur Photoshops. Sometimes, while sifting through hazy memories of 2016, of Pokémon GO, Hamilton fever, and Harambe, he needles at me, and I catch a glimpse of a feeling, a creative muscle memory lain dormant for ten years, waiting for the right moment to return.
I can't read any further without asking where I can buy my “so who’s the soyboy cuck now?” tee?
I hate that I didn't notice about you. I also hate that this is some of the best commentary and criticism on 21st century kitsch and irony-pilled humor to date. You nauseate and tickle me, Herr Martin.