Good Will Hunting is a film released to major critical acclaim and theatrical success in 1997. It seems to tell a rather basic story, but it forged an intense emotional connection with audiences across America, and even throughout the world. The story centers on a 20-year-old Irish boy living in a poor neighborhood in south Boston. He has suffered from child abuse from his father, so he is stunted in life. He is seemingly trapped in a cycle of poverty along with his close friends, who indulge in street violence, and heavy drinking regularly. He works a menial labor job that happens to be at one of the world’s most prestigious universities: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.
Eventually it is revealed that Will is so incredibly intelligent that he can’t help himself from solving math problems in the most advanced mathematics class at the university. Once he is caught solving these problems, he is given free medical care in the form of therapy sessions by the mathematics professor, which enables Will to overcome his self-hatred by absolving himself of blame for his father beating him as a child.
Will is then able to find true love with a beautiful girl who goes to Harvard, win a job at one of the world’s most prestigious and highly-paid think tanks, and escape his poverty and mental demons while being allowed to work on whatever he wants forever after (Van Sant & Armstrong, 1997). It seems that despite all of its flaws and abuses, the American system assures that the very best rise to the top, and, of course, the film hints, all of us have a Will Hunting lurking within us.
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Althusser argued that ideology is most effective when it is inserted into individual’s minds softly, not with violence, or via specific education, but instead offered as an imaginary solution that helps people identify themselves within the context of reality (Felluga, 2002). One of the strongest emotional bonds that viewers of films have is with the protagonist, whose identity they tend to take on throughout the journey of the film (Cesaratto 2006).
So, effectively, a film has immense power to inculcate people with particular elements of identity, and a film that makes people feel good is an ideal vehicle to communicate ideology because viewers are prepared to identify intimately with the protagonist of a film in an emotional way that is likely to make them receptive to reframing their imagination of reality to reflect the features of the protagonist.
Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting is one of the most feel-good protagonists of all time: he comes from an Irish neighborhood in Boston that is bound by poverty, rife with a history of racism and neglect, he is persecuted by the legal system and enemies on the street, he was violently and mercilessly beaten by his father as a child, he works a dead end job as a janitor, a job that the film itself asserts is ‘for retards,’ where he makes almost no money, and he was let down by the education system that deprived him of a good education, or seemingly any education at all, and he suffers from intense mental demons that torture him and make him hate himself (Van Sant & Armstrong, 1997).
Will’s condition is essentially a conglomeration of the real conditions that most Americans live in: impoverished, uneducated, suffering with mental issues that only expensive therapy can help with, and employed in dead end, soulless jobs; a lot of people are also horrifyingly able to relate to Will’s abuse as a child. Despite all of Will’s extreme disadvantages, he proves to be so prodigiously intelligent that none of the abuse, neglect, or mental demons are enough to stop him from ascending to the top ranks of society and acquiring wealth, power, freedom, and love (Van Sant & Armstrong, 1997). Will Hunting overcomes every social and personal evil imaginable before he makes it to the top.
While Will Hunting is certainly one of the most feel-good protagonists in film history, he may also be the most insidious. A central reason to suspect that Will serves a different purpose than meets the eye is that film viewers report that they deeply identify themselves with Will after watching the film (Cesaratto, 2006). However, the vast majority of people are absolutely nothing like Will, they do not have even close to the level of super-human intelligence that Will does (Cesaretto, 2006).
This means that identification with Will must necessarily reorder people’s imagined relationship to reality in some manner i.e. watching the film must infuse viewers with some sort of ideology. Indeed, a recent study revealed that intelligence has almost no correlation with success in reality (Pluchino, Biondo & Rapisarda, 2018).
In writing about the movie two decades after its release, reviewers have stated that the film ‘changed the way we live our daily lives,’ and that watching it now feels like consuming, ‘felt knowledge’ (Burr, 2017). Most analysis of Good Will Hunting tends to focus on an existentialist notion that Will is able to attain freedom and find meaning in his life by coming to a deeper awareness of himself through psychotherapy (Szabados, 2015).
The typical focus of criticism regarding the film conveniently ignores the fact that the only reason Will ends up with a therapist, a romantic partner, and financial freedom is his extreme intelligence; none of these things would have been given to him if he wasn’t solving some of the most difficult mathematics problems in the world as a relaxing hobby at MIT. Will’s ascendency looks like a representation of the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional eternal election, which stipulates that some people are predestined before birth by the grace of God for salvation, and to live a grand life full of riches and pleasures, while others are predestined to live in misery (Calvin, 2005).
However, Good Will Hunting seems to substitute intelligence for the grace of God. The problem with such a view is that it might easily be utilized to enforce a conceptual hegemony of comfortable nihilism where self-improvement is pointless, and people are trained to simply accept the failures and injustices of the dominant social system they find themselves in (Bazzicalupo, 2016).
Taking Althusser’s insights about ideology in combination with the reactions to Good Will Hunting that treat it as a form of gospel truth, and the dangers of the Calvinist ideology it appears to be promulgating, there is a serious need to investigate the nature of the ideology that the film may have inculcated the majority of the American population with since the film was delivered to the public by Hollywood. There is a severe lack of criticism of the film that addresses the ideology it presents to audiences. Because of the dangerous nature of the ideology latent in the film and the lack of ideological criticism surrounding it, Good Will Hunting is an ideal artifact for ideological analysis.
