Having grown up next-door to anarchist historian Howard Zinn, actor Matt Damon is no stranger to radical politics. In his breakthrough film, Good Will Hunting (1997), Damon’s character (a mathematical genius from Boston’s working class) challenges Robin Williams’ character to read Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Williams then responds by challenging him to read Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent!
Recently, Damon narrated the documentary about Zinn, titled You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train (2004), and also began a project with FOX Television to create a TV mini-series based on Zinn’s A People’s History, before it was cancelled by FOX.
Damon’s recent films The Good Shepherd (2005) and Syriana (2005) also present a radical critique of the CIA and the general objectives of US foreign policy. In Martin Scorcese’s The Departed (2006), Damon plays a corrupt police officer working for Frank Costello, a real-life Boston gangster with documented ties to the US intelligence community.
Robert Ludlum and the Radical Spy Novel
The recent Bourne movies are based on the trilogy written by best-selling author Robert Ludlum, a WWII veteran who passed away in 2001. The original Bourne Identity was written in 1980, so the new movies have been updated to correspond with recent history. The only real similarities in the plot are that Bourne is a wounded CIA assassin, with amnesia, who is being hunted by the CIA. In the book, Bourne is severely traumatized by his experience leading a US death-squad in the killing fields of the Vietnam War.
In contrast to conservative spy fiction authors like Tom Clancy, who glorify the US National Security State, Ludlum’s many books presented a profoundly critical view of authoritarianism, ruling class power, the military-industrial complex, violence, and the US intelligence community.
Inspired by the emergence of The Trilateral Commission, The Matarese Circle (1979) is Ludlum's Cold War classic. Two arch enemies (one Russian and one US master-spy) both make themselves wanted fugitives of their respective agency, when they unite to bring down a covert international ruling class network which owns most of the media and the world's military industries. "The Matarese" have effectively created and supported global wars (including between the US and the USSR) both for war profiteering and to further their overall power over the global poor.
Many of Ludlum's books focused on US political and economic collaboration with the Nazis, as well as post-WWII Nazi plots to retake power, including The Holcroft Covenant (1977), The Apocalypse Watch (1995), and The Sigma Protocol (2001), whose historically accurate summary of US corporate ties to Nazi Germany, is truly chilling. One of Ludlum’s last books, The Janson Directive, is a harsh critique of liberalism, arguing that alleged motives of “humanitarianism,” often serve as a cover for the sinister agendas of the global corporate elite and the governments that serve their interests.
A movie adaptation of The Chancellor Manuscript (1977) starring Leonardo DiCaprio is due out in 2008. Here, Ludlum addresses US industrialists' ties to Nazi Germany, illegal CIA domestic spying, and the US military's murderous racism. The main story is about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's extensive blackmailing of other powerful people, which he used to further his own racist and authoritarian agenda. The book suggests that Hoover was assassinated by someone who then stole his extensive files that he had long used for blackmail. Perhaps he finally blackmailed the wrong person?
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