Film-Philosophy 19 (2015)
America’s Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism,
Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting
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Anna Cooper, University of California, Santa Cruz
([email protected])
Stanley Cavell’s books Pursuits of Happiness and Cities of Words both argue
very engagingly that moral perfectionism is an idea guiding the logic of a
group of Hollywood romantic comedies from the 1930s and 1940s which he
calls ‘comedies of remarriage’. These films, he argues, re-conceive marriage
as a potential source of perfectionist transformation for both a man and a
woman. Underlying this work is an almost invisible assumption that the moral
perfectionist conception of the self has previously belonged primarily to men.
Cavell writes:
It is not news for men to try, as Thoreau puts it, to walk in the direction
of their dreams...What is news is the acknowledgment that a woman
might attempt this direction, even that a man and a woman might try
it together and call that the conjugal (Cavell 1981, 65; italics in
original).
Here he proposes that the revolutionary nature of the remarriage comedies
lies in their application of moral perfectionism not only to men but also to
women and to shared, sexual experience. Yet nowhere is this idea
systematically developed by Cavell: nowhere does he wonder why moral
perfectionism needed to undergo such a revolution to begin with. This article
redresses this gap, exploring the conceptual links between moral
perfectionism and a particular strand of hegemonic American masculinity
reaching back into the 19th century. It begins by drawing a series of
connections between Cavell’s work and the myth of the American frontier
hero, triangulating with the works of Emerson and Thoreau to fully flesh out
these connections. I then use the film Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant,
1997) as an example to elucidate my critique. A male-focused melodrama,
this film depicts a process of transformation that has much in common with
moral perfectionism, particularly in its conceptualization of psychoanalysis
as a philosophical and spiritual endeavor. Yet this transformation is also,
equally, depicted as a transformation from ‘boy’ to ‘man’, forcing us to
address the gendered differences in the ways that psychoanalysis, at least in
its popular mythologisation, is understood to operate for men versus for
women.
Cavell coined the term ‘moral perfectionism’ to refer to ‘...a dimension
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or tradition of the moral life that...concerns what used to be called the state of
one’s soul’ (Cavell 1990a, 2). This tradition amounts to a conception of the
individual which sees the striving for self-fulfillment as a moral calling. It
suggests that human virtue is connected to an ‘idea of being true to oneself—
or to the humanity in oneself, or of the soul as on a journey (upward or
onward)’ (Cavell 1990a, 1). Of course, any number of texts argue that humans
should seek to improve themselves; by itself this would be hard to distinguish
from a mere rhetorical device—albeit one that rests on certain assumptions
about human potential. However, Cavell argues, there is a particular strand of
thinking originating in Plato, turning up in various works of philosophy and
art throughout western history, and finding possibly its consummate defender
in Emerson, which conceives of the necessity to continually improve oneself
as a moral ideal in its own right. On Cavell’s reading, ‘there is no question of
reaching a final state of the soul but only and endlessly taking the next step
to what Emerson calls “the unattained but attainable self”—a self that is
always and never ours...’ (Cavell 2004, 13). While many might favour one
particular model of virtue—a certain set of ideals we should strive to do or
be—Emerson’s conception of self ‘specifically sets itself against any idea of
ultimate perfection’ (Cavell 2004, 3). Instead, the self is conceived as a
journey, in which the process of expansion, development and movement is
never complete.
Cavell is greatly concerned with how moral perfectionism applies to
women, calling the remarriage films ‘comedies of equality’ in which ‘it is
essential…to leave ambiguous the question whether the man or the women is
the active or the passive partner, whether indeed active and passive are apt
characterizations of the difference between male and female’ (Cavell 1981,
82). Indeed, he claims that these films, which ‘essentially concern the status
of the woman’s voice’ (1990a, 3), offer a utopian vision, ‘exemplary of the
possibilities of…society perceivable from its current stance’ (Cavell 1990, 8).
Also considered alongside these remarriage comedies are a group of classical
Hollywood women’s films which he terms ‘melodramas of the unknown
woman’ which, on the other hand, are about a woman whose ‘answer to the
possibility of friendship [in the form of marriage] is a resounding “no”’ – in
other words, a woman for whom solitude or ‘unknownness’ is preferable to a
marriage that would deprive them of their own full humanity (1990, 11).
Although these quotations might be taken as indicative of a feminist reading,
addressing as they do women’s transformation and the limits of this
transformation under traditional patriarchal forms of marriage, feminist
critics have often been less-than-impressed with Cavell’s analysis. He rarely,
if ever, mentions feminism or patriarchy as concepts, nor does he engage with
any of the substantial scholarship on women’s histories which would
historically contextualize the supposedly revolutionary content of these films.
For example, he claims of the remarriage comedies that they ‘declare [their]
participation in the creation of the woman’ (1981, 140) without addressing
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why a woman, but not a man, would need to be re-created under these new
1930s conditions of equality in the first place. Cavell has also been criticized
for failing to acknowledge any of the the substantial work done by women
scholars on the Hollywood women’s film (Modleski 1990).
