Real Life, Hunting.

For all its shortcomings via connection to the Weinstein company, I can’t deny that I’m a pretty big fan of Good Will Hunting. It’s always been a movie that makes me cry – most do, especially now. It’s a movie about connection, about risking pain and heartbreak for the sake of truly living. 

It’s a movie about going to “see about a girl,” an idea increasingly difficult for the homebound citizens of 2020, left with only the endless wasteland of internet dating. I’m not so sure Dr. Sean Maguire, played by an at-his-best Robin Williams, would exactly approve of Tinder.

 

But maybe he’d have no choice. The resident psychic in my apartment building tells me that if we’re going to date anyone in the next two years, they’ll have to be people we already know. Gulp. In a world where you can’t really leave your house, it seems like the only way to “go see about a girl” is via the land of 1s and 0s.

 

Even I, long ruined by my parents Rotterdam meet-cute, have acquiesced, downloading Hinge in a drunken (but isn’t this what everyone says?) fit of existentialism almost as soon as I had landed in LA (word on the street: “it’s where the investment bankers are").

 

Most people I know use these apps as a sort of game. I can't see it like that. “What if this is the love of my life and I swipe them away?” I've asked, to rolling eyes. “You don’t have to respond, Katie,” I hear later. But don’t I? It would seem that these apps just aren’t made for my ever romantic -- okay, neurotic -- self. 

 

But it’s not like this for everyone. One of my friends has unrivaled luck with the things, meeting a nice enough fling as well as her current boyfriend on the world wide web.

 

This is because she “goes to see about a girl.” She takes a chance, and okay, maybe these chances are scarier because the internet is involved, but everything – not just dating – is scarier when the internet is involved, and the internet is involved in everything, anyways.

 

It is likely that I am attempting to draw a connection between Good Will Hunting and dating apps that is both inconclusive and nonsensical. I have long been quick to criticize these platforms and their users, these people that willingly let artificial intelligence into their romantic lives. Well, artificial intelligence exists in my life whether I like it or not. And I don’t see things this way anymore. I don’t think Dr. Sean Maguire would either.

 

I passed by Minnie Driver at an event I was working at in the land before COVID. With her much-younger looking (good for you, Minnie) date at her side, I couldn’t help but think, it’s been a long time since Good Will Hunting. I wonder how they met.