Megan Fox: Bombshell, star, poet?
Alexander Larman
Those mourning the death of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück last month may, or may not, take solace in that there is a new poetic act in town, in the form of the actress Megan Fox. Fox, who is engaged to the bellicosely named musician Machine Gun Kelly, announced the project on Instagram (naturally), saying, “These poems were written in an attempt to excise the illness that had taken root in me because of my silence. I’ve spent my entire life keeping the secrets of men, my body aches from carrying the weight of their sins.” Only the cynical might observe that Sylvia Plath offered a rather pithier summation of the same idea at the end of her poem “Daddy,” when she concluded, “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
Fox’s debut collection of poetry, Pretty Boys Are Poisonous, is, inevitably, already a bestseller: The combined power of BookTok, Instagram and Fox’s screen celebrity has produced what will probably be the highest-selling collection of poetry published in the United States this year, or in recent memory. Eat your tender hearts out, Ocean Vuong and Amanda Gorman. This slender collection will connect with many multiples of readers compared to what you could ever hope for. Yet Fox, a veteran of the rapacious shark tank of Hollywood, will know that critics of all hues will be sharpening their scalpels in an attempt to make this her first and last book.
POINTLESS POSES AS POIGNANT IN SALTBURN
Labored introductory rambling about “throat chakras” and Fox pronouncing that “I’ve always believed I am meant to be a sacrificial lamb, a ransom for the soul of whichever beautiful, broken, self-absorbed idiot is currently hunting me down and draining me of my life force,” suggests that this is going to be very, very bad indeed, a craven wallowing in self-indulgence that will be nothing so much as a rich, bored woman adopting a dilettante affectation.
Still, it improves. (It would be hard for it to worsen.) The first proper laugh comes on page 15, with the poem “i would die for y- oh, j/k lol.” Fox imagines what would happen if a present-day Romeo and Juliet were indifferent to each other, or, as she puts it, “maybe they too/would have gotten to the point where romeo was so numb to/her that he would rather read twitter in bed than f***….” It then ends sardonically, with the observation, “i still imagine she kills herself in the end though/only he doesn’t follow/he just signs up for raya instead.” Immediately, the faint hope that I had upon opening the collection — that Fox will offer a deadpan satire on the narcissism of fame — grew, and the thought occurred to me that this could, in fact, be a modern-day Don Juan: a veiled poetic autobiography that takes as its subject its creator’s celebrity.
This is not, alas, entirely the case. Fox is no Lord Byron, for better or for worse. But amid the grandiosity of the titles of many of the poems here, such as a “32-year-old narcissist quantifies his crimes” and “true love’s kiss was a cancer not a cure,” of which some are virtually the same length as the verses themselves and all of which are written in modish lowercase, thereby inviting a hitherto unsuspected comparison between Fox and e.e. cummings, there are genuine pleasures to be had. Fox has an ear for a disarming image, as in the opening of “I’ve always liked serpents — “maybe the apple/was actually a c**k” — and sometimes, there’s a bracing anger to the selection, as in “7, the number of completion,” which merely consists of the words “i hate men” repeated seven times. One can only feel sorry for her machine gunning paramour.
It’s clear that the book’s target audience is earnest, pronoun-wielding young women who can readily empathize with this kind of expletive-scattered pop feminism, with the vast majority of the poems short enough to fit on an Instagram caption, accompanied by an image of Fox looking wronged yet alluring: enough to satisfy her 21.6 million followers on the service. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to describe it as any worse than, say, the utter doggerel that James Franco inflicted on the world with his 2012 collection Strongest of the Litter. (Sample lines, from his poem “Montgomery Clift”: “Burly Burt Lancaster feared you/Because of your latent power/You played your character in/From Here To Eternity like a human.”)
Pretty Boys are Poisonous has a point, of sorts, and cumulatively, there’s a catharsis to Fox’s misandry that amuses as much as it appalls. When she writes “your love leaves/bloodstains/on my bedsheets,” it’s witty that the poem is called “it’s giving patrick bateman.” But Fox is either unprepared, or unwilling, to go the extra step forward and become fully satirical, a la Bret Easton Ellis. Instead, the targets here are easy and, for all the sturm und drang, safe.
Those looking for devastating or revelatory insight into the psyche of Fox the movie star are likely to be disappointed. There is no satire on the (largely dismal) films that made her name, no Frank O’Hara-esque reflection on the wider industry, although “the stepford wife” briefly lurches into the realms of metaphor, observing that “i’m tired of being a supporting actor/in everyone else’s life/while being a featured extra in my own.” Instead, there is an unrelenting and solipsistic focus on the awfulness of men, specifically the men who have screwed Fox over in degrading and repetitive ways. By the time you come to the end of this often interesting, occasionally witty, but fundamentally depressing collection, you will feel that you, too, have been used and abused by the patriarchy. Hand over your $26 and shiver in contrition.
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Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, The Windsors at War, and an editor at the Spectator World.