In fact, although Cavell never quite acknowledges this outright, his
project of identifying and tracing moral perfectionism as a ‘register of the
moral life’ throughout the intellectual history of the West is thoroughly
suffused with an implicit need to rescue it from those who would critique its
relations to gendered, racial, and other forms of hierarchy. Making an idea
that finds some of its consummate supporters in Plato, Kant and Nietzsche –
all rabidly sexist and racist thinkers, to the contemporary reader – appear
palatable for a democratic society must involve somehow carving it away
from its more unsavory connections. Consider how many of these thinkers –
the three latterly mentioned but also Emerson and Thoreau, for example –
advocated and/or practiced celibacy. This celibacy is predominantly framed
in misogynistic terms, where women’s sexuality has the power to seduce men
away from the light of truth, thus framing the moral perfectionist subject as a
kind of priestly male class, an identity to which only a very few powerful
members of society have access. Cavell never quite states outright that it is
his mission to separate moral perfectionism from such unpopular views, but
in my reading his work to incorporate marriage (almost by definition a
collectivist institution that puts the needs of society and the family first) into
an egalitarian and individualist form of democracy are suffused with this
implicit aim. Why indeed does his goal of a reconciliation between moral
perfectionism and democracy fill so many volumes if it is not a difficult task
in the first place?
In any case, my goal in the present article is a more limited one: to
explore the links between moral perfectionism and hegemonic masculinity
specifically in the American cultural context. A current of masculinity can be
found in the writings of those whom Cavell rightly claims to be the
quintessential American moral perfectionist writers—Emerson and Thoreau
(and, I would add, Walt Whitman, whose work is in the same tradition
although Cavell does not discuss him extensively). All these authors are
pervasively concerned with masculinity. Emerson, taking the lead, writes,
‘Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its
members...Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist’ (Emerson
1983c, 261).1 This kind of statement might be taken as an unfortunately
antiquated turn-of-phrase, as though we should take it for granted that
Emerson intended to include all humans were it not for his unfortunately
sexist historical context. Yet the heroes of all these authors are noticeably
masculine. Their arguments are suffused with symbolisms of stereotypically
masculine forms of physical labour like hunting and farming. The following
1
Originally published in 1841.
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discussion will bring out the possibility of a reading in which these authors’
frequent references to ‘man’ and to masculine subjectivities and sensibilities
are given full significance.
Much scholarship on American film masculinities has focused on
hegemonic white masculinity as a ‘dominant regulatory fiction’ (Cohan 1997,
57) that requires a constant performance, a careful balancing of opposing
forces within the male self. Steven Cohan identifies this as a tension between
the civilized and the uncivilized/wild. He explores how this played out in
1950s American cinema and popular culture, which conceived of the white
American man as in crisis due to the difficult transition from the demands of
being a soldier in the Second World War, where Eros and Thanatos could run
free, back to the demands of work and family in civilian life where the
superego had to remain in control. More recent scholarship has drawn out
these claims further in relation to more contemporary American cinema.
Donna Peberdy shows how the trope of masculinity in crisis is actually a
defining feature through which it functions to dominate, exploring film
masculinities as modes for performing this constant crisis (Peberdy 2011, 5),
while Kord and Krimmer argue that contemporary hegemonic masculinities
in cinema are ‘the proud product of a prolonged struggle’ between the
citizen/warrior or vulnerable/impregnable aspects of the male self (Kord and
Krimmer 2011, 2). Yet it is striking how very far back in the history of
American ideas these tropes of hegemonic masculinity can be traced, at least
as far back as Emerson and Thoreau (if not even earlier) and developing
through the American frontier myth and its most significant 20th century
iteration, the western film.
Richard Slotkin in his book Regeneration Through Violence reads the
genesis of what he calls American ‘individualism’ in the myth of the frontier
and its white male heroes. America, he argues, sees itself as straddling the
opposition between civilisation and wilderness. The Puritans saw their own
society as the apotheosis of the lawful, Godly and rational—a bulwark of light
that was constantly threatened by a dark, uncivilised, irrational other (1973,
57). In time, according to Slotkin, this view was tempered by Romanticism,
through which ‘the wilderness landscape took on more appealing qualities
and played a healing or restorative role in relation to the human soul’ (147).
Americans thus developed a double vision of the wilderness: it is both
threatening, there to be conquered or dominated, and the source of a kind of
purity. Popular American heroes, according to Slotkin, represent ‘a blending
of Indian and European characteristics’ (191), with one foot in the world of
the wild backwoods to the west and one in the civilisation to the east (with
Europe as the farthest point east). The American white male hero is
‘simultaneously hunter and farmer, wanderer and citizen, exploiter and
cultivator’ (367) – the familiar trope of hegemonic masculinity as split.
