It’s been 25 years since Will Hunting (played by a baby-faced Matt Damon) stepped into the office of Sean Maguire (the note-perfect Robin Williams) and found out it wasn’t his fault. Though now a beloved classic, for all its twinkly-eyed charm, the film is not without its rough edges. The plot is set in motion when Will narrowly avoids jail time for beating a former bully senseless. More than once, he and his friends are happy to use slurs. “Bro, how r*tarded you gotta be to get fired from that job?” Morgan (Casey Affleck) asks Will, after being spotted working on a math’s problem on a chalkboard by Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård). This surface reading of the film, though, makes what lies under the surface of the movie even more surprising.
Past all the machismo, Good Will Hunting tells a story that shares a lot in common with the experiences of most, if not all queer people. Will starts the film in denial about himself. His tight-knit group of friends are all he needs to survive, he seems to think, until girlfriend Skylar (Minnie Driver) asks him to move to California. Reluctant in the extreme to leave the tiny world in which he feels comfortable, Will explodes. The incident forces both him and the audience to confront the idea that in Boston, he’s boxed in. Closeted, if you will.
Subscribe to i-D NEWSFLASH. A weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
The film’s finale sees him drive out west to “see about a girl”. Will had other choices, of course. He could have spent his days working construction with best friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck), or taken a lucrative job thrown his way by Gerald. Neither option sat right, though. It’s no surprise the film resonates with people who have had to eschew a pre-determined (read: heteronormative) path to live in a way that feels right for them. Self-actualisation of a hidden, ‘other’ self can put a film dead centre in the queer consciousness, the British Film Institue has noted. The Collider has examined both the queer aspect of the earlier Robin Williams vehicle Dead Poets Society, and its similarities to Good Will Hunting.
I put this reading to Glyn Davis, professor of film studies at the University of St. Andrews. Though undeniably a male-dominated narrative, he explains the film has plenty of influences which divert it from a traditionally heterosexual brand of masculinity.
For one, there’s the star. Though not exactly a queering of masculinity, a core part of Matt Damon’s image in the 1990s was a degree of vagueness in relation to his sexuality, Glyn explains. “Matt Damon – like a number of other prominent male actors of the time – was less concerned with shoring up a rigid masculinity in interviews, which you couldn’t imagine stars doing ten years previously.” It’s certainly hard to picture Sylvester Stallone enthusing about taking his mum to the Oscars. Matt Damon was part of a new canon of stars in the 90s — suddenly the new heartthrobs weren’t machismo muscle men like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, a Calvin’s clad Mark Wahlberg and, regrettably, Johnny Depp — who pioneered an aesthetically proto-softboi approach to being a leading man.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, famously close friends, lived together whilst writing the script, and became subject to “a certain amount of queer gossip and rumour”, says Glyn. Matt Damon himself has since acknowledged the rumours about the pair, which he chalks up to the closeness of their working relationship. In earlier drafts, the two even were perfectly happy to write a gay sex scene into the finale of Good Will Hunting. (Admittedly, this was just to see if studios were looking at it properly before tossing it onto the reject pile.) “They weren’t reading the script closely anymore. It was literally probably a full paragraph about what these two characters were doing to each other,” Matt Damon told the magazine Boston. Even if the scene was designed to stick out like a sore thumb, the exact choice of litmus test does speak to a certain sexual openness, or ambiguity in the reading of the film itself.
There’s also the film’s director; Gus Van Sant, a gay man and darling of ‘New Queer Cinema’. The film movement was first identified by scholar B. Ruby Rich in 1992, who noticed gay and lesbian movies making waves on the festival circuit at the time. In interviews in the late 1990s, the director would often talk about Good Will Hunting right alongside Pink, his surreal and vividly queer novel also released in 1997. “For Good Will Hunting I wanted to preserve what the actual screenplay was doing rather than imposing some sort of stylistic manipulation on top of it,” he told The Austin Chronicle in 1998. “Pink is made up of these different fractals and you can add them up in different ways.”
By then, New Queer Cinema had begun to bleed into the mainstream, taking Gus Van Sant and a host of other directors with it. Big studios were opening up independent labels, such as Fox’s Searchlight (now owned, like everything else, by Disney) or Sony Pictures Classics. What followed were mainstream releases which owed a debt to earlier, under-appreciated queer filmmaking. The Talented Mr. Ripley and Boys Don’t Cry stand out. From a commercial point of view, Good Will Hunting is often recognised as the biggest success story here.
Other details in Good Will Hunting have also pricked up the ears of LGBT+ viewers. For example, queer mathematician Chris Goff has analysed Will Hunting’s mathematical ability as an analogue for LGBT+ identity. Despite attempts to conceal it, Chris points out, Will eventually winds up ‘coming out’ by solving equations in public MIT corridors. “There is a stereotype out there that mathematical ability is innate or fixed, like sexual orientation, and I think the movie reinforces that stereotype with Will,” Chris tells me. Today, maths educators prefer the idea that ability is more fluid, in that it can be learned and improved upon. In hewing to a more antiquated view, the film presents mathematical aptitude as an ‘identity category’, just like being LGBT+, he continues.
I ask him why over the past 25 years, queer audiences have been drawn to the film, and we get to talking about the avalanche of same-sex relationships it depicts. Will’s bromance with Chuckie might be the most obvious, but there’s also Sean and Gerald’s “fraught sort of relationship”, Chris says. Their time on-screen is replete with highs (dinners and afternoons in the pub together) and lows (simmering resentment and screaming matches). Gerald’s assistant Tom (real-life mathematician John Mighton) is also notably jealous of the professor’s affection for Will.
None of this is to say the film is a perfect one-to-one analogue for the LGBT+ experience. A major problem with a queer reading is that what Will represses is childhood trauma, not same-sex attraction. To say the two are homologous, is to equate queerness with psychological damage. Glyn points to the scene in which Sean insists to an eventually-sobbing Will “it’s not your fault”. A queer reading might technically work here, but it’s not the most comfortable fit. “It’s a moment of therapeutic breakthrough rather than necessarily a friendly gay elder saying ‘hey, guys, don’t worry’,” Glyn says.
It’s important to bring this up to understand the pitfalls in queering a film whose creative leads are – despite 90s gossip – straight. Still, queer theory is more than capable of taking on texts which aren’t intentionally or explicitly gay. “It isn’t just interpreting queer texts: a lot of it is also interpreting and contextualising queer coding, made by the straights,” cultural critic Lindsay Ellis has observed. Even if an LGBT+ reading of Good Will Hunting may not be what was originally intended, it can still be enjoyable. We’ve all started making an omelette and ended up with scrambled eggs. In the case of Good Will Hunting, the fingerprints of queer cinema are all over the celluloid, chief.