Enforcing Belonging: Community, Vulnerability, and Canadian Heroism in “Goon”

If I wanted you to fall in love with Goon, I would start about five minutes in. Doug Glatt and his best friend Pat - played by Seann William Scott and Jay Baruchel (who also co-wrote the film) - watch hockey legend Ross Rhea (Liev Schreiber) receive a 20-game suspension. In a moment of staggering vulnerability, Doug turns to Pat and admits, “I don’t have a thing, you know? … Everybody’s got something but me.” Pat, utterly unequipped to handle this kind of masculine emotional exposure, responds the only way he knows how: with a crude sexual joke. He drags Doug to a hockey game, promising him “tasty treats” (corn dogs). Amid the chaos of a fight, Pat taunts the players from the stands for his cable-access show. One player lunges toward them, hurling a homophobic slur at Pat. Doug snaps. He warns the player that his brother is gay and, in a sudden, brutal assertion of loyalty and identity, uses his head to shatter the player’s hand mid-punch - with an audible crunch.

This moment is crucial. Dougie is invited to a tryout at the local rink for the Orangetown Assassins. He can’t skate; he’s a complete fish out of water, wearing his brother’s figure skates and immediately wiping out on the ice. After a round of teasing, he beats the shit out of the rest of the team. The coach offers him a spot, and it is here that Doug begins to find something he can finally call his own.

The film follows Dougie, a going-nowhere security guard and the black sheep of his family, as he searches for a place where he belongs. His story loosely follows an enemies-to-lovers arc with his rival-turned-best friend, Xavier LaFlamme. Seann William Scott plays Dougie with disarming honesty and warmth; he is kind, deeply loyal, and unexpectedly tender, becoming not just his team’s enforcer but, at times, an enforcer for good. Against his parents’ wishes, Dougie carves out a space for himself, growing into his role while learning to love both his team and himself, and ultimately discovering what it means to belong.

Released in 2011 and loosely adapted from Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey into Minor League Hockey by Adam Frattasio and Doug Smith, Goon was born out of Baruchel’s deep love for hockey and Canadian culture. Baruchel has said he “just leaped at the opportunity to write something that was that close to my heart… I love movies, I love my country, and I love this game, so it was a no-brainer” to take on the project and help bring enforcer culture to the screen. When writing the story, Baruchel wanted to fill a long-standing void in hockey cinema. He noted that since Slap Shot, there hadn’t been a film that really captured the grit and humanity of minor-league hockey and its fighters, and Goon puts the controversial role of the enforcer “front and center,” showing both the roughness of the job and the loyalty behind it. Baruchel has also spoken about how the movie honours the enforcer’s place in the sport’s mythology, arguing that there’s a “purity” and “honesty” in two players agreeing to drop the gloves that is often misunderstood and undervalued in modern hockey discussions.

Dougie Glatt’s rise and redemption offer a distinctly Atwood-esque Survival narrative, but one that diverges sharply from the traditional model of endurance through isolation, conquest, or dominance over hostile terrain that we’ve seen illustrated in earlier depictions of Canadian Storytelling. While the Dougie character is from Massachusetts, told from the Canadian perspective of Baruchel’s writing, the narrative is inherently Canadian-coded. Instead of surviving by overcoming the land or asserting himself as an exceptional hero, Dougie survives by locating himself within a community. His journey is not about triumphing alone but about learning how to belong. Pat, after Doug gets recruited to the Assassins, takes the time to show Doug how to fight by watching old Ross Rhea footage. His coach pushes him, telling him, “You gotta be shitty to get better!” And by the end of it, Doug the Thug is born. The fans cheer his name, but he apologizes to his opponents after he leaves them a puddle on the ice before getting recruited to the Halifax Highlanders, Doug’s first real crack at finding a place he belongs.

Crucially, this belonging is made possible through vulnerability as much as physical strength. Dougie’s willingness to admit fear, protect others without ego, and care deeply for his teammates allows him to become integral rather than exceptional. He earns Xavier LaFlamme’s trust shortly after his debut with the Highlanders. Sitting on LaFlamme’s couch following his first knockout, LaFlamme asks why Dougie fights for players he barely knows. Dougie answers simply: “The coach puts me out there to fight - that’s my job. I like standing up for my team, y’know?” He takes pride not in recognition, but in understanding his role and knowing that his presence makes a difference when he steps onto the ice.

This ethic is echoed visually through a recurring vignette involving the team logo on the dressing-room floor. In the first game, the players walk directly over it; Dougie alone steps around it, instinctively respecting what it represents. Later, when LaFlamme spits on the logo, Dougie quietly kneels down and cleans it. By the film’s end, the entire team avoids stepping on it as they head to the ice together. The image crystallizes Dougie’s influence: without speeches or confrontation, he reshapes the team’s values. Even in silence, Glatt’s strength lies in empathy - and it is this quiet leadership that binds the team together.

While he is brought to the team for his fists, his empathy keeps him there. In this way, Goon reframes survival as relational rather than solitary, communal rather than individualistic. Dougie becomes a quiet hero, one who does not seek recognition, power, or hubris, but instead finds meaning in service, loyalty, and care. This understated heroism, grounded in humility and collective identity, is a defining feature of Canadian art, and Dougie Glatt stands as one of its clearest contemporary expressions.

