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Good Will Hunting (1997) has received the following awards:
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The 12 August 2012 release over the Internet of an excerpt from a putative intra-KGB memorandum, which excerpt someone has titled THE KGB DIRECTIVE and dated 01 April 1994, proposed the making of a film for the purpose of further undermining American education, and thereby accelerating the collapse of American power. Although THE KGB DIRECTIVE's claim to authenticity is neglibible and dismissible, the question arises of how it is possible for a movie that was not manufactured by the KGB to propound the same subversive messages, and to inflict the same harm, as one that might really have been. It is to assist the answering of this question that the so-called KGB DIRECTIVE is reproduced below, and with corresponding echoes from the movie following. |
01 April 1994
It has been long recognized by our policy planners that conventional warfare against the United States is contraindicated because it would be costlier, and ultimately less certain of success, than subversion. |
![]() Will Hunting next lures Skylar away from her work to have "some fun," which to Will Hunting means going to the dog races: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
At the dog races, Skylar discovers an enjoyment that she had been unable to derive from organic chemistry, and finds herself free of qualms about falling behind in organic chemistry. Will plays the role of her mentor and guru by remarking how happy she is, a happiness engineered by himself, and presumably a happiness which she would have missed had he not broken the chains which bound her to her fantastically-boring studies. |
Skylar has already told us above that organic chemistry is "fantastically boring" and that "nobody studies it for fun". We have seen Will Hunting so enraged at the tedium of doing his math homework, and at the loathsomeness of explaining any of it to Professor Lambeau, that he sets that homework on fire. When Will imagines breaking enemy codes in the employ of the NSA, he describes it as sitting in a room and doing long division for the next 50 years.
But he never considers overuse of the adjective "fuckin'" to be boring. He does not describe living in the slums as boring — not boring that he shares his lodging with mice and rats, with cockroaches and silverfish, with fleas and lice and flies and mosquitoes.
And Will Hunting never describes mopping and buffing MIT floors eight hours a day as boring:
And he never describes working as an unskilled laborer for a minimum wage as boring — as for example on a demolition site hefting concrete blocks or wielding a sledge hammer:
And he definitely does not find the cretinous conversation of his friends boring — the friends that Professor Gerald Lambeau calls "a bunch of retarded gorillas", the friends who wade with Will Hunting through verbal sewage up to their chins:
And he doesn't find brawling boring. And he doesn't find getting arrested boring:
And he doesn't find getting wrung through the justice system boring:
Worse than useless, as has been evidenced above by unlettered janitor Will Hunting besting MIT graduate students, along with one MIT math prof, in math, and as is further evidenced by Will Hunting besting a Harvard graduate student in a barroom debate in the area of American history which Hunting wraps up with "You dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could've got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library". |
Will Hunting evaluation of working for the NSA starts off as in the following stills, and can be read in its entirety below: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
The above evaluation, however, consists solely of stringing together every negative eventuality that the future might hold, no matter how implausibly caused by Will's breaking of a single code. For a usable evaluation, a similar string of positive eventualities should be placed in the balance, beginning something like this:
And so this thread could continue on to foresee the collapse of terrorism, the settlement of grievances which had been providing the motivation for that terrorism, world peace and prosperity, a historically-unprecedented leap in the development of science and art and literature, and in other words the arrival of Utopia. Doesn't this best-case scenario need to be put alongside the worst-case scenario for comparison? And missing too is the worst that could happen if Will Hunting continued on his present course for the rest of his life. Prison for a manslaughter committed in a barroom brawl, and not long after that brain damage from concussions in brawls within prison. Alcoholism and unemployment. Syphilis and AIDS. Ultimately Will Hunting ends up on the street, pushing a shopping cart containing all his worldly belongings, rummaging through garbage dumpsters for food and for bottles which can be redeemed for money to buy wine. Presenting the first of the above three threads to the exclusion of the other two teaches bad logic, and makes of Good Will Hunting a tool of subversion of American education and American strength. |
The movie shows psychotherapist Sean Maguire administering IT'S-NOT-YOUR-FAULT-THERAPY, by means of which the repetition of that statement nine times magically produces a cathartic flood of tears and a hug, and presumably a personality transplant of his old anti-social self with a new pro-social one: ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
The purpose of an examination is to rank student accomplishment. A ranking which sorts 100 students into 1 winner and 99 losers is a primitive and inadequate sort of ranking — if fails to reflect that right below the winner are a dozen runners-up whose performance is so similar to the winner's as to be almost indistinguishable from it (runners-up who might have solved the problem a few minutes after the winner did), and that among the losers there is an enormous spread (from the student who solved one minute after the winner right down to the student still unable to even understand the correct solution one week after it has been published). |
Skylar's summary is that Will Hunting spends half his time in bars: |
Will Hunting's genius is impossible because he doesn't have enough time to develop genius. Menial labor eats up a good chunk of his day, and the mental passivity which it induces lingers beyond the labor itself, making intellectual improvement as difficult after his manual labor as it was impossible during. Carousing takes a large chunk of what time is left, and the alcohol produces a mental haze which clogs intellectual acuity for much longer than the interval of carousing. Brawling, stealing cars, getting arrested, appearing in court — all these take time, and all leave distracting memories of what happened and anxieties concerning what is to come, all of which makes concentrating on difficult intellectual tasks almost impossible. |