I. Good Will Hunting is my Least Favorite Movie of All Time

“Art” can mean a lot of things. Almost anything, really. But surely it has never referred to the movies I saw at art cinemas in the late 1990s. Emma. The English Patient. Shine. Movies whose running times were spent complementing the audience on their fine taste in movies. Movies that feigned intellectual discourse by taking place in a foreign country or at a past time or by being based on a well-received novel. You know – middlebrow.

I was home from college for the summer when I saw Good Will Hunting. We watched it together, my family, on the couch in the den where the television was and where we spent most of our time together. The living room was reserved for guests we never had, and the Christmas tree. Middlebrow.

My parents – like most of the world – loved Good Will Hunting. But not me. No way. If Good WIll Hunting had just dressed up the cheap thrills of a coherent narrative in vague sentiments of educational merit, well, there was nothing novel in that. But Good Will Hunting was different. Good Will Hunting was insincere. Good Will Hunting was 126 minutes of Gus Van Sant encouraging his audience to congratulate themselves and then mocking them when they did so – with a sly wink at those of us cultured enough to “get it.”

That was me, all right. I was in college. I had read Walter Benjamin! I got it.

A movie that tells you you’re smart is a movie that appeals to people who want to be smarter, an audience that spends even its leisure time aspirationally. An audience that sends its children to expensive colleges, that believes in education as the surest path upward into the meritocracy. An audience that wants to better themselves and believes that such a thing is possible.

Suckers.

II. On Just Now Rewatching Good Will Hunting, Previously My Least Favorite Movie of All Time

As Will drives away from Boston we can feel safe assuming he ends up in California with a job and a girlfriend. It’s the promise the movie has made to us. We can assume that four years later, when Skylar graduates from medical school, Chuckie and Morgan are drinking beers across a pickup truck at a construction site. But the futures within movies take place in an infinite present. And fifteen years later Will Hunting will be fifteen years older in a world that’s never seen a Governor Schwarzenegger or a war in Afghanistan. Or the gentrification of Southie.

Clark the obnoxious graduate student thinks he can impress Skylar with his academic browbeating of two townies. But when Will proves more than his equal, Clark resorts to the sheer weight of social privilege. In the future – the future world of Good Will Hunting, where characters grow older but the year remains 1997 – we know that if Will and Clark meet at that drive-through it will be as two upper-class tourists. In the future where it is 2011 the joke is on a guy getting a Humanities Ph.D. who thinks he’ll end up making more money than anyone. In 2011 Clark gave up his part time adjunct position at Florida Gulf Coast University to go to culinary school, and the locally sourced lamb burgers he sells at a drive-though in Vermont have been featured in the New York Times Style Section.

He will never finish paying his student loans.

Will’s intelligence is unquestioned, but the opportunity to leave of Southie doesn’t present itself until he catches the attention of an MIT professor. His therapist teaches at a community college, but they only meet because the therapist’s MIT roommate was Professor Lambeau. Will’s relationship with Skylar isn’t just a relationship with someone who can recognize his intellectual gifts  – it’s a relationship with the people she’s met at “Private school, Harvard, and now Med. School.” You can get a Harvard education at the library for a dollar and fifty cents in late fees, but you can’t get the social contacts.

Good Will Hunting is the myth of the self-correcting meritocracy written by two guys who went to fancy colleges and had some personal interest in the continued relevance of that meritocracy’s institutions. And when I saw it as a college student – as an incipient if reluctant member of that meritocracy – I bristled. I bristled at the aesthetics I was in training to leave behind, and values that had sent me on my way. I bristled at the new aesthetics and expectations I was encountering, like I had entered a religious order and was only now realizing what vows I had sworn to uphold. And I realized, suddenly, on that old couch whose worn center springs pitched everyone towards the middle, amid shelves heavy with twenty volume collections of “the classics,” in the room with the television where we spent all our time, what it was I was losing.

But now, fifteen years later – now that meritocracy and its advantages are a distant smudge on the horizon – now I can’t bring myself to care.

Now I don’t hate Good Will Hunting very much at all.

III. But I May Have Overthought This

Images Cinema is currently showing The Help.

So amid all the recent debt ceiling drama, Republicans reportedly used a scene from The Town to persuade fellow party members to back Speaker Boehner’s plan.

Director Ben Affleck’s reaction? He spoke to the Huffington Post and explained “I don’t know if this is a compliment or the ultimate repudiation — but if they’re going to be watching movies, I think [layoff drama] The Company Men is more appropriate.”

