Cancel Culture Came for Matt Damon Again. This Time It Exposed Itself
Matt Damon has weathered storm after storm over things he said, or never said. He tells Husam Sam Asi how his words get twisted, and the latest campaign shows cancel culture's blindness.
When a star signs up for a Hollywood film, the contract includes selling it: walking the red carpet at its premieres, posing for the cameras and giving interviews to the local and international media. Those interviews often ignore the film and dwell on the star’s private life, relationships and politics, because audiences care more about celebrities and what they say than about films and their subjects. Stars hire publicists to coach them, script their answers and warn them away from loaded questions. Still, now and then they say something controversial, and some journalists and bloggers spin it into a provocation to grab readers, whatever the damage to the star.
Matt Damon has just walked into such a trap while promoting his latest film, Stillwater. He plays a rough American oil worker who travels to Marseille to visit his daughter in prison, after she is convicted of killing her Arab girlfriend. Suspecting a young Arab man of the crime, he goes looking for him behind his daughter’s back, tracks him down in an Arab neighbourhood, fails to catch him and is beaten up. When his daughter finds out, she is furious and tells him to keep out of her case. He moves in with a French actress and her young daughter and finds work on building sites, yet he cannot let go of clearing his daughter’s name, and that lands him in trouble with the local gangs, the police and his French girlfriend.
Stillwater explores serious questions, among them the American’s ignorance of other cultures and his refusal to adapt to them or respect their ways, and it sheds light on the racism that people of Arab origin face in France. The American media had no time for any of that. It was busy with a social-media outrage campaign against Damon over his remark to the Sunday Times that his daughter had taught him to stop using a slur for gay people. Damon later said he had never used the word in his personal life, and the storm only gathered strength.
Snowden and the Bourne spy
It is not the first such storm. One broke in 2013, after a television interview I conducted with him just as Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor who fled to Russia, exposed the mass surveillance of Americans by their own intelligence agencies.
Damon praised Snowden in that interview. The American government, he argued, had no right to trample on the civil liberties guaranteed by the constitution in the name of national security without the people’s consent or knowledge, because that broke the law and the principles of democracy. “If we are going to trade our civil liberties with our safety, then that is a decision we have to make collectively,” he said. The American right was enraged. It heaped abuse on him and mocked him as an actor who only plays CIA agents in films and has no idea what happens in the real world.
Besides playing Jason Bourne, the CIA assassin of the Bourne action films, Damon starred in Good Will Hunting as a self-taught mathematical genius working as a janitor at MIT, who turns down a job with the National Security Agency for fear that his discoveries will be used to kill innocent people. He wrote the script with his friend Ben Affleck, and the two won the Oscar for best original screenplay.
Luckily for Damon, much of the American left and social movements around the world supported what Snowden had done, so they shared his comments on social media and praised him for them.
In a later interview, in 2015, Damon told me how much it irritated him when people exploited his comments to promote their own ideas. They don’t listen to what he says, he complained. They twist it to broadcast their own opinions or push their own convictions. That could have caused him serious trouble, he said, but he pays it little attention because it comes and goes quickly.
When the hashtags turned on him
Things began to change in 2014, when cancel culture emerged from Black Twitter. Its aim was to expose the injustice suffered by the marginalised and the vulnerable, such as Black people, gay people and women, and to hold the powerful and the famous to account through hashtag campaigns on social media calling for them to be boycotted, shunned or put on trial: #OscarsSoWhite, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo and Time’s Up.
Damon had always been among the strongest supporters of those campaigns, and soon he became their target. In 2015 he had to apologise after HBO broadcast an episode of Project Greenlight, the programme he founded with Affleck to help new filmmakers, minorities in particular, and so bring diversity to the film industry. In it he is talking to Effie Brown, a Black producer working on the project.
“When we’re talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not in the casting of the show,” Damon says in the clip, in flat contradiction of the project’s purpose. Black viewers responded with a storm of scathing criticism. He blamed the editing, apologised, and stressed his support for diversity in front of and behind the camera.
It is upsetting when you are made to say what you never said, he told me. In that case his words had been edited and taken out of context.
