[With pre-season sports practices beginning this week, I’ve officially got two sons in high school (!!!!). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy pop culture representations of American teens—share the teen texts & contexts that stand out to you in comments, fellow kids!]
On the use of
therapy to help tell the stories of two troubled, telling teens.
There’s a lot to like about Good
Will Hunting, and much of it is deeply engaged with American identities
and communities: first and foremost there’s Robin Williams’ career-best
performance as Sean
Maguire, a South Boston child genius turned Vietnam vet turned therapist
for fellow Vietnam vets turned mourning widower seeking to rediscover the spark
that he has lost along with his wife; but there’s also, among other things, a
pretty incisive if quick set of portraits of different Boston communities, from
the Southie of Will (Matt Damon) and his friends to the Cambridge of Harvard
and MIT; and a really interesting multi-generational American narrative, with
Williams and his college roommate (Stellan Skarsgard)
representing in this analysis two very different paths that the nation took
after the 60s and Will and his British immigrant and fellow orphan girlfriend (Minnie Driver) a new
generation coming to grips with its past and making its hesitant way forward. But
to my mind, the one scene that the film—and its wunderkind young screenwriters
Damon and Ben Affleck—didn’t quite nail is also perhaps the most important: Will and Sean’s breakthrough
in therapy. Damon’s performance in the scene is phenomenally good, but I
just don’t buy that Sean’s repetition of “It’s not your fault” in relation to
Will’s history of abuse is enough to shatter decades of repression and
avoidance.
Therapy in general and
breakthroughs in particular are, it seems to me, particularly difficult to
capture on film, as they require the kinds of patient and gradual and
multi-part conversations that can drag the pace of a film to a virtual halt. Similarly,
much of what defines teenage identity and experience (and Will is either a
teenager or a very early twenty-something, I would say) is in a lot of ways
quieter and more inward-looking than can be easily captured in a film; it’s no
coincidence that many of the most acclaimed movies about teenage life are, like
those made by John Hughes, all about putting teenagers together in places and
sequences where they have charged and impassioned conversations, drawing out
those introverted identities. For a single film to capture both what it means
to be an individual teenager and what therapy can ideally accomplish is thus an
extremely tall order. But I would argue that there is such a film in our
history, one that is known to many film buffs mainly as the movie that (in this
view) robbed Raging Bull of its Best
Picture Oscar: Robert Redford’s directorial debut, Ordinary People
(1980). I’m not going to debate the Best Picture question here—Bull, like most of Martin
Scorcese’s films, doesn’t work for me nearly as well as it seems to for
most viewers, but in any case the two films are so different as to reveal just
how subjective and inconclusive the idea of choosing one as the year’s Best
Picture really is. But I most definitely will stand up for Redford’s film on
its own terms.
There are lots of ways to make
that argument, including those that have little to do with teenagers or
therapy: the perfect pairing of Mary Tyler Moore and Donald
Sutherland; the best use of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” in any movie; the cinematography
and especially how well the film captures the textures and details of its
suburban settings in fall and winter; the moments of humor that provide just
enough balance to keep the film from being dominated by its darker tones. But
what makes Ordinary People truly
great, and truly revelatory about its core themes and experiences, are two
central performances: the unbelievably impressive film debut of a 20 year old
Timothy Hutton as the movie’s protagonist, Conrad Jared, to my mind the most
rich and realistic teenager in any American film; and Judd Hirsch as Conrad’s unusual,
sarcastic, and very committed therapist, Dr. Berger. The therapy sessions between
the two of them form the movie’s core and heart in every sense, and are allowed
to develop with precisely the kind of patient, gradual, quiet, multi-part pace
about which I wrote above; by the time they, and we, come to the breakthrough,
aided by a new tragedy in Conrad’s life and one of the most judicious and best
uses of flashback I’ve ever seen, it feels entirely believable and convincing,
not least because it’s partial and painful and represents, without question,
only a step (if a crucial and literally life-saving one) on Conrad’s continuing
journey toward health, happiness, and a more balanced and realized sense of
himself and his identity and future.
Interestingly
enough, Good Will Hunting gives its great last line to
Williams’ therapist (whose own rich character trajectory will definitely continue
beyond that ending), while Hirsch’s character is absent from Ordinary People’s final scenes (which
are devoted instead to the culminating conversations between first Moore and
Sutherland and then Hutton and Sutherland). But perhaps that’s part of my point
about Redford’s film—therapy, like teenage life, is ideally a stage of
experience, and while Conrad Jared has not left either entirely behind by the
end of the film, his time with Dr. Berger nonetheless feels as if it has
reached a satisfying conclusion. Next teen texts tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other teen texts & contexts you’d share?
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