Vulture also felt that Ben’s other films might have some more appropriate scenes, offering Seven Other Ben Affleck Scenes That Republicans Can Watch for Inspiration.

Coming in at number 4 of 7, The “Retainer” Scene From Good Will Hunting.

Does it seem odd that President Obama has given the Republicans nearly everything they could ask for and yet they still threaten to drive the country into financial ruin? Maybe they’ve just learned from this classic scene in Good Will Hunting, where Affleck’s masquerading Southie is offered a generous salary with perks, but still demands a “retaaaaainer” and threatens to storm out of negotiations. Let me tell you something: The president is suspect.

There are brief references to Will’s biological and foster parents, Skylar’s wealthy father, Sean’s abusive dad, and Chuckie’s Ma (and her VCR…). Certainly, Sean and Lambeau become a type of hybrid father figure to Will, together tumultuously strengthening Will’s ability to form healthy emotional attachment. But there are no actual moms or dads written into the script and we never witness any authentic parenting in the movie.

As a mother to two young children I sometimes find myself thinking back to this film and wondering, what about the parents? What’s their deal? What parenting successes led to Chuckie’s unabashed confidence? What drove the horrific foster parents to utterly ignore Will’s obvious genius?

Despite the lack of parental presence in the film there is still a lot of child-rearing wisdom to be reaped. In fact, I’ve managed to successfully incorporate several brilliant GWH one-liners into my own mothering repertoire.

For example, the baby hates to don his snow suit. By the time I stuff all four extremities into the ball of down fluff he is sobbing as if I’ve submitted him to some kind of torture device. But then once he’s strapped in the backpack or the stroller and he’s outside in the fresh air he is hands-down the happiest kid in the world. At this point I get right up in his face and declare, “How do you like me NOW?!”

Next example: My 2.5 year-old decides to dump out every single Lego, block and puzzle piece we own about 35 seconds before we’re supposed to leave for preschool. My response? “Jane! No more shenanigans. No more tomfoolery. No more ballyhoo. Put. On. Your. Shoes.” If my request is subsequently ignored I have been known to take a deep breath and mutter, “Keep antagonizing me, watch what happens.”

And my personal favorite: as I break up a scrum between my son and daughter a sudden stench makes my eyes sting. I ask, “OK, who made a poop?” <They both look innocent.> I point to the guiltiest-looking child and announce, “Ya suspect!”

Thank you, Good Will Hunting, for allowing me to share these truly awesome parenting gems with my kids, especially the most graceful way to exit an awkward social encounter: “I swallowed a bug.”

“Miss Misery” is, of course, Smith’s song that plays during the Good Will Hunting closing credits as Will drives off to California. In 1998 it was nominated for Best Original Song (losing out to Celine Dion’s Titanic theme… because the Oscars are stupid.)

Some would say “having a good time is important when making a music video,” and never has someone seemed more miserable in a music video than Mr. Smith appears here.

As he would at the Oscar performance, he wears white formal wear, and like the Oscar performance, he is not having a good time.

Smith (in a white suit)

It would be fair to say, I think, that Elliott Smith didn’t belong in the spotlight. His music was for quiet, dimly lit moments, lingering in the background. That’s why it worked so well with the visuals of crumbling working class apartments and late nights in dorm rooms in Good Will Hunting. Once you start listening too carefully, though, you discover the severity of the pain in his lyrics — his melancholy runs quite deep. He wasn’t meant for People Magazine.

Beck (in a white suit)

In a 2000 interview with In Music We Trust he explained his ambivalence with the fame that came with Good Will Hunting :

Too much exposure, it makes you feel like a cartoon character. I’m the gloomy folk cartoon figure. Nobody wants to feel like a cartoon, but at the same time I don’t want to complain.

It all depends on how much you buy into it, though. People Magazine called me a Beck impostor because I played the Oscars in a white suit. Great, both Beck and I wore white suits, so I must be a Beck impostor. Things like that… you can choose to buy into them or just ignore them. I choose not to read press about me anymore.

The success of Good Will Hunting (for the filmmakers, as well as for this musician) was unexpected, to be sure, and the icing on the cake is much like this white suit (if you will); under close scrutiny, it’s not quite what it seems to be. Is the film a conventional, hopeful, earnest story with a big movie star (Williams), dressed up like a scrappy, rough-around-the-edges indie drama? Or is it an unapologetic, ardent indie film, adorned with some Oscar-bait monologues that were tacked on to pay the bills? Either way, does the suit fit?