Self-reliance and the capacity to self-create were two extremely
important characteristics within this mythology of the American frontier hero.
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The American hero, in his embodiment of the characteristics of both the
civilised and the wild, could survive with very little help from society,
pressing ever onward into the wilderness to bring to it the conquering light of
civilisation; cities with their hemmed-in and emasculated masses were
antithetical to the independence, freedom and solitude which became the
American mythic ideal (Slotkin 1973, 471). The American hero was free to
re-create himself and society from scratch—a process of constant expansion
and growth which could never be completed until the full realisation of
America’s ‘manifest destiny’ to civilise the whole continent. American
citizens and American society alike were constantly engaged, according to
the myth of the frontier, in a re-creation from scratch, a never-ending process
of expansion and self-realisation which should not rely too heavily on the
models and implements handed down from European metropolitan
civilisation (473).
This all sounds remarkably similar to Emerson in ‘Self-Reliance’ and
‘The American Scholar’, two essays which Cavell takes to be at the center of
American moral perfectionism. In both these works, Emerson theorises a
dichotomy between the urban, the east, Europeanness or the ‘foreign’, and a
degenerate over-civilisation on one hand, and the freedom and virtue found
in nature to the west on the other. In ‘Self-Reliance’ he contrasts the ideal
American man, confident in his own thoughts and feelings, non-conforming
to society, ever willing to enact his beliefs and whims in a continual act of
self-creation, to ‘city dolls’ who cannot stand alone or think for themselves
(Emerson 1983c, 275); in ‘The American Scholar’ he calls these ‘the courtly
muses of Europe’ (1983a, 70),2 in both cases feminising the perceived
antithesis of the ideal American citizen. He worries that America is not doing
enough to foster this individualist masculinity: ‘Young men of the fairest
promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds,
shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with
these,—but are hindered from action….and turn drudges, or die of disgust’
(1983a, 70). The American geography of moral perfectionism is thus mapped
out: the expansion of the self is also a movement away from a stifling, passeddown, stale civilisation to the east—a movement towards nature, into the
wilderness to the west, which alone is where acts of self-creation and selfreliance can occur. This conception already incorporates the trope of
masculinity in crisis: if American society does not continue to expand
westward and thus cultivate the conditions of ideal masculinity, men might
weaken or even die.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s now-canonical 1893 essay ‘The
Significance of the Frontier in American History’, written around the time of
the genesis of the western as a genre, is one of the fullest descriptions of (and
2
Originally given as a lecture in 1837.
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apologias for) the myth of the American frontier hero.3 But this description is
also striking in its use of Emersonian conceptions of the self, virtue and
society, further bespeaking the possibility that when Cavell describes the
American tradition of moral perfectionism he is also describing a tradition of
American masculinity. Turner, as Slotkin’s work might have predicted,
describes the frontier as embodying a conflict, or split, or straddling between
civilisation and primitivity. To the East of the frontier lies the cultivated
society inherited from Europe, while to the West lies a wilderness; at the
frontier lies the ideal balance between these two opposing forces, as
previously civilised men shed their bonds and embrace ‘a love of wilderness
freedom’ (Turner 1976, 43).4 Indeed,
Each frontier did...furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape
from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn
of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and
indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. (57-58)
Here we see a repetition of tropes from Emerson and Thoreau: that civilisation
is a kind of slavery, while at the frontier is freedom and opportunity. This
process is a matter of constant growth and development:
American development has exhibited not merely advance along a
single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually
advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area.
American social development has been continually beginning over
again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American
life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its
continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the
forces dominating the American character. (Turner 1976, 28)
It is the very fact of the boundary between civilisation and wilderness that
causes the frontier’s exemplary version of society to flourish.5 This ideal
frontier society, moreover, both creates and is created by the ideal American
man:
To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics.
That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and
inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find
3
It is also often seen as a prescient description of the hero of the western film—see for
example Baker 2006, 128.
4
Originally published in 1893.
5
This notion of an ever-expanding frontier presenting continual opportunities for ‘rebirth’ is
strikingly similar to Emerson’s ‘circles’: ‘Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that
around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a
beginning…’ (Emerson, 1983b, 403; originally published in 1841)
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expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the
artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;
that dominant individualism...and withal that buoyancy and
exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the
frontier… (Turner 1976, 57)
This conception of individual greatness is startling in the way it seems to sum
up the character of the virtuous man put forth by our moral perfectionist
authors. Coarseness, strength, practicality, inventiveness, ‘lacking in the
artistic but powerful to effect great ends’: these ideas come straight from
Thoreau, who everywhere warns us of the seductiveness of the ease, comfort,
and beauty of the things valued by the masses of society. Turner’s admiration
of acuteness and inquisitiveness are most reminiscent of Emerson in ‘The
American Scholar’, and what Turner calls the ‘buoyancy and exuberance that
come with freedom’ remind us of Whitman’s exhortations to cheerfulness.
