I have to admit, I hate the movie Good Will Hunting. It’s well made and acted and everything, and I’m sure it was well-intended, but I can’t stand it because when you think about it, the obvious message of the movie is that if you have some great intellectual gift, you should totally squander it so that you can hang out drinking in bars and then chase some girl across the country that will probably dump you within a week because you don’t have any money or a job. And with that in mind, naturally I’d love to write a bad sequel to it. But this time, rather than inverting and ruining all the Hollywood ending stuff I usually do with my joke sequels, I only seek to show what would likely really happen in part two of this story.
So we open where we left off in Good Will Hunting: Matt Damon’s character has thrown away his opportunity to make something of his life by not making use of his genius, and he decides to follow what’s-her-name to California, spending his life savings to get there. Oh, but once he arrives and finds her, she dumps him because he’s broke and unemployed, and she has met someone else who has rich parents; so he tries to get some genius stuff going at UC Berkeley to win her back (or to undo his mistake from Good Will Hunting), only the professors there, once they hear his New England accent, don’t believe he’s smart and throw him out. And so he becomes a lonely alcoholic homeless failure, bumming change on the street, always regretting missing his chance from the first movie when he might have really done something important with his life and actually contributed something special and rare to society. The End.
I know it’s brutal and depressing, but it would at least send a (sort of) positive message the first movie doesn’t bother to try sending: don’t blow it! If you have a gift, use it; don’t waste it, as you might always regret it. There are a lot of fish in the sea, and you’ll more likely find a good one if you are successful than if you aren’t.
(There’s a book called The Golden Turkey Awards, which is about the worst movies of all time, as of 1980; and in it, there’s a capsule review of Grease, the fun 1950s-themed musical with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, which says that (I am paraphrasing, as I don’t have the book with me at the moment, sorry) it’s the musical that teaches: “it’s better to be a slut than a wholesome girl.” Or at least, that it's better for a girl to bow to peer pressure to become something she's not to please a guy than for her to be herself. And you know, I never thought about it like that, and nobody I knew ever seemed to get that message out of it, but when you really think about it, that actually is the moral of the story, isn’t it? And that’s really not such a great message, is it? And I think this is what happened with Good Will Hunting: people liked the sort of feel-good seeming story, and so they missed what was a way more powerful message, which is that maybe it’s nice to “find yourself” and such, but people really don’t get unlimited opportunities in life, so perhaps you shouldn’t throw the great ones away on a whim, because another one may never come again.)