Justin Stewart of Reverse Shot writes in his article “New Math“:

There’s something hostile, even violent, about the way this movie’s writing screams for attention. As much as Van Sant and Elliott Smith are able to mute it, Good Will Hunting still gives one a feeling for what it must have been like for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in meetings with the Weinsteins (“Emotion the fuck out of this scene!”).

I like this notion of Smith’s role — to dampen the more freewheeling emotion of the film, bringing a subtlety to some of the more clunky aspects of the screenplay. It helps speak to the question of what on earth the song “Miss Misery” is doing alongside our otherwise happy, driving-off-into-the-sunset ending.

To vanish into oblivion
Is easy to do
And I try to be, but you know me
I come back when you want me to
Do you miss me, Miss Misery
Like you say you do?

The prevalence of Smith’s work on the soundtrack, not unlike Simon and Garfunkle’s in The Graduate, sets a distinct tone that — at first glance — seems to have less to do with the content of their lyrics than the quality of their sound. But the attitude behind the words are important, and I think the similarities between the films extends to the the ambivalence of their endings. One can’t imagine a sunnier-sounding outfit than Simon and Garfunkle, but what could be bleaker than the opening lyric, “hello darkness, my old friend”? “The Sound of Silence” informs the conclusion of The Graduate quite succinctly — the return of the dark, isolating unsureness Ben feels towards his future will surely set in shortly, and it perhaps already has for the pensive-looking Elaine in that final shot.

With Smith’s tender “Miss Misery,” does Will’s uncertainty — a “vanish into oblivion” — also return? It rings true for me that would. A solo cross country road trip brings with it a lot of time to question one’s decisions and recoup some dark doubts. With Elliott Smith’s romantic ode to relapse seeping in as the credits roll, Van Sant deftly wrinkles the edge of the seemingly happy ending. No white suit can remain quite so pristine.

Check out this decidedly less uncomfortable — and surprisingly intimate — 1998 performance of “Miss Misery” on Conan O’Brien.

Good Will Hunting

The Social Network

Thanks to these windows and mirrors, our genius janitors (Good Will Hunting) and entrepreneurial college students (The Social Network) can work out their formulas in an aesthetically pleasing manner with an inherent visual metaphor for self-reflection, intellectual clarity, and access — just through a window — into the analytic mind.

Bret Schneider of Chicago Art Criticism writes:

A Beautiful Mind

For some reason it is common among films portraying genius to aestheticize their intellectual process by showing the protagonist writing on glass, mirror, or other reflective surfaces. In Good Will Hunting the film opens with the solitary genius writing abstract mathematical formulae on mirror, with few other objects in sight. A man and his mind, alone in a room. Oh wait, but also an obscure writing utensil that one would need to go far out of their way to procure. A Beautiful Mind has a similar scene, where the main character, a sociopathic math genius, writes his ideas on transparent glass. A plethora of pi glyphs and some mundane squares, punctuated by some other recognizable shapes like triangles and greater-than or less-than symbols writ in white mar the view of his dormitory window. Apparently geniuses are too pure for paper.

The following deleted scene from Good Will Hunting finds him math-ing away in his grungy Southie studio apartment. We see library books, and then a rare moment of him writing on notebook paper (actual paper!), which transitions to a scene in which he walks to the room’s periphery and starts writing on the wall.

Furthermore, a close look at the following still from the film also shows that Will has at one point resorted to doing math (homeomorphically irreducible trees, perhaps?) on the window shade. (Also check out Will’s beer of choice — a box for locally brewed Sam Adams sits in the lower left corner.)

Mathematician Keith Devlin (who discussed the math of Good Will Hunting on NPR’s Morning Edition in 1998; their conversation is considered here on Blog Will Hunting) defends this trope.

One of the most derided scenes in Good Will Hunting is where the hero starts to write equations on a bathroom mirror. Conveniently forgetting that the great Irish mathematician Alexander Rowan Hamilton scratched the key identities for the quaternions on a stone bridge — the only writing surface available to him at the time inspiration struck him — the critics scoffed that no mathematician would ever do such a thing. … Depicting a mathematician scribbling formulas on a sheet of paper might be more accurate (and you’ll see Crowe doing that in A Beautiful Mind, just as we saw Damon doing it in Good Will Hunting) but it certainly doesn’t convey the image of a person passionately involved in mathematics, as does seeing someone write those formulas in steam on a mirror or in wax on a window, nor is it as cinematographically dramatic.

