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Revisioning Migration: On the Stratifications of Irish Boston in Good Will Hunting

This article reinterprets the outcomes of American immigrant narratives through the lens of Irish-American cultural discourses in the film Good Will Hunting. It examines the filmmaker's (and screenwriters') use of collective cultural devices--language, alcohol consumption, military service, color symbology, etc.--as instruments of social orientation, for both the Irish-American characters and their antitheses, the Harvard students and one MIT professor presented in the film. This argument emphasizes the dynamic relations and interconnected discourses that Boston Irish have with the nation's contemporary process of self-imagining, of forging what are sometimes non-geographic cultural borders, and of projecting a harmonious cohabitation of diverse groups through popular culture. ********** In the United States, politicians often place specific importance on social contributions of immigrants. This focus insinuates that newcomers (like metropolitans, in mythic circumstances) achieve status through talent and intrinsic potential, factors external to the social and economic marginalization that they might concurrently confront. While these models are ostensibly constructive for metropolitan integration, such depictions often misrepresent immigrant status because the "typical" cultural images of immigrants do not correspond to median demographics (in economic and social senses). In this vein, Irish migration to Boston has been engaged as an exemplification of transitional social stratification--from poor beginnings to socioeconomic status and political might--making them a "model" immigrant group. This particular myth habitually references John F. Kennedy and his family, ironically posing a multimillionaire educated at elite establishment schools as representative of the Irish community as a whole--or at least of the potential of that community, when "pulled-up-from-bootstraps." This reductive conceptualization fails to encompass the density of the Irish experience in America, yet it is a central part of group's collective orientation, in both the academy and popular culture. In this myth, the Irish were hyphenated after Kennedy, becoming -American. (1) This conventional sociohistoric conceptualization of Americanization for immigrant groups has recently been challenged, notably in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Zinn's text delineates continued marginalization of certain demographics in the United States, positing robust opposition to the traditional hierarchical organization that frames immigrant adoption of established culture and social norms as a route to socioeconomic equality. In doing so, Zinn demonstrates the often oppressive nature of national narratives themselves. He comments that we live amidst "continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few" (687). These collective social structures, which often take the form of metaphoric cultural systems, create exclusion and cause inequality. (2) Zinn's book has been central to a post-Kennedy re-imagining of the Irish-American plight, an example of which emerged conspicuously in the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting (1997), directed by Gus Van Sant, a film that mentions Zinn's text by name. "If you want to read a real history book," says protagonist Will Hunting, played by Matt Damon, "read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. That book will fuckin' knock you on your ass." Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, screenwriters of Good Will Hunting, were Zinn's neighbors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1980s. This film interprets two communities in Boston--working-class Irish-Catholic immigrants and their descendents and the landed establishment--through the story of a boy-genius from a traditionally Irish Catholic neighborhood, South Boston (or "Southie"). (3) This article investigates the norms of this subnational imagined community through the filmmaker's (and screenwriters') use of collective cultural devices--such as language, alcohol consumption, military service, color symbology--as instruments of social orientation, both for the Irish-Americans and their antitheses, as represented by Harvard students and one MIT professor. …