- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Matt Damon is a master of blankness -- his best performances all revolve around that, whether in "Good Will Hunting," "The Bourne Identity," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," or "The Departed" -- that bland virtuosity that is Damon's stock in trade, where even when he's excellent at something, his cipherlike quality mutes it, diminishes it, like a lightly-applied eraser to a penciled line, blurring the details.
Nobody does affable blankness (for good, for evil, or for good and/or evil, as in Bourne) quite the way Damon does. In that blankness, a uniquely American hero resides, and, I think, is a big part of Damon's success as an actor -- maybe Americans find they can project themselves onto Damon's characters, and onto Bourne, a kind of superhero assassin -- but we're supposed to like him, to forgive him, for he knows not what he does. That is so utterly American, it bleeds red, white, and blue.
I loved the first Bourne movie, and wished the franchise would've stopped there, because there's something unsettling about the extension of that blankness over three movies; it makes American audiences complicit in it. The Bourne movies would've probably been impossible without Damon to carry them, but they'd have been revolutionary in the 70s or even 80s, when Americans could conceivably not know what we do as a nation, or what we're capable of being. In our imperial era, however, such blankness isn't even a luxury; it's a delusion.
Today, there's less of an excuse to have that kind of blankness, with the abrogation of responsibility and accountability that comes with it, and to see it trotted out again in "The Bourne Ultimatum" -- I don't know; it kind of creeps me out.
Bourne's both a victim and a perpetrator of violence (physical and psychological) -- gifted with superhuman talents that were intended for subhuman purposes, able to do amazing things, but unable to really understand why -- he's the enfant terrible of espionage.
People talk about Bourne's isolation -- and Damon's bland affability sells it, and that's true, but Bourne's truly a monster more than a superhero, with no real place in civil society. Or, if he has a place, then our society is no longer a civil one. That's Bourne's ultimatum to the rest of us.
