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Good Will Hunting or Wild Goose Chase?: Masculinities and the Myth of Class Mobility

Perhaps one of the reasons that 1997's Good Will Hunting received such warm critical and popular receptions is because its narrative is for many viewers another telling of America's most dominant myth. Leo Rull, for example, a South Boston social worker from the depressed, working class neighborhood represented in the film, said, "You don't have to be a genius to make it in life ... But the movie shows you can make it regardless of all the odds stacked against you" (qtd. in "South Boston"). The film's story falls into the well-worn grooves of the rags to riches story of class mobility whose ideological function is to rationalize the inequitable nature of labor relations in a capitalist society. In America, if you have enough perseverance, so the old homily goes, there is no limit to how high you can climb the ladder of status and wealth. Thus, those who remain where they are must view their own immobility as indicative of some personal, rather than social, failing. For the film's stars and co-authors, Matt Damon and Matt Affleck, Good Will Hunting has proved their breakthrough film. So the Horatio Alger narrative even becomes the story that the members of the Academy told when they awarded Damon and Affleck, previously "independent" bit actors, the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1997.