That sums it all up rather nicely, I think. Both a visually-striking metaphor and a shorthand for the urgent intellectual passions of a genius, this cinematic cliché, like any other, gets its storytelling work done efficiently… even if the readiness of the appropriate writing utensil for such a purpose is rather unlikely.

When Ben Affleck’s character enters the Harvard bar in Good Will Hunting he announces, “So this is a Hah-vahd bar. I thought there’d be… equations and shit on the wall.”

Sorry, Ben — “equations on the wall”? That’s only in the movies.

Maybe the first time you saw it. Maybe other times. Seeing a movie in a movie theater lends itself to a more textured experience, so maybe if you saw it back in 1997/1998 you have a couple distinct memories about the experience.

Leave a comment below, email us, or submit your anecdote here.

I remember going by myself to the bigger theater in the next town, back in 1998. (It had a small release in December of 1997 but didn’t reach me in South Carolina until early 1998.) As far as I was concerned, Good Will Hunting was a small, indie movie for discerning viewers (like my 17-year-old self).

I had been to Boston before, and had lived in a suburb when I was younger. The next year I would go to college in western Massachusetts.

Getting home from the theater involved taking a small highway, not unlike the one seen at the end of the film, and I reflected upon my young life in a brooding, Matt-Damon-y way on the ride. Inspired (I was an artist, you see) by Gus Van Sant’s tonal choices in the film, I went to the little room off of the garage that I called “my studio,” where I had my art supplies set up. I did a small abstract oil painting, which relied heavily on yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and raw sienna (among my favorites, those earth tones).

Via Wonder-Tonic, it’s “a useful simulator for all those times you wish you had Robin Williams there to counsel you.” Launch the simulator.

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 18-1-2010 15:01:02 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.

I’ve learned from the best that a good blog isn’t afraid to bring you right into the conversation, into the formation of its ideas as they are being constructed and processed.

So I figured I would go ahead and share the following online conversation I recently had with a friend, former Bostonian Dave C.

I bring you a discussion of life, masculinity, and the conceptual underpinnings of Good Will Hunting.

In the summer of 2007 I went on a European adventure.  Late one evening, strolling the streets of Vienna, Austria, I encountered the above scene.  It was a grungy video store with a Good Will Hunting poster in the darkened window.  How odd it felt to encounter this very local-feeling film as a cheesy, sun-bleached cardboard display, four-thousand miles away from Boston.

There was also a slapdash tagline added to the poster — “Hol Dir Deinen Denk-Zettel an der Theke!” (Perhaps they simply swap in a language-appropriate tagline wherever in the world the display finds itself?)  Here in Austria the tagline was German — and translates to “Get Your Lesson in the Bar!”

Now, this isn’t an entirely accurate summing-up of the film’s themes.  American marketers used “Some people can never believe in themselves, until someone believes in them” and “Wildly charismatic. Impossibly brilliant. Totally rebellious. For the first 20 years of his life, Will Hunting has called the shots. Now he’s about to meet his match.”

“Hol Dir Deinen Denk-Zettel an der Theke” suggests a story of actualization through growing up on the street (and, well, yeah — in the bar.)  Sure, the bar part does describe Will and his crew, but Will Hunting would be content to sit around the bar not really changing at all.  He doesn’t really “learn his lesson” until confronted with his own potential, via Sean, Lambeau, and Skylar — none of whom are operating within his comfort zone.

So perhaps we should conclude that this is simply catering the film to a German market that likes to drink a lot (and likes its film protagonists to do the same)?

The following scenes make some interesting choices interpreting a moment between Will and Skylar.  These performances confirm that it may be impossible to deliver the line “on behalf of my wiener” with any actorly dignity.  I’m not sure how Damon did it.

Until last weekend the only time I had been to the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade was in 2005 with a friend from high school, a friend of my friend, and a my friend’s friend’s 8 to 12 teenage English-as-a-second-language students.  I really only remember three things.

1. It was crowded.
2. Some guy was selling a green long-sleeved t-shirt that said “What happens in Southie stays in Southie” and I’ve always regretted not getting one.
3. There were Storm Troopers marching in the parade, and they were wearing leprechaun hats.

This, Boston’s official St. Patrick’s Day parade, has been held in Southie since 1901 — and unofficially since 1737.  It is such a distinct part of South Boston history and tradition that Team Affleck/Damon intended their Good Will Hunting would open with it.  The opening credits were to take place over scenes from the St. Paddy’s marching and motorcading, and the subsequent opening scene would take place at the crowded Southie bar as Chuckie regales the boys with a story.