All four of these authors—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Turner—
suppose for the virtuous man a kind of pragmatic self-reliance, rugged and
powerful, whose dominant inflection is cheerfulness.
A further way in which this moral perfectionist notion of American
hegemonic masculinity connects to contemporary studies of film masculinity
is in the notion of a confluence or mapping between the virtuous (male)
citizen and the ideal American society. The works of Susan Jeffords and
Yvonne Tasker explored how Hollywood masculinities of the 1980s and
1990s buttressed dominant economic and military ideologies. Again showing
how very far back this confluence goes, Turner writes that the turning out of
virtuous men by the culture of the frontier is ‘like the steady growth of a
complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent’ (Turner
1976, 37), implying that the ideal individuals of American society make up a
single virtuous body. The way Slotkin describes it too, America’s frontier
heroes occupied with their own self-creation were equally participating in the
creation of American society:
This conversion, or self-creation, or initiation, is essentially a personal
process, taking place within the individual. But in American society
the experience of acculturation and of nation building made this
individual experience a social one as well. All men, individually and
collectively, were engaged in becoming Americans—in making a
new, American identity for themselves and, by extension, for the
whole culture. (Slotkin 1973, 473)
Cavell similarly theorises a confluence between the moral perfectionist
transformation of the self and the utopian transformation of society. In
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome he makes it clear that one cannot be
considered except alongside the other; much of the book is concerned with
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demonstrating how moral perfectionism is not only reconcilable with but
essential to John Rawls’s project of critiquing and perfecting American
democracy (Cavell 1990a, 3). Cavell sees moral perfectionism as at the core
of the American democratic project: questions about the organisation and
laws of that society must be, and have always been, about allowing and
encouraging individuals to seek their own highest selves. With the title
Pursuits of Happiness he traces the moral perfectionist conception of the
individual back to the Declaration of Independence itself; he absorbs
Emerson’s use of the term ‘constitution’ to refer to both the constitution of
the body/mind and the ‘writing (or amending) of the nation’s constitution’
(Cavell 1990a, 11). Plato’s Republic is of such central concern to Cavell
precisely because it offers perhaps the clearest and most philosophically
elaborated picture of the interdependence between the virtuous person and the
building of a utopian society. And all of this relies on a notion of individual
virtue as the birthright of white American men.
All these similarities or points of contact between moral perfectionism
and the myth of the American hero I have been discussing also seem to
continually turn up, as might be expected if my contentions are true, in the
critical literature on the western film. A thorough study of the issue would
need to discuss individual film texts within this genre and how they might
relate to moral perfectionism; for now I will only have the space to point out
that within film studies approaches to the western, I find moral perfectionist
language to be strikingly ubiquitous, although most often put forth as a kind
of introductory generalisation that merits no real discussion. Lee Clark
Mitchell, to take just one example, writes,
The one aspect of the landscape celebrated consistently in the Western
is the opportunity for renewal, for self-transformation, for release
from constraints associated with the urbanized East. Whatever else the
West may be, in whatever form it is represented, it always signals
freedom to achieve some truer state of humanity. (Mitchell 1996, 5)
The language of the western hero here is couched in perfectionist terms—
‘self-transformation’, ‘truer state’ and so forth—yet these are treated as selfevident and even a little uninteresting. Moral perfectionist ideas seem to
occupy a kind of background territory to intellectual approaches to the
western, taking for granted that westerns concern themselves with American
ideals of self-transformation and self-reliance alongside their interest in the
growth of American civilisation westward.
Robert Warshow is to my knowledge the only scholar to have put this
kind of language into deliberate discussion in relation to the western, although
his article on the western hero, whilst perceptive and rewarding, is quite brief.
Warshow writes:
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What does the Westerner fight for? We know he is on the side of
justice and order, and of course it can be said he fights for these things.
But such broad aims never correspond exactly to his real motives; they
only offer him his opportunity...What he defends, at bottom, is the
purity of his own image—in fact his honor...the image the Westerner
seeks to maintain can be presented as clearly in defeat as in victory:
he fights not for advantage and not for the right, but to state what he
is, and he must live in a world which permits that statement.
(Warshow 1970, 152)
The desires for ‘honor’ and ‘to state what one is’ sound a lot like moral
perfectionism: they amount to a commitment to intelligibility, virtue and selfexpression. Like Cavell, Warshow contrasts these notions to more traditional
conceptions of ‘the right’ or ‘the good’, which Cavell would respectively call
Kantianism and utilitarianism (Cavell 2004, 25). Moreover, according to
Warshow, ‘justice and order’—that is, the possibility of a principled
American society—arise from the westerner’s commitment to his own
intelligibility; this mirrors Cavell’s formulation that moral perfectionism is
antecedent to any rational conception of goodness or justice (24-26).
