Character Development and Demonstration of Ego

How the film Good Will Hunting shows the way

Rising action gets the love. Climax is where the headlines are. Resolution is not just remembered as narrative’s key, but felt as cathartic release. Character development is less heralded, often unseen even if felt, and in the background — glossed over and unregistered as a concrete data point, yet the subtext is accrued to the character in the viewers’ psyche. Climax is in your face. Character development shapes the narrative often without the reader/viewer/listener realizing when this happens.

Let’s examine one narrow slice of character development done about as well as any piece of writing. In the film Good Will Hunting, the volatile protagonist Will Hunting is presented as troubled, violent, disadvantaged, and sneaky smart. The poor kid from a redlined neighborhood with genius intellect is not novel. In some ways this is as old and tired a cliche as the Hooker with a Heart of Gold®. The writing does not feel this way, though. The heavy lifting is done not just with rising action, but with character development that doesn’t strain the cliche elements of framing and instead softens them, doing so subtly.

Will Hunting’s character most certainly displays ego. He finds bourgeois fakery stone anathema. Worse yet in his eyes is self-aggrandizing behavior. This protaganist is apart from such. This is his world view. Implied is that the character views himself as harboring such traits and that these are a strength.

This is seen when Will dress down Clark, the snobby Harvard grad student: “You got that from Vickers! You have any of your own ideas, or are you gonna just rehash some obscure passage you read, try to pass it off as your own idea to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?” He has not injected himself here to build himself up, but to defend Chuckie and in the process tear down Clark’s hollow braggadocio.

A viewer might not pick up on the difference without one three or four second exchange in this multi-minute scene. “When you get outta here you’re gonna realize three things. One, you’re going to start to think. First, don’t do that.” Funny that the advice to this blowhard is to not think. The third item is “that you paid a hundred and fifty grand for an education you could have gotten for a buck fifty in late fees at the public library.” Clark retorts, “But I’ll have a degree and you’ll be serving my kids fries in the drive thru on our way to a ski vacation.” Now Matt Damon shines here. The laugh. The smile. The easy response, “Maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal.” The point of ego Clark thought he was attacking was not there. Will has incredible strength of ego, but it ain’t where anyone who wants to lay into him thinks it is.

Another subtle placement of the same idea is the repeated airplane joke. Here’s the gist as first told at the bar by one of his Southie friends. For those that don’t recall: “On a flight, pilot announces ‘We’re cruising at thirty-five thousand feet and expect a smooth flight and an on-time arrival.’ The pilot forgets to turn off the intercom, though, and is heard by the passengers and crew in the cabin as he speaks to his co-pilot/first-mate/navigator, ‘All I need now is a cup of coffee and a blow job.’ A flight attendant hears this and begins to run up the aisle toward the cockpit, ostensibly to tell the pilot the PA has been left on. So I lean out say, ‘Don’t forget the coffee!’ ”

Later Will tells the joke to Robin Williams’ characters. In this telling, he doesn’t allow himself to be the smart one that leans out with the punchline. Instead, the guy in front of him says, “Don’t forget the coffee.” Even when Robin Williams’ characters says, “have you ever been on a plane,” Will is not hurt or embarrassed. “No, but it’s a joke. It’s funnier if I tell it in first person.” His ego exists, but is not where or like anyone thinks it is. The writing captures this as well as any refined example of literature, not that the author is prone to ego-boosting rhetoric, of course.