Becuase Everything Else Sucks

Matt Damon and anarchism

By John Geraghty
Published Friday, July 18th, 2008, 6:33 pm
Filed under: US Politics

This is more a request for discussion than a statement of fact regarding Matt Damon. I just started to watch ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train‘, a documentary about anarchist author and activist, Howard Zinn (which you can watch here), when I was surprised to see that the narrator was Matt Damon, star of the Bourne films. After seeing this I realled the speech he both wrote and performed in the film ‘Good Will Hunting‘, in which he discusses the national security state and all that is wrong with the military, the intelligence community and U.S. foreign policy. (You can watch the clip here)

The question I pose here is “Do we have a potential anarchist in our midst?”. We know that Matt Damon is quite liberal, but is he in any way sympathetic to anarchism? The Bourne films do display one of the nasty sides of the CIA, that being its drug smuggling, though it does not cover the topic of empire. For such widely viewed movies to deal with a sensitive subject is quite remarkable.

Hows about it, can anyone else remember other reasons to consider that Matt is a closet anarchist or is in any way radical?

Edit: According to Democracy Now!, Matt Damon is a neighbour of Zinns. Source

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6 Responses to “Matt Damon and anarchism”

  1. May be, but he won’t kill the goose laying his golden egg until the goose is near dead and bloated.

    BuelahMan
    07/18/08 at 7:09 pm

  2. Add to this Viggo Mortensen. He narrated the audio version of Zinn’s ‘A Peoples History of the USA’. According to a friend of mine, he also supported an anarcho-communist commune in Copenhagen. I knew that Viggo endorsed Kucinich, but this just raises my respect for him.

    John Geraghty
    07/18/08 at 7:24 pm

  3. Woody Harrelson describes Zinn as one of his “true heroes”, http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=1BydZv9ykJU

    This anarchist acting list is growing.

    John Geraghty
    07/18/08 at 7:35 pm

  4. In another part of ‘Good Will Hunting,’ Damon’s character tells Robin Williams’ character that if he wants to read something that will really blow his hair back, he should read Zinn’s _People’s History_.

    pp
    07/20/08 at 7:55 pm

  5. Don’t forget he also starred in “Syriana”, which is supposedly a work of fiction but is by far the best summary of US foreign policy in the Middle East that I’ve seen to date.

    Kimchi
    10/29/08 at 4:10 pm

  6. Wow…seriously, people will blog about anything. Who cares if he’s an anarchist? Are people going to change their judgements about him if he is? Well…judging by how arrogant some of the U.S. citizens are, they will…but still.

    Pulpul
    10/30/08 at 1:12 pm

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