In sum, American moral perfectionism as Cavell theorises it has too
much in common with both the myth of the frontier hero and the hegemonic
masculinities of contemporary American cinema to be a coincidence.
American moral perfectionism and hegemonic American masculinity are
deeply intertwined. I should clarify, however, that the question of causality
or inheritance must remain open. Slotkin has it that the myth of the American
hero, and the ‘individualism’ which it cultivates, arises out of the literature of
the frontier; but it seems clear that this ‘individualism’ must also, equally,
have arisen out of old world philosophy, particularly Locke and Mill but also
the likes of Plato and Aristotle, and indeed have caused the frontier myth to
take the particular forms it took. In any case, Cavell gravitates to Emerson
without considering how Emerson’s work grows out of a wider cultural
context, one expression of a whole set of discourses surrounding and
connecting the themes of self-determination and self-creation, principles of
law and civic organisation, American national identity, expansion westward,
and hegemonic masculinity.
bell hooks argues that Good Will Hunting represents a progressive reworking
of masculinity, in which the male protagonist’s ‘choice to love, to live, is to
break with the patriarchal model [and] liberate his spirit’ (hooks 2004, 134).
He thus lets go of a ‘violent undercurrent’ (ibid., 132) in favor of something
hooks calls ‘sensitivity’. While it is not uncommon to read this film as
progressive in its politics of masculinity, I believe that such a reading fails to
acknowledge how Good Will Hunting engages with the history of American
hegemonic masculinity I have been tracing. If Will is faced with a choice
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between sensitivity and violence, this choice is inscribed by the very same
dualistic, catastrophized notions of masculinity that appear in Emerson,
Thoreau and Turner, and informs Cavell’s moral perfectionism. Here I reread
Good Will Hunting, exploring how it mobilizes a moral perfectionist notion
of transformation that, however, cannot fully be understood without
acknowledging moral perfectionism’s connections to hegemonic American
masculinity.
One reason why Good Will Hunting is a pressing example here is
because, although it is of relatively high ‘quality’ (it was nominated for nine
Oscars, winning two), it is a familiar Hollywood generic narrative of
masculine transformation, a ‘coming of age’ story in the tradition of other
Hollywood male melodramas of the period such as Dead Poets Society (Peter
Weir, 1989), Scent of a Woman (Martin Brest, 1992) and With Honors (Alek
Keshishian, 1994). The film participates in a set of familiar Hollywood
tropes: a young man, led by an older, in some way exemplary man, seeks to
define his own individuality and his inhabitation of masculinity against the
backdrop of an overbearing institution. Although well made, Good Will
Hunting is by no means an exceptional film. My conclusions will thus, I hope,
be useful to the interpretation of a relatively wide swath of Hollywood cinema
– unlike the remarriage comedies which most critics (Cavell included)
consider to be extraordinary.
To briefly review the plot of Good Will Hunting: Will Hunting (Matt
Damon) is a brilliant young man with an extraordinary talent for mathematics.
However, he is also troubled. Orphaned at a young age, he is now a member
of a South Boston street gang, working as a janitor at MIT. One night he
anonymously solves a difficult math problem that a professor, Gerald
Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård), left on a chalkboard. Lambeau eventually
discovers Will’s identity and offers to get him out of jail (where he has briefly
landed after an arrest for brawling) on two conditions: first, that he study
mathematics with him, and second, that he meet with a therapist. Will
consents, and after disastrous sessions with several well-known
psychotherapists, Lambeau takes Will to his old friend Sean Maguire (Robin
Williams), a washed-up psychologist teaching at a community college. Sean
and Will hit it off. The rest of the film follows Will as, with the help of Sean,
he works through his various psychological issues: his anger, his fear of
intimacy, his general immaturity. Will meets a Harvard student, Skylar
(Minnie Driver), who becomes his girlfriend; however when she asks him to
move to California with her, he bolts. Although under pressure from Lambeau
to become a professional mathematician, with Sean’s help Will realises that
this is not what he wants; in the end he heads for California to find Skylar and
follow a new path.
We might begin by thinking about the final shot of the film (figure 1).
It is a shot of Will’s car cruising down a motorway. The motorway is nearly
Figure 1
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empty and is surrounded by a lush forest, indicating that he has left Boston;
he is heading west. The car and road are in semi-darkness, while ahead is a
glimmering dusk. The shot is taken from behind and above the car, following
it along the road at the same speed. We follow this car for some time, until it
speeds ahead of us and, going around a bend, disappears from view entirely.
In the context of the rest of the film, this shot takes on rich and varied
meanings which I will discuss in some detail.
The first thing we might notice is this final shot’s resemblance to the
archetypal western ending: Will is ‘riding off into the sunset’, heading west
for a new adventure, leaving an old, civilised life behind. The geography of
Good Will Hunting closely parallels that of the frontier myth: when Will
leaves Boston for California, he leaves behind the city, the institutions, the
sense of himself as a ‘leaning willow’; he heads west to find freedom, selfreliance and self-creation.