Weeks later he walked into another media trap while promoting The Martian, in which he plays an American astronaut left behind on Mars after a storm hits his mission and his crewmates, believing him dead, fly back to Earth without him.
“I think you’re a better actor the less people know about you period,” he told The Guardian. “And sexuality is a huge part of that. Whether you’re straight or gay, people shouldn’t know anything about your sexuality because that’s one of the mysteries that you should be able to play.” Some bloggers read it as advice to gay actors to stay in the closet, and gay activists launched a fierce campaign against him on social media, although he rejected that reading.
Damon did not blame the Guardian journalist. He had done a professional job and published an accurate interview, Damon told me. Someone else took it out of context and used his name to win more readers, when that person could have looked at all the positions he had taken over the past 20 years. Laziness, sloppy understanding, recklessness or ignorance lay behind it. It is a cruel position to be in, he said. You are embarrassed because what is attributed to you is false, and you know there is nothing you can do. If you keep explaining what you really feel, you give them fresh chances to win more readers and followers. You don’t know what to do.
Stars have faced this dilemma ever since bloggers took over the internet. Bloggers follow no journalistic ethics, answer to no editor and chase sensation over accuracy to build a following. The field is now open to anyone, Damon told me in 2015, and that creates a new kind of problem. It makes people in his position rethink the consequences of what they say and the limits of their responsibility, and even wonder whether it would be safer to say nothing at all or to change how they behave.
The Weinstein smear
The most dangerous smear came in 2017, after the sexual assaults of the producer Harvey Weinstein were exposed. The journalist Sharon Waxman claimed on her website, TheWrap, that in 2004, when she worked for The New York Times, Damon had called her at Weinstein’s request while she was investigating Fabrizio Lombardo, who ran Miramax in Italy and, she had been told, procured women for Weinstein. Pressure, she wrote, had led the paper to gut her story.
Damon had been close to Weinstein, but in an interview I conducted with him at the time, he denied Waxman’s account. He had had no idea at all, he said, and he did not believe anyone had known that all of this was going on.
Damon explained that the call had lasted a minute and that he had simply vouched for his own professional dealings with Lombardo. Waxman then tweeted that she endorsed his statement and that he had called her only briefly.
She had nearly dragged him into that swamp, he told me, and it hurt him because she had painted him in public as the opposite of everything he believes and everything that guides his life. What upset him more was that what had been done to those women was being pushed aside. He did not want to sound as if he was looking for sympathy, he said, because what happened to those women was horrific. They were the issue, and they were the ones who deserved support. He knows who he is and how he runs his life, he added, and he is fine.
A blind culture
Damon survived every one of those crises. The campaigns hurt him neither personally nor professionally, and he remains one of Hollywood’s most popular and best-loved stars, among audiences and colleagues alike, thanks to his charm, his sharp intelligence, his eloquence and a stable, scandal-free life with his Argentine wife, Luciana, and their four daughters. He often puts his fame behind social, environmental, political and global causes, whatever the controversy they stir. Many others have been less lucky.
Cancel campaigns have toppled powerful people in every field, destroyed the careers of many celebrities, cost them their reputations and their fortunes, and sent the criminals among them to trial. They have forced Hollywood’s institutions and studios to confront racism and to promote racial and gender diversity in front of and behind the camera, and in their awards.
For all they have achieved for racial and sexual minorities, cancel campaigns now alarm even supporters of their causes. Barack Obama has criticised them sharply and warned against cancelling good people for a single mistake. Demagogues have hijacked them to wage cynical campaigns against innocent people, famous and not, to settle scores with their rivals and push their own political, personal or professional agendas.
Many people now have megaphones, Damon told me, and anything can be distorted easily. A tweet can be multiplied again and again, and before long the phrase ends up completely different from what was actually said.
The latest campaign against Damon exposed the flaws of cancel culture far more than his own. It looks blind, unable to tell villains from decent people, judging some by an innocent slip or a misunderstanding while ignoring years of service to their communities and to humanity. That is why it is unlikely to hurt a star as loved as Damon, or the box office of Stillwater, or his next film, The Last Duel, which he also co-wrote.
Sources: Time; The Boston Globe.
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