Humility Lesson Postscript

Edward Wood and James Cagney in William Wellman's Public Enemy (1931).

A spectacular literary fail I forgot to mention in the Brooks column that I know you'll all appreciate: a metaphor in which America is the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting and Brooks himself is the infinitely wise but irreparably damaged Robin Williams character:

We’re confronted with a succession of wicked problems and it turns out we’re not even capable of putting on a friggin’ mask.

In the days leading up to this July 4 weekend, I’ve been thinking about a scene in “Good Will Hunting.” We’ve seen Will perform all these mathematical feats and flights of verbal brilliance, but the Robin Williams character sits him down on a park bench and confronts him with a rot at the core of his character. “I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared” kid.

The last three years have been like that Robin Williams speech for a whole nation — an intervention, a truth-telling.

By coyly bowdlerizing the line 

I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid.

while scrupulously keeping the quotation mark truthful, just seconds after the awkward attempt at being racy in his own voice with the euphemism "friggin'", he bleeds out the line's meaning, turning it from the deeply startling moment of the 1997 movie (the weird acoustic weight of "scared shitless" as a modifier before "kid" in addition to the semantic weight of all the "shits" and "fucks" in the passage on the part of the kindly older man addressing the genius punk) into something that would already have sounded like a cliché if Pat O'Brien had used it in the 1930s.