As in the frontier myth, Will’s achievement of masculinity is deeply
tied to the development of American society. The persistent use of American
flags in the mise-en-scène ought to alert us to this: they are in every bar, in
Sean’s office, on a (phallic) water tower by a baseball diamond. Red, white,
and blue is the dominant colour scheme in certain key shots: for example, the
first time we see Will in a subway car, the subway car is painted in red and
white and the sky in the window behind him is a deep blue, giving the
impression of stripes. Here, the film seems to be telling us, is the American
representative man.
At the scene of his arraignment for brawling, Will explicitly claims that
America is on his side. He was arrested for punching a police officer, and in
his own defense he claims,
There is a lengthy legal precedent, Your Honor, going back to 1789,
whereby a defendant can claim self-defense against an agent of the
government, if that act is deemed a defense against tyranny, a defense
of liberty.
[...]
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I am afforded the right to speak in my own defense, sir! By the
Constitution of the United States, this is the same document which
guarantees my liberty. Now liberty, in case you’ve forgotten, is the
soul’s right to breathe. And when it cannot take a long breath, laws
are girded too tight.
Will is quite floridly claiming for himself an older American identity, an
identity which has been lost amid the chaos of twentieth-century America. He
claims that he, as a kind of maverick freedom fighter, is actually closer to the
soul of the country than the legal institutions which regularly claim that
position. (Later on, he rejects a job offer from the National Security Agency
on similar grounds.) Good Will Hunting is an extension of the frontier myth,
participating in this myth’s intersections with masculinity and American
national identity. When Will ‘rides off west’, he signals his newfound
inhabiting of the myth of hegemonic American masculinity, taking his place
in the pantheon of American cinematic and literary male heroes.
The use of psychotherapy as the method of Will’s transformation
suggests a number of things. Psychoanalysis has long been theorised in
studies of popular culture to be a tool of patriarchy, especially when used on
women: it is a method for medicalising and ‘curing’ a woman’s panic, or
‘hysteria’, at her own powerlessness in patriarchal society. But this leaves
open the question: how, in popular culture, is psychoanalysis used on men?
What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and popular masculinities?
Although certainly there are many films in which a man is a psychoanalytic
patient (many are comedies, a la Woody Allen),6 I would like to suggest the
the idea of therapy is often configured quite differently when applied to men
than when applied to women in popular culture: it becomes a tool for growth
and maturation, for the cultivation of hegemonic American masculinity, a
positive force which frees men to achieve their full potential for selfknowledge and self-creation.
In my reading, Cavell fails to acknowledge this distinction between the
application of psychoanalysis to men versus to women. Compare the role of
psychoanalysis in, say, Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) to that in Good
Will Hunting. Charlotte (Bette Davis) remains unknown, as symbolized
through her remaining uncoupled, while Will ultimately achieves legibility
and love. Charlotte begins from a place of paralysis, while Will begins from
a place of untamed wildness. Despite her transformation, Charlotte still at the
end remains in the same house (though she changes it), while Will moves
westward across the landscape to a new beginning. And perhaps most
importantly, Charlotte’s transformation involves a physical metamorphosis
6
Also relevant are What About Bob? (Frank Oz, 1991) and Analyze This (Harold Ramis,
1999).
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of the body – she is an ‘ugly duckling’ brought into line with patriarchal
standards of beauty – while Will’s body is not at stake and was already
granted wholeness at the start of the film. Cavell’s discussion of Bette Davis’
body as a site of transformation does not seem to notice this difference. Indeed
even when he claims that the remarriage comedies reveal how ‘a feature of
the medium of film… is [its] power of metamorphosis or transfiguration’ of
the female body (1990a, 122), he treats this as a supreme strength of film
rather than a potential sexist problem with it, arguing that Laura Mulvey and
her feminist colleagues simply can’t see this because they are too singleminded in centering the male gaze (124). But it does matter very much that
there is an entire genre of film devoted to transformation of the female body
(McDonald 2010), while no corresponding physical transformation of the
male body exists as a trope in American cinema.
When a man’s body is in distress, on the other hand, what is needed is
to free him from external forces that would seek to imprison him; the problem
is assumed to be external or institutional rather than internal to the man. To
Figure 2
return to the final shot of Good Will Hunting: because Will is driving himself,
the shot suggests proactivity, motion and freedom. In other parts of the film,
the mise-en-scène has insinuated the opposite, Will’s imprisonment and
stasis. For example, in an early scene Will and his buddies start a brawl with
some street rivals (figure 2). They are surrounded on all sides by chain-link
fences and cold cement walls; occasional shots are filmed through the chainlink fence, emphasising a sense of entrapment. The bright blue sky gleams
above them, as it does on so many occasions in this film, always suggesting
the possibility of escape, of enlightenment.7 But the boys seem unaware of
this realm of possibility. Part of the fight sequence is in slow motion,
apparently showing us their subjective experience—in which this fight is the
7
This reading is informed by Van Sant’s other work, such as My Own Private Idaho (1991)
and Elephant (2003), in which he uses the sky to evoke a sense of escape from the everyday
problems of the world.
