Brief encounter: Matt Damon in Marseille

Abstract

ABSTRACTStillwater McCarthy (2021) brings together Matt Damon, a Hollywood star with cosmopolitan credentials, and Marseille, a crucible of civilizations often described as a cosmopolitan city. Damon plays Bill Baker, an Oklahoman redneck who must travel regularly to Marseille to visit his daughter in jail. For Bill, a character from a small, quiet mid-U.S. town, Marseille is all excess and opacity, almost impossible to navigate. Large parts of the film are spoken in French, a language that the protagonist neither speaks nor understands.This article uses a cosmopolitan perspective to explore the consequences of the encounter between the Hollywood star and the European city. As will be argued, the ambivalent cosmopolitanism of both Damon’s star persona and Marseille converge in an irresistible but ultimately impossible way. This article explores the dynamics between these two drives by means of a spatial perspective that sheds some light on the multiplying facets of cosmopolitanism in contemporary cinema, including mainstream cinema, and highlights the fraught interface between cosmopolitanism as a utopian ethical aspiration and political agenda, on the one hand, and an everyday reality, on the other.KEYWORDS: Matt DamonMarseillecosmopolitanismstar studiescinematic spaceEuropean cities AcknowledgmentsJulie Assouly, Sébastien Lefait, Vincent GeisserDisclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. We would like to thank Julie Assouly, Sébastien Lefait, Vincent Geisser for their help with our bibliography on the history and society of the city of Marseille.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2021-123836NB-I00]; Diputación General de Aragón [H23_20R].Notes on contributorsMaría Del Mar AzconaMaría Del Mar Azcona teaches Film Studies and English at the University of Zaragoza. She is the author of The Multi-Protagonist Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and co-author, with Celestino Deleyto, of Alejandro González Iñárritu (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and of Before Sunrise: Young Love on the Move (Routledge, 2023). Her latest publications include “Don’t Stop Me Now: Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Bourne Saga” (Mobilities, 2016), “Matt Damon: A Cosmopolitan Hero for the Mainstream” (Celebrity Studies, 2018), “The Texture of the Age: Digital Construction of Unbounded Space in Birdman” (with Celestino Deleyto, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 2021) and “The Trickster and the Fool: Matt Damon and Comedy” (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2022).Celestino DeleytoCelestino Deleyto is Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Zaragoza. His current research interests are the study of cinematic spaces, social space and real places and the interface between them, particularly in the context of border films and cities, as well as cosmopolitan theory and transnational cinema. His latest publications include Alejandro González Iñárritu (with María del Mar Azcona, University of Illinois Press, 2010), From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film (Wayne State U.P., 2016), “Romantic, Transnational and Messy: Intimate Spaces/Cosmopolitan Spaces in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong,” in Imagining “We” in the Age of “I”: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra, eds., Routledge, 2022), “Looking from the Border: A Cosmopolitan Approach to Contemporary Cinema” (Transnational Cinemas, 2017), “Stories So Far: Romantic Comedy and/as Space in Before Midnight, in ReFocus: the Films of Richard Linklater (Kim Wilkins and Timotheus Vermeulen, Edinburgh U.P., 2023) and Before Sunrise: Young Love on the Move (with María del Mar Azcona, Routledge, 2023).