The sensuous Matt Damon

I was just browsing the other day, wasting my time, when I ran across the photo seen here of Julia Roberts. Something struck me as odd … was I looking at a slight widow’s peak? That shit-eating grin – I have seen that before. Where? Was it this guy, seen to the right? No – that’s John Denver. He had (has) the s/e grin, but his mouth did not go full-on wide like Julia’s. Where have I seen this? Whose smile is so big that it practically touches his ears?

Then it hit me. We have stumbled on another member of the club, the Matt Damon Batch.

For those who are new here, we have a long history of Damonizing people. It first started when I clipped the above quote from an online book. I’ve long forgotten its name – I read it on an iPad as we traveled Europe. But in it you see something that I now know to be fairly typical, that Damon is related by bloodline to just about every other Hollywood star, and outside of Hollywood, to people like FDR, Sarah Palin, Bill Gates, John Jacob Astor IV, and on and on.

That’s all interesting. What I gather from other sources is that the children of the monarchical bloodlines need to be kept occupied, and some of them of lesser talent are used as actors, rock stars, even politicians. Damon is just such a person, not terribly talented, but handed high-profile roles like Will in Goodwill Hunting, a movie for which he and his pal Ben Affleck were even given writing credit. (How did two young boys manage to turn out such a remarkable script on their first try? Well, says Matt, they worked really, really hard.) Not only is Damon handed roles like that on a platter, he even wins an Oscar for fake-writing it, along with his fake pal, Ben Affleck, another member of the batch along with Ben’s fake brother, Casey. Ben was once fake-married to yet another member, Jennifer Garner.

And that was the end of the story, really. Damon slid down the right birth canal. We once had a writer here we called “Straight” (we called him that as his website was Straight From the Devil’s Mouth, as he was very concerned about being outed online.) He had a remarkable eye and brought to us one thing after another, much of which we used back when we were identifying twins and zombies. He chimed in one day and said he had stumbled onto something very big. He called it the Matt Damon batch.

Straight opened that post with the bloodline information above, and then went on to do face chops of Damon with people like Leo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, George Clooney,  Russell Crowe and a few more.

The work is all gone now – that is, the post is still there, but the images, the face chops are gone. I do not know why, but it does not matter. We eventually got away from face chops, and I added a little more rigor using Photoshop layers. I did a post called Bokanovsky Brats, after the process described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In that book he wrote about a process of embryo splitting where they could make 8, 16, 96 copies of a person.

“One egg, one embryo, one adult – normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before.”

In the Brats post I aligned faces between Damon and sixteen other Hollywood stars, and found perfect alignment even as they are easily identifiable as different people. Later I added quarterback Tom Brady, Jimmy Kimmel, and most recently, Barbara Walters to the Damon Batch. Pam Courson belongs as well, and Sarah Palin … so close, but not.

What is going on? I don’t know. Another person talked about what is called a “golden ratio” for facial alignment, suggesting that all of these faces align so well because we who watch movies and TV select them as our stars for these features. That might have some merit … might …  save for the opening image above listing Matt Damon’s very famous relatives. If we were selecting stars ourselves, would we select Damon? He’s not ruggedly handsome, as was James Dean, or even a very good actor, as say Leo DiCaprio. In fact, we might select none of these to be our stars. They are given to us and suggested to us to have star power. Matt Damon would otherwise have to work for a living.

It is apparent to me that there is at work a system not of selecting our stars, but rather of making our stars. It operates behind the scenes. These brats are chosen at a very young age to develop whatever skills they might have to later be chosen as actors, musicians, with even one famous athlete, Tom Brady, in the mix. (See Damon-Brady to the right.)

At other times we have seen this mysterious system at work with exact duplicates appearing on the scene generations apart, as with Helen Mirren and Jennifer Lawrence. The image to the left here is not my work, but rather one that appears by merely searching for the two names. Others have noticed this odd and perfect alignment of features in these two “great” actresses, all the way down to facial shape and dimples. They are, however, not in the Matt Damon Batch.

Others who bear such strong resemblance have been PBS news correspondent Judy Woodruff and French actress/vocalist Dalida, seen to the right here (my work). Dalida was famous in the 1950s and died in 1987. Woodruff is still with us.

Inger Stevens (died April 30, 1974?), was a perfect match-up with Emma Thompson, so much so that we looked very hard at the timeline to see if they could be the same person, one faking her death and reappearing as the other. Not so.

Betty White looks amazingly like Jayne Mansfield (died June 29, 1967?), again, so much so that I thought we might be able to connect the timeline. Not so – but it did convince me that Betty White is not 96 years old. She is in her 80s, and I don’t know why they lie about her age like that. One important difference that convinced me and others that these are different people … Mansfield was much more glamorous and busty.

These people are not twins, they are not related according to their official bios, but they look amazingly alike even as they span generations. Some might say that it has to do with all celebrities being from the same gene pool, that is, related to one another. There is truth to that, but I have a common gene pool with 24 cousins just on my mother’s side, and I do not remotely resemble any one of them. Some would guess that my brothers and I were related, but even there, we are not replicas.

So what is going on? I do not know, but suspect that a process is at work whereby embryos are split and then gestated by different mothers, ala Huxley’s Bokanovsky. The result is a product that is identical in many ways to others undergoing the same split/gestation with different mothers. It is the differing diets, DNA, blood type and climate that produces the notable differences, but the common embryo that produces the very strong likenesses to one another.

A caveat: I have never met one of these famous people, and don’t know anything about their relative head sizes. I merely set their pupils at common distance and work from there. Do these people have different head sizes? I cannot know. (I did at one time find that John Denver looks exactly like Richard Branson, the British business magnate, but in order to produce the likeness I had to artificially enlarge Denver’s head. It was not otherwise close.)

Also, my wife asked me if these people are self-aware – do they know about each other and their origins? My immediate answer was yes, of course. But after reflection, it is not necessary. They might just go through life with that golden ratio, land parts, become wealthy and famous, and imagine they did it all on their own and never knowing the truth.

Anyway, enjoy now as Julia Roberts emerges in the features of our pal, the somewhat handsome, somewhat talented, but really kind of dorky Matt Damon. And contemplate the mystery with me. Why does this happen?

Matt, you have such a sensuous mouth.