REVEALING YOUR HERO’S WOUND: Good Will Hunting

At the beginning of your screenplay, your hero should be in a state of inertia — settling for a life that may be emotionally safe and tolerable, but that lacks passion, risk and fulfillment. Her life might be filled with activity and even give the illusion that she’s striving for something, but all this effort is ultimately going nowhere. In other words, your hero should be stuck.

The reason for all this spinning in place is that the hero is living in his or her identity — the emotional armor we all carry to protect us from our deepest fears. This is your hero’s persona, the false self she presents to the world to avoid feeling vulnerable and terrified.

Some wounding event or situation from the past has left your hero unconsciously terrified of experiencing that pain again. So she’ll do just about anything to avoid facing that fear, even if it means living a false, limited and unfulfilled existence. Then, through the course of your screenplay, your hero must gradually confront and overcome that fear in order to achieve whatever goal she’s pursuing. To get what she desperately wants, the hero must abandon her emotional armor and risk standing up for who she truly is. Simply put, this transformation from living fully in her identity to living fully in her essence is the character’s arc.

The causes and effects of one’s identity are brilliantly illustrated in Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s award-winning screenplay Good Will Hunting. It’s a wonderful example of a hero living an emotionally safe existence and how he gradually finds the courage to abandon that identity to achieve real fulfillment.

When we first meet Will Hunting (Damon), his life doesn’t seem all that bad and he seems fairly content. But something — we don’t yet know what yet — frightens him so much that he’d rather stay a poor Southie custodian than let the world witness his brilliance. He’s a master at avoiding any real connection or vulnerability.

Then two key events force Will out of his emotional armor: He begins working with Sean (Robin Williams) and he starts pursuing Skylar (Minnie Driver).

From the moment Will meets Sean, we see that he is unlike the other shrinks Will’s been to before. Sean holds his ground in the face of Will’s insults and evasions. And in the face of Will’s false identity, Sean holds firm with his truth — he doesn’t overreact to Will, doesn’t try to best him, and he isn’t intimidated. At their second meeting, after a wonderful soliloquy about living life fully, Sean gives Will an ultimatum:

SEAN
 ... you wouldn't know about
 real loss, because that only
 occurs when you lose something
 you love more than yourself,
 and you've never dared to love
 anything that much. I look at you
 and I don't see an intelligent,
 confident man,... I see a boy...
 There's nothing you can tell me
 that I can't read somewhere else.
 Unless we talk about your life.
 But you won't do that. Maybe
 you're afraid of what you
 might say... It's up to you.

No hero wants to give up his identity and leave himself emotionally vulnerable. So your hero must be forced to abandon it in order to achieve his outer motivation — the visible goal he’s desperate to achieve by the end of the movie. For Will, that goal is to win Skylar’s love. But the only way he can do that is by connecting with her honestly, not continually running away from real love and intimacy.

When Will first begins dating Skylar, he avoids saying too much about himself, makes up a story about having 12 brothers and stops calling her after their first date. When Sean tells him to call her again, Will responds:

WILL
 Why? So I can realize she’s not
 so smart? That she’s boring? You
 don’t get it. Right now she’s
 perfect, I don’t want to ruin
 that.

SEAN
 And right now you’re perfect
 too. Maybe you don’t want to
 ruin that.

Gradually — and a hero’s transformation must be gradual — Will’s persona begins to fade. He starts opening up to Sean and to Skylar. He takes her to meet his friends. He does her organic chemistry paper, revealing his genius (something he previously kept hidden). As his best friend, Chuckie (Affleck), tells Skylar, “I’ve known Will a long time and I seen him with every girl he’s ever been with. But I’ve never seen him like this before, ever with anyone, like how he is with you.”

But as your hero moves away from his identity, the outside world starts closing in and life gets scarier. Finally, the terror becomes too great and he reverts back to his identity one last time. For Will, this is when Skylar asks him to come to California with her and he refuses:

WILL
 We might be in California next
 week and you might find out
 somthin’ about me that you
 don’t like... And I’m stuck in
 California with someone who
 really doesn’t want me there.

Skylar lashes out at Will’s cowardice:

SKYLAR
 What are you afraid of?
 ...You live in your safe little
 world where nobody challenges
 you and you’re scared shitless
 to do anything else ... At
 least I have the balls to give
 it a shot. At least I’m honest
 with you.

And then we learn the reason for Will’s identity: He tells Skylar that she doesn’t really want to hear the truth — that she doesn’t want to hear how he got cigarettes put out on him when he was a child. And then he lifts his shirt and shows her a six-inch knife scar on his torso. His abusive childhood filled him with shame and he’s terrified that anyone who sees the real Will is going to know how worthless he is. So he shuts down again completely:

SKYLAR
 You know what I want to hear?
 I want to hear that you don’t
 love me. If you tell me that,
 then I’ll leave you alone.

WILL
 I don’t love you.

You always want the hero to retreat this way as you approach the climax of your screenplay. But this reversion to identity can never last, because once a hero has experienced living in his essence, the protected existence he tolerated at the beginning of the script won’t work, and he’ll make one final attempt to live his truth. For Will Hunting, this realization comes first from Sean, when he asks Will about his soulmate:

SEAN
 You’ll never have that kind of
 relationship in a world where
 you’re afraid to take the first
 step, because all you’re seeing
 are the negative things that might
 happen ten miles down the road.

And then from Chuckie, who nails Will for working construction instead of using his talent to live a fulfilling life:

CHUCKIE
 Tomorrow I’m gonna wake up and I’ll
 be fifty and I’ll still be doin’ this…
 But you, you’re sittin’ on a winning
 lottery ticket  and you’re too much of a
 pussy to cash it in.

Skylar, Sean and Chuckie are all hammering Will with the same ultimatum: Stop hiding your feelings, stop hiding who you truly are and live your essence. And then Sean shatters all of Will’s remaining armor in that powerful moment when he keeps telling Will, “It’s not your fault.” Will’s belief that he’s worthless is wrong and was not the reason his father abused him. So the identity he’s constructed is built on a lie and his fear of being seen is only hurting him.

Accepting this truth gives Will the courage to get in his car, leave his identity behind forever and drive toward Skylar — and his destiny.

One of the many wonderful elements of Good Will Hunting is how it takes Sean through a similar arc. After the wound of losing his wife, Sean is hiding out as well, helping others find their truth but refusing to take any emotional risks of his own. In the screenwriters’ words, he’s “tired of teaching, tired of life.” As Will tells him, “[Your wife] dies and you just cash in your chips… Some people would have the sack back and ante up again.” By finding his own courage, Will redeems Sean as well and, at the end of the film, Sean, too, is ready to risk venturing into the unknown to once again live his essence and his truth.