On the character who reflects communal stereotypes—and the one who
transcends them.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a community
that—like any college town, of course, but I would argue with a particular
intensity in this case—has a conflicted relationship with the prominent
universities (Harvard and MIT) which it hosts. And when the two childhood
friends wrote their first (and to date only) screenplay, for the film that
became Good Will Hunting (1997;
the two won the Best
Original Screenplay Oscar for their work), they created a character who
embodies the worst possible images of Harvard and Ivy League elitism: the long-haired,
snobby, arrogant, academic fraud of a grad student with whom Will gets into a
debate (standing up for his townie friend Chuckie, whose lack of
intelligence the grad student has insulted) in a “Harvard bar.”
The grad student’s ugliness could be read as just another version of the
kind of elitism about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, but I believe that
Damon and Affleck have taken the stereotypes even further in this case: the
student admits to his own intellectual fraudalence and plagiarism, relishing
the fact that he will achieve success and high status in any case thanks to his
“degree” (in direct contrast to Will’s genuine but, as the student frames it, socially
unsuccessful intelligence). Leaving aside the ironic reality that a graduate
degree in History is no longer a guarantee of even a job, much less elite
social or financial status, the real problem with this character is that, in a
film full of impressively three-dimensional human beings (especially the two
central adult characters played by Robin Williams and Stellan Skarsgard),
he’s a cartoon, and a particularly unbelievable one at that.
The character whom Will meets (and is at least partly trying to impress)
during this same scene, Minnie Driver’s Harvard undergraduate Skylar, seems in
some ways like another such stereotype, on the fantasy side this time: a
British trust fund baby who’s both pre-med and beautiful. But after Will’s friends hang out with
Skylar for a night, Chuckie notes that she has changed his perspective on
Harvard students, and I would argue that the character has a similar effect on
us as viewers—particularly in the scene when she fills Will
in on her backstory, including the early death of her father that left her
with that trust fund but with a hole in her heart as well. There are multiple
characters and events that contribute to Will’s evolution in the course of the
film, but Skylar has to be located at the top of that list, and I would argue
that it’s precisely the way in which she challenges Will’s preconceived notions
of class, elitism, institutions like Harvard, and his own future that produce
such effects.
Next Harvard movie tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other images of Harvard or higher ed you’d highlight?
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