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To my mind, the widely acclaimed 1998 Oscar-nominated hit, Good Will Hunting, offers us a convenient example of how identity in popular American film is constructed almost exclusively according to gender and heterosexuality, at the expense of class. Good Will Hunting is particularly useful because the film pretends to be about class difference, at least for a time. Ultimately, however, the lead characters are informed less by such difference than by their youthful good looks and, in the case of the central character, a talent as large as Harvard Yard.
You might recall one of the more dramatic scenes when Chuckie, played by the jaw-jutting Ben Affleck, lectures the titular hero, played by the equally magnetic Matt Damon, on the foolishness of Will's decision to decline a lucrative computer job interview with a large corporation. The two handsome man-boys are standing amid the rubble of their work site. At first it is difficult to tell if their work involves construction or destruction, but they are surrounded by bricks, noise, and mortar dust. They wear hard hats, swill from thermos bottles, carry lunch pails, lean against cars, require showers. Their speech is inflected with the whuz-it-to-yehs of south Boston, and although they share impossibly good looks and pretematurally white teeth, we know that everything about this scene signifies the solidly clock-punching working-class.
In a winning bit of moral role reversal, Chuckie is advising the evidently smarter Will on a correct career path. Will, in placing his tribal roots and his loyalty to neighbourhood friends over a guarantee of life among the affluent reaches of the middle-class, has been foolishly rejecting the very escape hatch the lamer Chuckie can only dream about. Chuckie might not possess a savant's facility with memory recall or a genius's aptitude for complex equations, but he knows what he likes -a fast-track away from south Boston and far from the dirty brick-laying business. Upbraiding Will for not heeding the soft knock of opportunity, Chuckie appeals to his friend's noble urge to be a tree fraternal hero. Such a guy would leave the south streets of Boston in order to serve as a symbol of success for the vicariously happy working-stiffs left behind. Chuckie argues that unlike him and the rest of the...