Response To The Film Good Will Hunting

 John C Gibson

Instructor Emma Peterson

Introduction To Sociology 

University Of Massachusetts, Lowell

22 April 2023

This film is about a series of conflicts -- within individual characters as well as between characters -- and many of those conflicts are related to class. Choose one or two of the major conflicts in the film and analyze the role of class in that conflict.

Response To The Film Good Will Hunting

Why start a film with the camera aimed at a Calculus (I) level equation on a chalkboard in a school about a janitor’s life story if it wasn’t to highlight the class conflict of a society? Conflict theory says that the actions taken by conflicting groups make the world tick. The action taken by the man in the class struggle of this film was doing math and reading books with high skills and proficiencies!

The arrogance of the main characters doesn’t seem consequential in the conflicted groups, though. The words “arrogance” and “arrogant” are never mentioned in the popular textbook Sociology Matters, while “proletariat” was mentioned 22 times (Shaefer, 2018). According to Karl Marx, proletariats work for large private enterprises with wealth inherited by the estate system. MIT and Harvard are large private enterprises personified by Skylar, who inherited her wealth precisely from the estate system; laborers are exploited under capitalism, and Willy, the main character, was one among the countless laborers. But laborers can have comparable intelligence to the large enterprises, and Willy’s math skills, on par with a math professor at MIT on certain math subjects, show it. Laborers are no less arrogant than capitalists, and Willy makes fun of the psychological therapists, crashing the therapy sessions to prove it. The capitalist setting was relevant for class grouping, though. The schools involved in the film are well-endowed, and the film would not make sense if filmed in a communist country. For example, the lead female character can not be portrayed as an attractive KGB female agent working to improve the mother country. Instead, the lead female character pays for Harvard tuition the average working-class citizen or public servant can not afford.  

The class grouping was not all about skin color or hair color contrasting either. The lead female character was a brunette, and her style, and color gamut, seemed compatible with the blonde man, Matt Damon, the character Willy, who was in the lower class stratum. Doing math and reading books was, again, the desirable lifestyle for both class groups. For an undergraduate student at Harvard, Skylar likely has an SAT math score of between 790 and 800. The course that Skylar was taking was organic chemistry, a practical job skill for dentists and doctors, and the screenplay says “learn” multiple times, “I have to learn this,” by Skylar with a typical British accent, which could have been voiced by a working-class British person. It appears that, in a conflict, both the higher and lower stratum are doing the same thing of doing math and reading books. Human natures are the same between the proletariats and the bourgeoisie. In the first psychotherapy session, the psychologist’s confidence in his own marriage was crushed by Willy’s insults about “married the wrong woman.” In the second psychotherapy session, where the scene was shot in a peaceful park in Boston, Willy’s lines became tamed, with softer words like “swan” and “garden”, compared to the first session with words like lifting “weights” and “285” ponds of hard iron and cold metal. Arrogance was fluid and can melt, depending on the scene and the setting, in either social stratum. In the second psychotherapy session, the psychologist quashed Willy’s arrogance with horrific Vietnam War stories while they sat on the park bench watching the swans.

 However inconsequential, the proletariats and bourgeoisies express their arrogance differently, even when doing the same things. Proletariats, represented by Ben Aflec’s character impersonating the math genius Willy, at a job interview for a code breaker, demanded “retainer” money from the interviewers. It was out in the open about money, with Ben Aflec’s hands open and palms visible to the public. That was not the case with bourgeoises’ dealing with money. Money was almost invisible to the public in the high-stratum society. For example, the well-paid MIT math professor describes his Fields Award as putting him down to become a “lowly” high-pay professor, trying to diffuse attention to his wealth, in a sarcastic tone. The arrogance expressed by the bourgeoisie was convoluted and sometimes hard to read. It can be a social problem, and the film singles out Unibomber Ted Kaczynski, a Caltech math professor, specifically an assistant professor who provided day-to-day teaching to young undergraduates. It was hard to imagine how Ted Kacynski imparted his thought process to his students. And, in MIT, the Field’s Medal was a point of contention, which the math professor and the psychotherapist argued but couldn’t reach any conclusion regarding a career path for Willy. 

According to Karl Marx, the capitalistic setting accentuates the contrast between the wealthy and the working-class groups. In the film, Willy’s abusive family was the scar of the old era passed down generations from the industrial revolution, specifically the textile industry of Massachusetts, which vanished. In contrast, Skylar’s family was expected to be kind and generous when Willy asked Skylar if her family will pay for the tuition for Stanford. Poverty gives family fertility, and Willy was expected to have twelve siblings. In contrast, Skylar was expected to be a single child, and the film never mentions any sibling of Skylar.

According to Karl Marx, the contrast between the wealthy and the poor would not last long, and a social movement would result in power redistribution. Wealth was the point of contention between Skylar and Willy that Willy could not bear when he said to Skylar that “I don’t love you,” out of arrogance and ego. But arrogance seems to be put aside finally in the last scene of the film when Willy decided to move to California. It was unclear in the film whether the family movement was substantiated. But, arrogance seems to be irrelevant in the end when it comes to family formation and family conflicts. It was not quashed or crushed, or melted down this time. Instead, it was just relented and let go…

Figure 1. The first scene, the first equation after the opening credit shots

Figure 2. Brunette Skylar with a masculine jaw.

Figure 3. The blonde main character.

Figure 4. Second psychotherapy session at a park in Boston 

Figure 5. Retainer money 

Figure 6. Lowly high-pay MIT professor

Works Cited

Conley, Dalton. You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist. 7th ed., W. W. Norton and Company, 2021.

Schaefer, Richard. Sociology Matters. 7th ed., McGraw Hill, 2018.