Matt Damon has shielded himself from online angst

How many times in recent years has Matt Damon been “cancelled”?

He was accused of whitewashing and indulging in white-saviour tropes for appearing in a Chinese film made by a famed Chinese director that was marketed mostly to Chinese audiences.

He mansplained to a black filmmaker about how diversity really works in Hollywood on the reboot of Project Greenlight. In the midst of the #MeToo movement, he suggested alleged serial sexual harassers such as Al Franken shouldn’t be forced to resign because being handsy with women isn’t the same thing as raping them.

Most recently, Damon offered up, for no particular reason at all, that he has stopped making jokes using the “f-slur” in recent months after his daughter read him the riot act. Although Damon would walk his comments back the next day, he had already done his latest stint as a trending topic on Twitter.

Who knows which story is true? I, frankly, find it relatively hard to believe Boston-bred bro Matt Damon is a complete and utter stranger to the word in question. Besides, the story about his daughter, as he told it, makes no real sense if he had never used the slur before.

But that matters less than how it’s perceived. To someone who spends no time on social media, it probably looks as though Damon is demonstrating growth. He is revealing a misstep in order to prove he knows better now, that he is a good ally, that he’s working toward a more inclusive future for all of us.

If only Damon wasn’t so Twitter-averse he’d have remembered that, a couple of years ago, Liam Neeson nearly had his career ended because he said he had wanted to kill a black man – any would do – after a friend was raped.

It didn’t matter that Neeson’s point was, explicitly, that this was wrong and horrible. It didn’t matter that it had taken place years ago or that Neeson admitted, as he was telling the story, that he was ashamed for what he had felt and hoped to do. Twitter users aren’t interested in rewarding growth. They’re interested in punishing sin.

So, yes, Damon keeps stepping in it, partly because he’s famously social media-averse. His “own social media presence is basically non-existent”, the New York Times noted in a recent profile, part of his effort to exist “in the last of that line of people who want to maintain privacy”.

That bargain means being excluded from the world of Twitter, where so many nontroversies turn into news stories because so many journalists have amassed so much of their power from the big blue bird app. Anger equals clicks.

If you remain purposely ignorant of the landmines that might blow up promotional efforts for your movie, you can’t be surprised when you step on one. The flip side is that Damon’s complete lack of online presence means he doesn’t feel the constant need to respond to every slight or provocation.

He isn’t refreshing his mentions, seeing who’s taking him to task now. He’s not experiencing the soul-crushing dog pile everyone who has ever been the focus of Twitter angst has experienced. And as such – by simply refusing to feed the trolls and get sucked into a cycle of clarification and apology – every cancellation attempt just fizzles out.

And sure, part of this fizzling is progressive privilege. Precisely because he’s a good liberal, most will forgive his missteps. But Damon helps himself a great deal by trying not to help himself at all. More artists should keep that in mind the next time they’re tempted to get into the muck and mire of social media.

 

Sonny Bunch is culture editor for The Bulwark (© Washington Post)