GITS Script Reading and Analysis Series: “Good Will Hunting” — Structure

Welcome to Week 3 of the GITS Script Reading & Analysis series. This week we will be analyzing the 3/14/1997 draft of “Good Will Hunting” (written by Matt Damon & Ben Affleck), your choice for the Drama genre. If you haven’t had a chance to read the script yet, you can go here.

Before we get into the perimeters of today’s discussion, Teddy Pasternak sourced an interview between writer and film critic Tom Shone and Matt Damon in which Damon discusses the background of Good Will Hunting. Here is an excerpt from that interview:

“I think for us, coming from Cambridge, and living in a neighbourhood that was very much dwarfed by Harvard and MIT, we would look at these other people, these students who came in every September and think ‘it’s our city not yours’ — all of those issues were very much a part of our lives and all the kids we knew and grew up with. And then I went to Harvard, and suddenly I was friends with all these people, and not seeing them as some strongman antagonist. Perfectly wonderful people too. So what does that mean? All that stuff bottled up in Good Will Hunting. Ben’s father was the janitor. At Harvard. In fact his girlfriend at the time was the janitor in my dorm in my freshman year, which made it even more bizarre. So when on Friday night the kids would get too drunk and throw up all over the place, I knew who was going to clear it up and it was someone I considered a friend. That kind of shift came out, I think, in the soup of Good Will.”

For more, go here [and a big HT to Tedd P for the link].

Today we discuss GWH’s structure. One of the things I found to be interesting about the script is how in some respects it’s quite traditional in terms of its narrative shape, yet there are some distinctive aspects to it as well.

Once again you may choose to consider the story in terms of three-act structure with one of these iterations.

Aristotle: Beginning / Middle / End

Campbell [Hero’s Journey]: Separation / Initiation / Return

Hegel: Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis

Jung: Invitation / Immersion / Integration

If anyone is into sequence theory, if you’d care to break down the script per its sequences, we would all laud and honor you.

See you in comments!

For Day 1 of our analysis of Good Will Hunting, go here.

[Remember next week (9/26–9/30), we will be reading The Silence of the Lambs. You may access the 1/15/1990 draft here.]

NOTE: THIS SERIES AND THE USE OF SCRIPTS IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!

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