Dougie’s quiet heroism is most clearly articulated through his repeated refusal to claim credit or status, even as his role becomes indispensable. LaFlamme consistently falls victim to his own status as a former second-round pick, which is directly proportional to the work that Dougie does to keep the team afloat, unlike traditional sports narratives that center on ego, rivalry, or upward mobility. Dougie consistently frames his purpose as protective rather than aspirational. He fights not to dominate the ice but to shield his teammates. He bleeds for his team, proving himself again and again as he keeps LaFlamme safe on the ice, all while elevating his own position on the team.  His position as enforcer is never glamorized as a path to stardom; instead, it is framed as a form of labour undertaken for the collective good of the team. This ethic is emphasized when Dougie absorbs punishment without complaint, treating pain as a necessary cost of belonging rather than a badge of honour. In a game against Windsor, to redeem himself after costing the team a game earlier in the film, he awaits the coach’s permission to hit his opponent, ensuring that he doesn’t screw up again. In this way, the film recasts physical endurance not as self-aggrandizement but as mutual obligation, aligning Dougie’s masculinity with service rather than spectacle.

The film also repeatedly foregrounds Dougie’s emotional openness as central to his integration into the community. Early in Goon, his confession to Pat establishes vulnerability as a catalyst for the film. Sincerity is not lessened or corrected by detachment or bravado. Instead, it becomes the condition that allows Dougie to recognize his own worth once he finds a space where his particular strengths are needed. His relationship with Eva (Alison Pill) further reinforces this sincerity. Dougie does not perform masculinity through dominance or emotional withholding, but through gentleness, attentiveness, and an almost radical vulnerability. Their relationship develops not because Dougie becomes exceptional, but because he remains fundamentally kind. The relationship he shares with Eva is about endurance. A drunken meetcute leads to a bad decision when Eva kisses Glatt after a fight with her boyfriend, but Glatt doesn’t give up. He shows up for her, never pressuring her, but always pushing her to be kinder to herself. When she confesses to Dougie about her boyfriend, and she calls herself a bitch, Doug replies, “Eva, don’t say that!” and then proceeds to give her all of the gifts that he wanted to woo her with, including a licensed Halifax Highlander doll. In contrast to more aggressive masculinities, Goon suggests that emotional transparency is not a weakness to be overcome, but a prerequisite for connection and stability.

Perhaps most tellingly, Dougie’s final confrontation with Ross Rhea rejects the traditional redemption arc of individualistic supremacy. While the fight is inevitable within the genre, it is framed less as a triumph than as a burden Dougie must carry for the sake of the team. He learned how to fight from Rhea, and at the same time, Rhea sees the next generation in Dougie. He does not seek out Rhea to prove himself, nor does the victory elevate him as better than. Instead, the aftermath reinforces his everyman status: Dougie returns to his role, his relationships, and his community without fanfare. He lets out blood curdling scream as he knocks Rhea out, his ankle snapping back, his family watches as he bleeds, and the crowd cheers. Laflamme and Kim skate him off the ice as the aria to Act 3 of Puccini's opera Turandot plays. Rhea spits out a tooth as he gets up, LaFlamme wins the game, and Eva holds Glatt as he bleeds in the changing room. He doesn’t celebrate with his team; his team honours him in his place, as he utters the final words of the film, “I think I nailed him”.  The film denies him a grand heroic apotheosis, choosing instead to affirm his place within a collective that now functions because of him. This refusal to center Dougie as a singular, celebrated hero situates Goon firmly within a Canadian narrative tradition - one that values cohesion over conquest and belonging over legacy.

The rink itself functions as a crucial reimagining of landscape within Goon, transforming the traditional Canadian survival space into a site of social infrastructure rather than isolation. Where earlier Canadian narratives often highlight survival against an indifferent or hostile natural environment, Goon relocates this struggle to the built, communal space of the arena. The rink is not something to be conquered, but something to be entered, learned, and shared. Dougie does not master the ice through skill or dominance; for much of the film, he can barely skate, but instead through presence and participation. The rink becomes a social ecosystem governed by unwritten rules of loyalty, protection, and mutual dependence, usurping the place that landscape once served in Canadian storytelling as a basis for belonging. In this context, survival is no longer about enduring the land alone, but about learning how to exist within a collective that requires care, restraint, and trust. The shift from wilderness to rink reflects a broader evolution in Canadian cultural narratives, where community replaces geography as the primary site of identity formation.

What ultimately allows this narrative to resonate, however, is the gentleness at the center of Dougie Glatt’s character - made possible by Seann William Scott’s remarkably sincere performance. Scott plays Dougie without irony or self-awareness, allowing kindness, confusion, and earnestness to exist unguarded on screen. His Dougie is not performatively sweet, nor is his decency framed as comedic subversion; it is simply who he is. 

This honesty ensures that the character never becomes a parody of masculinity or an object lesson in virtue. Instead, Dougie’s goodness emerges quietly, through small gestures of care, loyalty, and emotional openness that resist spectacle. It is this softness, this refusal to harden himself beyond necessity, that allows Dougie to succeed without ever positioning himself as a hero. In a media landscape that often rewards cynicism or exceptionalism, Goon insists on the power of kindness as a narrative force. Dougie Glatt does not win by being the strongest, the smartest, or the most visible. Still, by being decent, and in doing so, he embodies a deeply Canadian vision of heroism grounded in humility, community, and care.