Fumarama

After I read The Crying of Lot 49, I became increasingly intrigued by the fact that Pynchon did no publicity for his books and no one really knew where he lived or what he looked liked. People thought he might live on the Upper West Side. I lived on the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights to be exact, but still. Pynchon could be any guy I passed on the street. He could be the wierd guy in the hungarian pastry shop i never paid any attention to. Ever since, I have loved the idea that someone I might dismiss if i saw them on the street is actually someone I would admire in other circumstances. I remember a story a couple of years ago about Souter being mugged on a jog. To me, Justice Souter is a brilliant legal mind and if I ever met him i would overwhelmed by my own inferiority, but to those muggers, he was just an old white guy in sweatpants.

Matt Damon in the Good Sheperd epitomizes such a character. In the first scene of the movie, Matt Damon leaves his hobby table (of putting little ship replicas in bottles!?), and all so very slowly gets on to a trolley bus, sits down reads his paper, and then enters a bland office in a bland office building somewhere in Washington DC. All while wearing a bland suit and glasses and a hat. Just another middle aged guy in DC. But this guy is a spy! The head of counterintelligence for the CIA! A total badass! or maybe kind of evil, depending on your view. But all while Damon's character is planning to undermine foreign governments, or watching someone be tortured, he never loses his underlying blandness, or stocism if you prefer.

Reviewers who loves the film find the character brilliant and those who hate it find him tedious. (everyone seems to agree though that Damon does a great job portraying him.) I am torn. I mean I love the contrast between what he does and what he seems like. And it is not like the character does not have emotions. But they are kind of rare and subtle. A couple of smiles, a hug for his son. The problem with the character is that I could not figure out his motivations. Why did he love the the deaf girl but not Angelina Jolie? Why did he make ships in bottles? Was he actually humorless, it seems at the beginning he is not but that eventually he is. There is one scene in particular that bothered me. Damon is meeting with an Italian guy and the Italian guy says something to the effect of: Italians have family and church, the Irish have the homeland, the Jews have their tradition, the (I do not use the N word in my blog) have their music, what do you have? Damon answers: We have the United States of America, the rest of you are just visitors. The statement comes as a shock. I did not know that Damon's character was kind of a racist, or nativist or whatever it is. Sure you can argue that all WASPs in the 60s were like that. But I had no proof up to this point, and none after, that he was like other wasps. The statement literally feels like it is out of nowhere, just hanging there in the middle of the movie, not connected to anything else or my understanding of the character. Ultimately then, despite my admiration for the stocism and subtlety, without any understanding of his motivations, the character actually felt pretty hollow.