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Post Proficiency - Fridays

Julie Banks

Good Will Hunting by Gus Van Sant

There is something that frightens me: I tend to forget that films are dreams, fantasies, no
matter how realistic these films are, or how close to reality they seem to be. I cannot blame
their genre for this, because I'm talking, presumably, about the substance of film as a whole,
not about their possible variations or combinations. One of my favorite writers, Stanley
Cavell, once wrote that the thin line separating reality from fiction is never as vapor-thin as
inside a dark cinema. Someone may raise the question about the truth of this sentence in
the age of Netflix and tablets. However, once again, it is not the place nor how we watch
films that worries me, but the fact that we cannot know for certain what reality is if our
cinema "dreams" can actually "cross" the line and seem real in real life.

What stroke me as the most surprising aspect of Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting, a feel-
good film about an improbable hero that, by the end of the film, gets both the money AND
the girl, is the fact that the movie actually revolves around choices. And nothing is more real
than choices. It can arguably be said that dreams are limitless. Fantasies, or the urges
underneath, can last more than a lifetime or the lifetime of a whole generation (and beyond).
In fact, we can define dreams and fantasies by saying that they are the unreal, limitless
power (or potential) that drives reality from behind or underneath. On the other side, reality is
constantly setting limits, forcing us to choose between different options.

Good Will Hunting, as has already been said, deals with the fact, not that we always have a
choice, but that sometimes we decide not to see ours (the one that we have already made).
Will Hunting, the main character, is an underdog amazingly portrayed by a young Matt
Damon that is a sort of math genius. While he works as a janitor in a top-notch university, a
teacher discovers him and becomes his mentor (Stellan Skarsgard). He believes that Will
should be helping NASA and CIA develop new technologies instead of wasting his potential
mopping the floor, but there is something stopping Will from making the best of his gift. The
movie kindly shows us the struggle he and his therapist (Robin Williams) have to face tin
order to solve Will Hunting's riddle.

The whole movie deals with Will's need to overcome his past, his pain, his miseries and his
sense of guilt, through therapy, to free himself of the terrible burden that is stopping him from
achieving higher possibilities. We are never told about the origins of the pain, mainly
because the movie is not about characters: even if Hunting's pain rang true to me at first, I
later realized that we end up knowing nothing about it or its origin. It is more an impression,
or may we call it a ghost?, than something real. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, the young
couple responsible for the script and (even if it is hard to believe today) unknown at the time
of its release, are endlessly vague about Hunting's pain and the therapy process. Talking
about having no limits!

Then, if it was not the main character, or his pain, that kindly touched my heart, I asked
myself: what was it about the film that somehow convinced me of its power, of its reality?
What was it that made me feel far from the shallow, as Gaga's song goes? After a couple of
days I did reach a conclusion: even if Will can have both love and economic release by the
end of the film, a first and possibly the most important decision in his life had been already
taken many years ago, at some point during his teenage (or even childhood) years. Namely,
he had accepted his past as his fate, because it hurt and he was used to hurting. Its not the
release of the pain per se that grabbed my attention, nor the fact that he can have
everything (isn't that a wonderful way to depict the American dream?) but the fact that he
was a slave of his own mind, or more precisely, he was living the worst life he could depict
for himself, but the one he felt it was more appropriate to him. He thought, he believed, he
deserved that life.

I tend to forget that films are fantasies, and I equally tend to forget that the world, full of
possibilities, is never exactly as I see it. On the one hand, my desires want to reach the
whole world and beyond, and that is factually impossible. On the other hand, my rational half
tends to underestimate the world itself and my possibilities in it. Watching Good Will Hunting
I experienced strongly that inner contradiction: I felt at once that I could have it all (romance
and dough), just like Damon's character, but that, despite that particular feeling, I would have
to end up choosing one thing only, and that thing would not involve romantic relationships
nor economic power, but the need to free myself of my mental strains.

So, even if Gus Van Sant's directing skills show exceptional taste and restraint when dealing
with emotions; even if Minnie Driver is definitely charming as Will's lover, and even if Ben
Affleck is incredibly naïf and hilarious as Hunting's big-mouthed friend, I eventually
discovered that what impressed me the most was not Hunting's pain or its relief, not the
characters and their personalities or problems, but the fact that by the end of the film Will
could have everything: love, money, and social recognition… and yet he still had to choose
one thing only: to free himself from himself in order to be able to love and be loved, in order
to be successful and be seen as successful.

A nice perk of being a cinephile is how open you are to get your deeper instincts sublimated
through this particular art. Just like good therapy, it makes you face yourself, whether you
like it or not. (And isn't it rewarding to see yourself, just for once, as having Matt Damon's or
Ben Affleck's face in their early twenties?). On a more serious note, if dreams can seem real
is because what keeps us with our feet on the ground, that is, our identities, are truly unreal
themselves. Torn between desire and their limits, between reality and fiction, we are stuck
between the world itself and how we see it, between the way we see ourselves and the way
we are (or can be). If I had to stress just one aspect of Good Will Hunting, it would be its
power to convey that duality. At the end, it all comes down to our sense of power and how
we use it, and our self-image can makes us our own slaves or our own rulers.

Will Hunting's final gift is, eventually, not his math genius, nor the money he can get, nor the
love he can enjoy, but his acknowledging of his relationship to himself, which entails
accepting the fact that for a long time he thought of himself as someone not worthy of being
happy. And I tend to forget that films are dreams because they may show you what you think
of yourself right now, o what dream for yourself, or what you once dreamed when you where
younger. Good Will Hunting forced me to notice the extreme porosity of films, dreams, and
our dreams of reality and identity,