Damon, Matt Damon.

Our relationship with celebrity is as curious as it is multi-faceted. Just as we consume every morsel about their romantic lives and are conversant to an unprecedented degree with their every career manoeuvre, we also appear to award them a privileged position within our political spaces. Few important areas of public policy, chief amongst which are health and the environment, are bereft of the involvement of celebrities as advocates. Indeed, in many respects, it appears as if certain issues do not achieve traction in the minds of the public until they are attached to a celebrity spokesman/woman. I find this particularly curious as celebrities are often amongst the least-educated members of our society. It has always puzzled me that we have opted not to consult, say, plumbers, on their views on the environment, but we are keen to have one celebrity or another descend from their Olympian heights to set us mortals to right on environmentally-friendly conduct, inter alia. One would be hard-pressed to discover a more pampered elite, or one less personally involved in the issues that they seem to champion. Hollywood, by its very nature, engenders in its luminaries a degree of narcissism that simply leaves no room for detailed engagement with important issues for most of its denizens. Enter Matt Damon, an exception to our rule. Mr. Damon and his writing partner, and friend, Ben Affleck, have both exhibited a formidable commitment to a variety of issues over the years, including deep knowledge of, and participation in, the political process.
Given these facts, I was particularly surprised to learn of his recent comments on the James Bond films. On a promotional tour of England, for the third installment of the Bourne franchise, Damon described the Bond films as being redolent of the values of the 1960s and 1980s and poured withering scorn on the character James Bond as a misogynist, draped in Prada suits, who really did not like women and served his country unquestioningly. He contrasted his own realisation, Jason Bourne, favourably with Bond, as someone who questioned his superiors and the tasks which they had set him, and as a one-woman man. What is one to make of all this? It is possible that the mercilessly repetitive nature of the film junket had worn Mr. Damon down. The barrage of the same questions, over and over again, may simply have rubbed him raw. It is an acknowledged fact that the first Bourne films were instrumental in causing the Bond producers to decide to relaunch the Bond series, with a new lead and with diminished scope for the gadgets for which the Bond films had become infamous. Mr. Damon may simply have had enough of the questions which invited comparisons between the franchises. In the end, I think he gets things badly wrong.
The values which underpin Bond are actually those of a much earlier time, that of the intrepid Victorian adventurer, perhaps in the mould of Sir Richard Burton, when British sang froid and derring do triumphed over all before it. Fleming, in tapping into this, was attempting to offer a palliative to a country that was in the throes of the painful transition from imperial hegemon to mid-rank power. It is arguable that his character was a manifestation of a widely-held contemporaneous view in the 1950s that somehow Britain could play Greece to America's Rome. Retaining an importance out of all proportion to its actual power. So we have Bond leading the efforts to protect the "Free World" with Americans appearing merely as his functionaries. Given the genesis of the character, and Fleming's impeccably upper-middle class background, complete with wartime service in intelligence, Bond could not possibly have been other than a loyal servant of the Crown. On this charge, and that of being a misogynist, it is impossible to gainsay Damon. Where he loses the plot is in ascribing the underlying values of this immortal character to the 1960s and 1980s. As we have seen, Bond was wrought of earlier stuff.
What is more, Fleming vastly expanded the spy genre with his creation, indeed it hardly seems likely that Robert Ludlum was not influenced in some way by the Bond novels in his work. His spy, as depicted in the films, certainly, is the true exponent of 1960s values, exhibiting a real counter-cultural edge, so appealing to Mr. Damon. His service to his country has been extracted through deception and worse, and salvation is to be found in eliminating former superiors. In his cinematic form, Bourne is every bit as fantastical as Bond: capable of inhuman feats of athleticism and so skilled in the martial arts as to render him invulnerable. That the Bourne films affect a more 'serious' posture than those of the Bond series, though perhaps not the latest installment, Casino Royale, cannot be denied. This does not in any way diminish the need to suspend our disbelief upon seeing one. Damon is being ungenerous when he attacks the progenitor of his own franchise and his grasp of the history to which he attempts to resort is shaky. What is more, he fails to acknowledge the degree to which the Bond films have come over to his view of things. The Bond of 'Casino Royale' has none of the class-markers that existed in the books, he snarls his indifference to a bartender who dared to ask him whether he preferred his martinis shaken or stirred and he is clad throughout the film in Prada, the historic Bond would never have been seen in such frippery, indeed his clothes would all have come from Savile Row. In the end, these two least secret of agents are on convergent paths. Take a bow, Mr. Damon and spare us the snivelling!