Good Will Hunting: An Oral History
Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant reflect on the film 15 years later:
“Damon: The very first day, I remember we started crying, because it was a scene between Robin and Stellan. And when Gus called action and we watched these guys—I mean accomplished actors—do our scene verbatim, we had waited so long for this to happen. I remember just sitting next to Ben and I had tears rolling down my cheeks because I was just so happy and relieved that it was really happening.
“Affleck: We did tear up a little bit. But why is Matt saying this shit? Like, he holds his fucking tongue for 15 years and now because it’s Boston magazine, he says he started crying? His career is not over, you know what I mean? He needs people to believe that he’s like Jason Bourne or whatever!”
We Shall Go to Her, But She Will Not Return to Us
[Fiction] A teenage mother leaves her childhood home, then returns three years later:
“Time seemed to pass according to alternate principles: spatially, barometrically. The car was a thing of the distance, and then it was so close, Cici felt the heat coming off its hood like fever. And then a person—Dane!—was flying out the door, engulfing Cici, submerging her. She breathed in cheap, buttery shampoo, and beneath that was the smell of Dane: rich, ripe, somehow feral. Dane’s pull on people was more than just attraction—and it wasn’t just men, and it wasn’t just sexual. Men, women, prepubescent boys, adolescent girls, family, and people who didn’t know Dane from a Mormon missionary. People wanted her. They wanted to be near her, to touch her, to breathe her in like air.”
Longreads Member Exclusive: The American Nonconformist in the Age of the Commercialization of Dissent
This week’s Longreads Member pick is “The American Nonconformist in the Age of the Commercialization of Dissent,” a 1992 essay by Thomas Frank from The Baffler, the magazine he cofounded with Keith White in 1988.
Frank writes:
“In republishing this bit of juvenilia from 1992—my very first exploration of an idea that I reworked and reconsidered a number of times over the years that followed—it is worth remembering some of the context. This was before the web, for the most part; it was right about when ‘alternative’ was beginning to hit the culture, and a lot of the stuff I describe here was new and surprising at the time. Today, of course, most of it seems utterly unremarkable, so far has what I used to call the commercialization of dissent advanced. It’s not something I really even think about anymore, except for the most outrageous iterations—like the ski helmet I bought last week, a model called ‘Mutiny’ by ‘R.E.D.’ And even then I’m too exhausted to bother belaboring the ironic contrast of this bragging rebelliousness with the millionairiest sport there is. I’m off to even more ironic fields. See you there.”
p.s. You can support Longreads—and get more exclusives like this—by becoming a member for just $3 per month.
George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year
On the “writer’s writer,” George Saunders:
“We talked for a while about his relationship to Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working similar themes, they were, Saunders said, ‘like two teams of miners, digging at the same spot but from different directions.’ He described making trips to New York in the early days and having ‘three or four really intense afternoons and evenings’ with, on separate occasions, Wallace and Franzen and Ben Marcus, talking to each of them about what ‘the ultimate aspiration for fiction was.’ Saunders added: ‘The thing on the table was emotional fiction. How do we make it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while (2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.'”
Trickle-Down Feminism
A call for feminists to not forget their labor roots:
“While we debate the travails of some of the world’s most privileged women, most women are up against the wall. According to the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, women make up just under half of the national workforce, but about 60 percent of the minimum-wage workforce and 73 percent of tipped workers. In the New York area, a full 95 percent of domestic workers are female. Female-dominated sectors such as retail sales, food service, and home health care are some of the fastest-growing fields in the new economy, and even in those fields, women earn less; women in the restaurant industry earn 83 cents to a man’s dollar.
“This is where most women spend their time, not atop the Googleplex. This is where feminists should be spending their time, too.”
America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead
Why are violent crime rates still dropping, even during the recession? The latest evidence suggests lead—in the air, in our gasoline, in our paint—was responsible for the rise in crime in the 1960s & ’70s, and the drop in the 1990s:
“And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to ‘fill ‘er up with ethyl,’ they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
“It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin’s paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it’s easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What’s more, a single correlation between two curves isn’t all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the ’80s and ’90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.”
Django, the N-Word, and How We Talk About Race in 2013
A new year, and a change in the conversation about race in America:
“As I left the theater after Django, it was interesting to see how diverse the crowd was, and, based on the conversations being had in the lobby, how they were all impacted in some way, whether it was by the violence or the language or the fact that it was simply a really good movie. I left the theaters feeling oddly proud of Tarantino for making such a thought-provoking film, while feeling the exact opposite way about Spike Lee for not giving Django a chance. I was slightly shocked at how numb I became to Leo’s use of the N-word, to the point that I almost started to marvel at the bravado with which he uttered it. As for my ‘Django Moment,’ yes, there was the horrible foreign couple behind me that thought everything was hilarious, but mine came from a more unexpected place: the laughter that filled the room when Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Foxx would say the N-word — less like we imagine blacks would have in the 1800s, and more like they were two of the four Kings of Comedy.”
The Children Who Went Up In Smoke
What happened to five children who disappeared following a 1945 fire in West Virginia?
“For nearly four decades, anyone driving down Route 16 near Fayetteville, West Virginia, could see a billboard bearing the grainy images of five children, all dark-haired and solemn-eyed, their names and ages—Maurice, 14; Martha 12; Louis, 9; Jennie, 8; Betty, 5—stenciled beneath, along with speculation about what happened to them. Fayetteville was and is a small town, with a main street that doesn’t run longer than a hundred yards, and rumors always played a larger role in the case than evidence; no one even agreed on whether the children were dead or alive. What everyone knew for certain was this: On the night before Christmas 1945, George and Jennie Sodder and nine of their 10 children went to sleep (one son was away in the Army). Around 1 a.m., a fire broke out. George and Jennie and four of their children escaped, but the other five were never seen again.”
What’s Inside America’s Banks?
It remains nearly impossible for investors to understand what’s going on inside the big banks—and what risks they’re taking on:
“When we asked Dane Holmes, the head of investor relations at Goldman Sachs, why so few people trust big banks, he told us, ‘People don’t understand the banks,’ because ‘there is a lack of transparency.’ (Holmes later clarified that he was talking about average people, not the sophisticated investors with whom he interacts on an almost hourly basis.) He is certainly right that few students or plumbers or grandparents truly understand what big banks do anymore. Ordinary people have lost faith in financial institutions. That is a big enough problem on its own.
“But an even bigger problem has developed—one that more fundamentally threatens the safety of the financial system—and it more squarely involves the sort of big investors with whom Holmes spends much of his time. More and more, the people in the know don’t trust big banks either.”
Friday Night Tykes
In Texas, football is everything—even among 12-year-olds:
“‘Celdon is the best eleven-year-old football player in America,’ Ronnie Braxton, his trainer, told me. ‘In America.’ Celdon isn’t the first youth football player to inspire that kind of claim. But when he hit the pile, his powerful legs churning furiously as he wormed his way through the defenders, the assessment seemed indisputable. As the referees pulled everyone off the pile and found Celdon lying in the end zone, his teammates began hopping up and down, and one of the grandmas in the stands rang a cowbell, and the Hawks cheerleaders—yes, the Hawks have cheerleaders—shook their metallic red-and-black pompoms, and the sound system that Coach Engel had rigged up with two car batteries and an ice chest began pumping out triumphal music, and I abandoned journalistic objectivity to throw my arms in the air and cheer until my throat hurt. How does it feel to watch a running back from the best preteen football team in the most football-mad city in Texas exert his will? It’s so beast.”
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