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most important thing in the universe. The screen is filled with their
momentary heroism, as if we ought to forget that they are the aggressors in
this wholly unnecessary scuffle. Inevitably the cops arrive; they slam Will
first against the chain-link fence, then down onto the tarmac as they handcuff
him. Later, we see Will in his jail cell. The film’s imagery thus sets up his
transformation as one from imprisonment to freedom, from bondage to
autonomy. The young men’s view of themselves is thus illustrated by the
film’s mise-en-scène, aligning the film with Will’s view of himself - rather
than given the distance and inscrutability that women’s interior lives are
frequently forced into through the metaphor of physical appearance.
Notice the similarity here to the Emersonian conception of American
masculinity: if men behave badly, it is because they are in crisis, and if they
are in crisis, it is because American society has failed them. In the American
popular context, psychoanalysis on a man is concerned with a transformation
of American institutions (educational, legal, familial) rather than with finding
him a way to inhabit those institutions more agreeably.
In another sign of the writing of Will’s spiritual needs onto his
surrounding environment rather than his body, Sean’s office resembles a
prison or cave (figure 3). It is semi-subterranean, with unpainted concrete
Figure 3
walls. Sunlight, if any, shines down in at a steep angle through high windows.
The wall which borders on the hallway outside is made of an opaque glass
with a pattern of vertical bars. In his first meeting with Sean, Will examines
a painting of Sean’s which is perched on a window ledge. It is a picture of a
tiny boat in a rough, stormy sea. As Will points out, it is a ‘Winslow Homer
ripoff, except you got whitey rowing the boat’—a reference to ‘Gulf Stream’,
Homer’s allegory of black slavery. This sequence is awash in symbols of
bondage, signifying the imprisonment and slavery of the two men. Plato’s
Cave allegory presents itself here, which Cavell calls ‘the most extended and
systematic treatment, or portrait, among the great philosophers of the
perfectionist perception of the moral life—a perception of it as moving from
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a sense and state of imprisonment to the liberation of oneself’ (Cavell 2004,
317). In the Cave allegory the state of the mass of humanity is envisioned as
imprisoned in a dark cave, watching shadows projected on a wall, with the
goals of education or philosophy both to make us aware that behind us,
outside, is a sun, and to help us begin the process of moving towards the light.
And indeed, at the very moment in which Will gazes at the painting, a moment
signalled through magical, expansive music as the beginning of Will’s
transformation, his face is suddenly bathed in a blazing light, as though he
were looking directly into the sun (figure 4). Sean’s office, then, is a visual
representation of what Cavell calls the ‘moment of perfectionism’ (Cavell
2004, 316): here in this office which resembles a subterranean jail cell, Will’s
state of imprisonment becomes visible to himself and he begins the journey
of moving towards the light.
The film’s final shot completes the Cave metaphor: Will is heading into
Figure 4
a glowing sky, moving out of darkened surroundings and towards the light
ahead. Yet this agency – Will’s possibility of movement, of choice – is more
available to men than to women. In his now-classic works on the Hollywood
melodrama, Thomas Elsaesser explored the relationship between the
woman’s film, geographical space, and the stifling conditions of patriarchy.
Contrasting it to the western, which is characterized by wide open landscapes
and expanding territories, Elsaesser argues, “the world is closed” to the
melodramatic heroine (1987, 55). Although Charlotte in Now, Voyager does
travel, she is exceptional in this respect; in other women’s films like Letter
from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) and Stella Dallas (King
Vidor, 1937), travel for the heroine is either a distant fantasy or a lie.
Moreover, this re-education or therapy - Sean’s leading of Will from
the darkness of the Cave to the light of day - is inseparable from Sean’s role
as a father figure. In their second session, in a park, Sean gives Will a fatherly
dressing-down. First Sean speaks about his own life experiences, portraying
Will as a kind of virgin—having never left Boston, never gained knowledge
except from a book, never loved (even if he has ‘been laid a few times’); he
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portrays Will’s life as essentially unconsummated. Then Sean says, ‘When I
look at you I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scaredshitless kid.’ Soon, Sean is addressing Will as ‘son’ and protecting him from
the designs of Lambeau, who at first presented himself as alternative father
figure to Will but who ultimately cedes this possibility when he kneels before
Will and blubbers about how Will’s superiority has left him miserable—an
effeminate gesture symbolising the weaknesses in Lambeau’s institutional
values, against which Will’s moral perfectionist masculinity is defined.