Gus Van Sant actually shot and cut together a sequence, which is available for viewing as a deleted scene on the Good Will Hunting DVD.  They shot it at the real parade, months before the film began principle photography.  This is notable for a couple reasons: shooting at a live event with a small crew, the footage actually looks like a Gus Van Sant movie.  You know — “gritty,” “intimate,” etc.  Second, according to Van Sant on the DVD commentary, since the hairstyles of the characters hadn’t yet been determined, they are all wearing ridiculous hats as they goof around at curbside. This combined with the actors’ odd clothing in these scenes points to how much those decisions about costume and makeup (and maintaining their consistency) matters in creating a set of authentic characters.

As someone who blogs regularly about Good Will Hunting, I was determined to make it to this year’s parade, rain or shine.

And rain it did.

Still, I’d say it was worth it.  I shook hands with the staff of multiple candidates for Auditor, received some green bead necklaces and 2010 Census chapstick, and saw unicycling floutists, an old-timey canon, and the coldest, wettest bagpipers I’ll probably ever see.

As far as the subsequent scene of the boys in the bar, it’s not the most eloquent introduction to the characters and themes of the film. (Otherwise, the film’s strongest moments lie in the relationships amongst Will and his friends.  Compare Will’s climactic scenes with Sean, his therapist, and with Chuckie, his best friend.  Both communicate to Will that he must let go of his fear, but the “it’s not your fault” sequence with Robin Williams is as forced and melodramatic as the later construction site scene with Will and Chuckie is frank and stirring — “you’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket.”)

Besides making it completely unclear who the main character of the film is, the St. Paddy’s Day bar scene is territory essentially retread by Chuckie, et al,  when Will introduces them to Skylar at the bar later in the film.

So, let’s be thankful Gus Van Sant served up a kaleidoscopic meditation on Will’s solitude, stuck inside his brain, instead of a story of a cat getting beaten to death, in those early moments of Good Will Hunting.

I suppose it should be no surprise that while home for the holidays last fall, in going through folders of old papers, I came across a receipt for a notable purchase from February 23, 1998.  It was from my local record store on College Avenue, and on that day I purchased the Good Will Hunting soundtrack.

I can pretty honestly say this would become one of the most significant music purchases I’d ever make.  I didn’t really listen to music until late in high school… or maybe I did, but it was just the Aladdin soundtrack over and over again.  In tenth grade, though, I discovered my dad’s Beatles collection.  I went from there, largely basing my new tastes on that of my peers: Dave Matthews Band, Counting Crows, Billy Joel (River of Dreams, man).  I can tell you I was definitely not someone who “listened to Dave Matthews before everyone listened to Dave Matthews.”

I can also tell you that on that February day I did not go into Manifest Records to buy the Good Will Hunting soundtrack.  More likely, I was going primarily to get my very own copy of Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20.  Also predetermined, I picked out the Counting Crows’ August and Everything After.  Somewhat less so, I snagged the soundtrack for the movie Swingers.

Near the cashier was a display of what were probably new(ish) releases.  It speaks to how hurting I was for music suggestions that I picked up the CD soundtrack to a movie I had seen, and loved, but had only vaguely recalled the music. “I think I remember liking it,” I said to myself.

While Matchbox 20 lit up my CD player, Good Will Hunting was more of a slow burn.  When I gave it a first listen I found it nice and mellow — but it kind of “all sounds the same,” I thought.  Matchbox 20, on the other hand… each song blazed like a smash-hit single.  (In fact, five of the twelve songs were released as singles.)  Good Will Hunting, at least, made good background music.

But it stayed with me.

I don’t really associate it with those early months of 1998, but in following years it became a staple.  I fondly remember Good Will Hunting keeping me company on late evenings in my dimly-lit college dorm room.  If it was raining outside, it was twice as wonderful.

If not for that impulse buy, who knows how long it would have taken for me to find Elliott Smith?  And I felt like I really discovered him, rather than co-opting his catalog along with whatever else my knowledgeable peers recommended.

Elliott Smith has never been far from my ears this past decade, while Rob Thomas and Company burned out and then they faded away.

Nevertheless, I look back twelve years later and wonder: what if Good Will Hunting‘s soundtrack was populated by the songs of Matchbox 20, rather than those of Elliott Smith?

Last night I put together a little video.  I think it would have looked and sounded a lot like this…

Google image search: "Matt Ben shiny joy"

Matt ‘n’ Ben are re-forming their production company for a “first look” deal at Warner Bros. In movie lingo, “first look” refers to this exchange: “First, look – Ben, I wish you hadn’t sold my Oscar on eBay to fund Gone Baby Gone. But what the hell, let’s re-form our production company!”

