Boy Movies #8

The Matt and Ben issue

You’re reading Boy Movies, one of the only newsletters to exist. How was your Thanksgiving? I admit that I didn’t watch a single boy movie during my holiday break, instead choosing to catch up on The Crown (lmao… girl…) and see She Said (this is neither a boy nor girl movie, but, as Daniela called it, a woman movie, also just fyi there’s a deepfake Trump voice in it — lmao… girl…) with my mom. But now I’m back in my corner office at Boy Movies HQ and back to asking you to consider subscribing and sharing with someone who might enjoy my humble operation. It’s Giving Tuesday, after all — why not give someone the gift of Boy Movies?

One of the questions I’ve been asked most frequently since starting Boy Movies (I’m 100% serious) is whether a boy movie can be gay. Not in the Top Gun way, in the men literally sucking and fucking on screen way. (A boy movie categorically cannot be about lesbians.) I can’t tell if this is just because I’m me and the people in my life know me well or if it’s a subject of genuine interest, but I’ve given it a lot of thought. There are plenty of gay movies made for straight people (Love, Simon; that part in Eternals where Brian Tyree Henry kisses the guy from Nurse Jackie), but does that make them boy movies? I’m no closer to an answer, though I do feel like I moved in the right direction with the subject of this week’s newsletter, Good Will Hunting¹. It came at the suggestion of friend of the newsletter Kerry, who recently called Boy Movies “the best thing in [her] inbox every week.” You understand why her request got moved to the top of the pile.

My brain’s gonna be worth $250,000

Good Will Hunting “isn’t” “about” “gay” “people,” but any queer reading of it can be attributed to its director, Gus Van Sant, who in my mind is one of the most famous people on the planet. Van Sant is gay, and before Good Will Hunting had been known for making queer stuff like My Own Private Idaho and weird stuff like To Die For. As the legend goes, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wanted him to direct their passion project because they loved Van Sant’s only (at the time) boy movie, Drugstore Cowboy, which tracks, doesn’t it? A white man opinion I hold is that Good Will Hunting is a near-perfect film, but it’s nowhere near as stylized or dare I say avant-garde as Van Sant’s earlier work. He had to butch it up in order to gain mainstream notoriety, which is its own other issue entirely.

this is heaven to me… having a Dunk with the bestie

What if a twink was a janitor but also a genius? That’s the question Good Will Hunting asks. Damon stars as the twink in question, an adorable little shit from South Boston (pronounced Bahstuhn) named Will whose fucked up life has not prevented him from becoming some sort of mathematical savant. His ability to solve impossible equations and lack of interest in getting credit for them catches the attention of a professor (Stellan Skarsgård) who agrees to mentor him as long as Will agrees to see a therapist (Robin Williams — always as luminous as you remember) to cope with his fucked up life. Along the way, he pals around with his boys (the aforementioned Ben Affleck — giving everything; Casey Affleck — ew; and 2 Fast 2 Furious’ Cole Hauser), falls for a Harvard student with stunning bone structure (Minnie Driver), and eventually accepts that his past doesn’t dictate his future. Going by my own criteria, Good Will Hunting earns boy movie status thanks to its focus on the powers of the male brain. It’s man-approved melodrama, and its influence on the “misunderstood dude is actually deserving of a better life” genre cannot be overstated. 

So, no, Good Will Hunting is decidedly not some kind of gay fantasia. It’s queer in the same way Top Gun is, but even less explicitly. And yet: Claire and I have spent years waxing poetic about the part where Sean (Williams) shoots Will down after he names Chuckie (that would be the Affleck brother who belongs to J.Lo) as his soulmate on the insistence that Chuckie doesn’t challenge him, only for Chuckie’s iconic “I’ll fahkin’ kill ya” monologue to come just a couple of scenes later². I mean, is it me? Look, I’ve seen The Talented Mr. Ripley, I know Damon knows his way around a queer narrative. (Remember when he was like, “My daughter wrote me a treatise on why saying gay slurs is bad” — lmao… girl…)

On that note, I’m sort of but not really embarrassed to admit how much affection I hold for the Matt and Ben duo. I was one of about twelve people who saw (and loved, tbh) The Last Duel in theaters, and I’m in a group chat with two friends called “bennifer updates” which we use to, that’s right, send periodic updates on the blessed Lopez-Affleck union. I wish I could say my enjoyment of Matt and Ben has ever been impacted by the amount of times they’ve both publicly shat the bed, but against my will, I’ll always be charmed by their lifelong boy best friend behavior. The story of how they got this movie made is so dude, as is their bro-y Oscar acceptance speech in which Affleck refers to them as “just two young guys.” Van Sant’s direction is essential to any non-platonic interpretation of the relationship between Will and Chuckie — there’s a softness to them that reminds me of those beautiful, intimate scenes between Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho — but the real-life history between Damon and Affleck is also key.

It’s the same softness that runs through the back half of Good Will Hunting as it dives into Sean’s efforts to get Will to embrace the avalanche of his own feelings rather than push them away³ and, later, of course, absolve himself. It’s pure nerd boy culture to be like, “Here’s a movie about math,” but it also, as silly as this sounds, feels slightly ahead of its time to center a story on a man going to therapy. (Okay, Tony Soprano!) There’s a focus on emotion that verges on cloying but is saved by the script’s dudes rock spirit. The emotion is what speaks to me about this film (I love watching men cry and sob), but I know there’s a subsection of fans who like it for the way it suggests that even a presumed deadbeat can find someone to believe in him. There are probably also people out there who just like it because it’s set in Boston.

That’s been the best part of this project for me so far: the discovery that a boy movie really can resonate with everyone in different ways, for different reasons. I’m still working on an answer to whether a gay movie and a boy movie can exist within the same Venn Diagram circle, but Van Sant is proof that the genre doesn’t belong to straight men. Howddya like dem apples?

• I for some reason own a copy of Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ script for their Damon-Affleck play Matt & Ben if anyone ever wants to come over and stage a production in my living room.

• Boy Movies moment: Timothée Chalamet calling Top Gun: Maverick his favorite movie of the year :)

• Every time I think about this tweet I scream.

• At least once a day for the past two weeks I’ve thought about how there’s a film called She Said coming out at the same time as a separate film called Women Talking. Sorry, but that’s goofy. Those aren’t movie titles, they’re just descriptions of this newsletter.

1. She Said is at best disappointingly muted and at worst unnecessary, but I thought about it a few times during this viewing of Good Will Hunting, which was famously produced by Harvey Weinstein. I thought about it during scenes like the one where Skylar picks up her dorm phone at night and casually asks if it’s her professor “again,” or the ones where Gerry shamelessly hits on his female students. And, obviously, there’s the Casey Affleck of it all. Weinstein’s involvement doesn’t ruin the film for me, but it’s not bad to recontextualize the things you love. That’s growth, I guess.

2. I can think of few acts more romantic than bringing someone Dunkin’ every morning.

3. Good Will Hunting is ultimately a movie about a twink with two divorced daddies who want different things for him.