Sean’s eligibility as educator, psychotherapist and spiritual father figure
for Will is emphasised and contrasted to Lambeau’s through Sean’s
performance of masculinity. Robin Williams has a talent for performing a
gender or sexual identity; Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993) and The
Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996) are prime examples of the theatrical,
exaggerated performances of gender and sexual identity which are central to
Williams’ star image. In Good Will Hunting, I submit that Williams’
performance is similarly (although perhaps more subtly) exaggerated and
theatrical, only here he performs the hegemonic masculinity that we expect
of Hollywood heroes rather than a (comical or melodramatic) deviation from
it. Brandishing his superior physical strength, he calls Will names such as
‘pissant’ and playfully hazes him. He has a gruff, working-class Boston
accent, which contrasts sharply to Lambeau’s European mannerisms. Perhaps
the most extended moment of this gender performance is Sean’s meeting with
Lambeau in a pub. We know Sean to be emotionally sensitive and expressive,
as well as highly educated. However, when he goes to the working-class male
atmosphere of the pub, he turns foul-mouthed, pugnacious and superstitious
in a way that feels like a performance on the part of the character.
SEAN: Can I get you a beer?
LAMBEAU: No, just a Perrier.
SEAN: (To bartender.) That’s French for club soda...Couple of
sandwiches too. Put ‘em on my tab.
BARTENDER: You ever plan on paying your tab?
SEAN: Yeah, chief. Got the winning lottery ticket right here.
BARTENDER: What’s the jackpot?
SEAN: 12 million.
BARTENDER: I don’t think that’ll cover it.
SEAN: Yeah, but it’ll cover your sex change operation. (Turning to
Lambeau) Nuts?
LAMBEAU: No, thanks.
Sean’s heterosexual, working-class masculinity is directly contrasted to
Lambeau, who is so out-of-place that he does not realise how inappropriate it
is to drink bottled water in such a milieu. Bottled water, and especially Perrier,
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is a comically stereotypical Hollywood signal for effeminacy.8 (And the pub
does not even stock it.) Sean also makes a joke at the expense of a
marginalised gender identity, as if to emphasise his membership in the
ultimate heteronormative group, that of the rugged working-class male.
Finally he offers Lambeau ‘nuts’, which Lambeau refuses—a gesture that
begs for a double reading. Sean thus functions as a ruggedly masculine role
model and a father figure, defined along what Stella Bruzzi identifies as a
traditional or conservative strain of Hollywood fatherhood that reappeared in
the 1990s. Such a father figure, Bruzzi argues, has consistently been how
Hollywood has ‘“worked through” its anxieties about masculinity’ (Bruzzi
2005, 158). Jeffords, further, addresses how Reagan-era Hollywood cinema
centered the hegemonic father-son relationship as a convincing symbol for
American nationalism (1994, 67). When the patient is a man, the therapist
must school him in hegemonic masculinity first and foremost in order to
achieve moral perfectionist transformation. Will’s conflict and his ultimate
decision to head west thus amount to a reworking of the trope of hegemonic
masculinity as split, as in crisis: his crisis is resolved through moral
perfectionist transformation performed by a suitably masculine father figure.
Given the links between moral perfectionist transformation and
masculinity traced here, it is no wonder that moral perfectionism itself is in
need of transformation, a project with which Cavell occupies the space of
several books. Cavell aims to show that moral perfectionism can apply to
women, yet he never fully acknowledges the historical contexts which
necessitate his doing this work. He does not recognize that moral
perfectionism, as it has developed in the American context, has traditionally
been thoroughly male-centric, enmeshed in myths of masculinity and
virtually excluding women from the possibility of self-expression, the pursuit
of happiness or citizenship in the American utopia. Thus when he extols
moral perfectionism as an achievement of American culture and Hollywood
film, with psychoanalysis as a major configuration of moral perfectionist
transformation, his arguments ring hollow for feminists, who sense that he
has only re-stated and romanticised the case for American patriarchy.9
8
One example is in Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989), in which bottles of water are planted
on two corpses to make it look as though they committed suicide because they were gay.
9ThisworkwouldnothavebeenpossiblewithoutthekindsupportofEdGallafent.
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Filmography
Brest, Martin (1992) Scent of a Woman. USA.
Columbus, Chris (1993) Mrs. Doubtfire. USA.
Keshishian, Alek (1994) With Honors. USA.
Lehmann, Michael (1989) Heathers. USA.
Nichols, Mike (1996) The Birdcage. USA.
Ophuls, Max (1948) Letter from an Unknown Woman. USA.
Oz, Frank (1991) What About Bob? USA.
Ramis, Harold (1999) Analyze This. USA.
Rapper, Irving (1942) Now, Voyager. USA.
Van Sant, Gus (1991) My Own Private Idaho, USA.
Van Sant, Gus (1997) Good Will Hunting. USA.
Van Sant, Gus (2003) Elephant. USA.
Vidor, King (1937) Stella Dallas. USA.
Weir, Peter (1989) Dead Poets Society. USA.
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