Of course, I’m being unfair (and hilarious!). Affleck has become a well-respected director after Gone Baby Gone, and his next film, the highly anticipated The Town, is due in September. With his newfound clout and Damon’s ongoing credibility as an actor and a box-office draw, the timing for this thing seems right. Ready those Gerry 2 pitches …. now.

Blog Will Hunting wishes you a good day, Valentine’s, or otherwise.  Have a bunch of caramels or something.

While browsing at my favorite local bookstore, I flipped through Barbara Lynch’s new cookbook Stir. Check out this choice bit of jacket copy:

Lynch’s cuisine is all the more remarkable because it is self-taught. In a story straight out of Good Will Hunting, she grew up in the turbulent projects of “Southie”, where petty crime was the only viable way to make a living…. Through a mix of hunger for knowledge, hard work, and raw smarts, she gradually created her own distinctive style of cooking….

The publisher has betrayed a fundamentally flawed—and, I think, commonly held—understanding of Good Will Hunting. True, Barbara Lynch and Will Hunting are both from Southie (notice the publisher’s timid quotation marks). But while Lynch’s rise to fame from unlikely roots as a result of her “hunger for knowledge, hard work, and raw smarts” is admirable, it is hardly the same as Will Hunting’s story.

Will Hunting does not work hard. Will’s remarkable gifts are unearned; as he puts it, he could “always just play.” At the beginning of the movie, Will is an under-employed genius with little more than (presumably) a high school diploma. At the end of the movie, he is an unemployed genius who has turned down multiple job offers and rejected academia to “see about a girl.”

Good Will Hunting is not the story of an underdog going up against the establishment and, against all odds, making good. That’s Finding Forrester, a much less satisfying film. Good Will Hunting is the story of a lonely orphan boy who learns to love and be loved. Will’s remarkable abilities are nothing more than a plot device.

But I don’t think that story will help sell cookbooks.

One of the most-referenced sequences in Good Will Hunting is, of course, the “apples scene.”

As the boys stumble from the bar, crossing Bow Street, Morgan sees the ponytail jerk sitting in Dunkin Donuts.  Will goes over and initiates a little confrontational wordplay through the glass.  (In the screenplay it’s not a Dunkin Donuts, but another bar.  We also learn that the original “Harvard bar” was intended to be the now-nonexistent Bow & Arrow Pub.)

I was recently informed that in the new word game Appletters, from the makers of Bananagrams,  a player going out must yell “HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES.”  And so I’ve been wondering, beyond its popularization in Good Will Hunting, where does this idiomatic expression of smugness come from?

The Internet (Wikipedia) dates the phrase back to World War I.

It is likely that the phrase originated during the First World War, when allied soldiers used mortar shells known as toffee apples, because of their resemblance to the confectionery. After using them to successfully take out an enemy, soldiers may have yelled in a sort of victory cry, “How do you like them apples?”

Beyond its use in a John Wayne film and Polanski’s Chinatown, there’s not much of a pop cultural record of the phrase, though it has apparently been listed in idiom dictionaries since the 1920s.

It also seems that every newspaper or magazine article that discusses apples or Apple computers is required to use the phrase as its headline.  (Though it is best used by respected news sources who possess a photograph of a squirrel eating an apple.)

Interestingly, a peek into Google Trends indicates that the phrase “them apples” has received a large percentage of traffic from the fair city of Boston (data has only been kept since 2007).  In fact, our Commonwealth’s proud capital googles “them apples” more than any other city in the world. (Dublin, Ireland, comes in second.)

Yo Ireland, so, how do you like… oh — nevermind.

According to Wikipedia (famous last words, I know — the source of this information has not been cited but Williams Goldman corroborated the details in a WGA seminar in 2003), Matt and Ben’s original story for Good Will Hunting was that of an FBI thriller.  If this is true, it likely stokes the flames of rumors that Matt and Ben weren’t the “real” screenwriters.  (But really, isn’t this sort of questioning of authorship innate in all collaborative, commercial works?)

Affleck and Damon originally wrote the screenplay as a thriller: Young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston, who possesses a superior intelligence, is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At Reiner’s request, noted screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film’s climax ought to be Will’s decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar (Driver) to California. Goldman has denied widely spread rumors that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor.^[1]

Everyone loves a good Brokeback to the Future-esque mashup, so here’s one for Good Will Hunted — a peek into what Good Will Hunting perhaps could have been.