The Film

The Dodgers are in town, and the Celtics are done for the season….

Casey Affleck in Good Will Hunting

Browse through Wikipedia’s List of films that most frequently use the word “fuck,” and you’ll find that the film Good Will Hunting scores somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Good Will Hunting uses the word more than 150 times, but not more than 200 times — and certainly not more than 400 times; that honor goes to only a handful of films (including Scorcese’s Casino and a documentary that is, well, specifically about the word.)

This reminds me of a goofy tweet I came across back in January:

drunken_hopfrog

(Dale)

Would you let your child watch GOOD WILL HUNTING? 150 F-Words! Call the police! On 3:01 PM Jan 18th 2010 from TweetDeck

In the past I’ve gained a certain amount of entertainment from an odd source — there’s a site called Kids-in-Mind, which is one of several similar services that rate the inappropriateness of movie content for children, with very awkward and straightforward explanations of any explicit goings-on.

I’ve found myself seeking out their analysis of the least kid-friendly films I can think of, just to take in the stilted, uncomfortable prose.

So, in case you were wondering, Good Will Hunting gets a 3 out of 10 for SEX & NUDITY…

We briefly hear sounds of a man and woman having sex, and we learn that, off-screen, a man has been masturbating while watching a pornographic movie. We see a few cleavage-revealing outfits.

While it gets a paltry 2 out of 10 for VIOLENCE & GORE, it does indeed max out the PROFANITY scale at 10 out of 10…

Nearly 150 F-words, lots of anatomical and scatological references, many insults and several mild obscenities.

To digress from Good Will Hunting for a moment, among the most entertaining of these reviews has to be Kids-in-Mind’s hapless account of dismemberment, chaos, rape, and revenge that explicates Robert Rodriguez’s film Planet Terror.

Some highlights:

• A young woman performs oral sex on a young man, she reaches up toward his head and realizes that his head has been severed. Another scene shows the same young woman kissing a different young man and his head is cut off mid-kiss.
• A man holds a jar with human testicles floating in liquid and tells a man to cut his own off. A man later carries a plastic bag filled with human testicles. A man has a very bloody neck wound.
• A man looks at a woman, makes a remark suggesting that he is going to rape her, and another man makes a remark about her having only one leg; the first man then makes another crude remark about her, and another man makes a similar remark about him. A woman climbs on a motorcycle with another woman, she holds her around the waist and makes a suggestive remark to her. A husband confronts his wife about her having an affair with a woman. A man makes a sexually suggestive remark about another man’s wife. A woman talks about her boyfriend’s sexual interests and that he likes to watch her urinate.
• A woman appears desperate to urinate and holds her crotch. A man has a large scar on his face. A man eats sloppily using his hands.

I’ve recently come across yet another entertaining layer of mediation available to the intrepid web searcher: ESL companion guides to movies.

These guides take the frank, explanatory tone of a site like Kids-in-Mind, and remove any sense of judgment or disapproval from the discussion, providing passages like this, by Raymond Weschler on ESLnotes.com (the quote being parsed is from an early scene in Good Will Hunting; the woman speaking is addressing Ben Affleck’s character Chuckie):

“Like I’d waste my energy spreading my legs for that Tootsie Roll dick? Go home and give it a tug yourself!”

• Note the use of “like” at the beginning of sentences, used (and overused!) by many young people for “as if.”
• The rest of the sentence is a crude sexual insult, since a “tootise roll” is a small piece of well known candy, and a “dick” is very common for penis.
• “To tug” means to pull, and thus the last sentence implies “go home and masturbate.”

It’s something to realize how much foul, idiomatic language is in a film like Good Will Hunting, and the challenge it is for a non-native speaker to pick up on its subtleties.  Say what you want about the screenplay, but you can’t say the dialogue is bland.  Peruse Raymond Weschler’s complete commentary here.