Forrest Gump

"And that's all I have to say about that."

One of the signature lines from "Forrest Gump" is "Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get." Ironically, during my viewing of the film, I knew exactly what I was getting: a stale, hollow shell of a movie with nothing sweet in the middle. Nostalgia is the enemy of history and "Forrest Gump" is chock full of misremembered moments from our collective past. When we gaze at the past through the lens of nostalgia, truth is lost. Given the continued ridiculous chain of events in the film (Forrest stumbles into a mystifying amount of historical events to make light of them and also completes impossible feats like running back and forth across America for two years straight), one could refer to the film as an American tall tale. The problem with tall tales, however, is that they are not true. The Rocky Mountains were not actually created by Paul Bunyan wrestling with Babe the Blue Ox. Johnny Appleseed did not plant every apple tree in America. Likewise, Elvis did not learn his performance style from an eight year old boy in Alabama; nor did John Lennon spontaneously get the idea for the song, "Imagine" on the Dick Cavett show from a ping pong player. "Forrest Gump" is disrespectful to history with the simplistic goal of making baby boomers blush with nostalgia as they revisit their past. The price of this entertainment is the creation of a false past. Forrest's whirlwind tour through the second half of the twentieth century is, in reality, a cyclone destroying history and turning it from a bittersweet reality to a completely sugarcoated fantasy world.

One of the most stunning aspects of "Forrest Gump" is how it subverts the American dream while managing to be so charming in the process. Forrest does not earn anything in the film. He is handed opportunity after opportunity through no work or desire of his own. In fact, the opening and closing imagery of the film is a feather effortlessly floating around by the power of an outer force. At Jenny's grave, Forrest says, I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze." In Forrest's case, that accidental breeze puts him in the middle of several key historical events and even makes him an accidental millionaire, all without much intent or effort. He is an insufferable character who manages to be guided in the right direction with no appreciation of his good fortune. Compare that to the characters of Jenny and Lieutenant Dan, both of whom get dealt a string of terrible events that they need to overcome. What does Forrest overcome in this film---besides maybe expectations? Moreover, Forrest's warped worldview is evident in how he views other people's lives. After Forrest tells the audience that Jenny was continually molested as a child by her father, he casually says, "Mama always said, God is mysterious. He didn't turn Jenny into a bird that day. But instead - he had the police say Jenny didn't have to stay in that house no more. She went to live with her grandma, just over on Creekmore Avenue. And that made me happy, because she was close." To Forrest, invisible forces rescued Jenny from abuse. If little Forrest knew about the abuse, why didn't he tell anyone, particularly his mother? Finally, when Forrest decides to buy a shrimp boat and fails in his first attempt, a massive hurricane destroys all of the other shrimp boats on the gulf coast, allowing him to become extremely successful. So much for all of those other hardworking shrimp boat captains. Invisible forces predestined Forrest Gump to be successful, notwithstanding his own obliviousness or incompetence. In the film, there is little or no connection between human intervention and consequence for its main character. All of the other characters struggle; he floats on the breeze.

From the vantage point of a character for whom nothing goes wrong or has consequence, the audience is fed a bogus nostalgia of the past, one in which serious events are trivialized or distorted for emotional effect. A clear example of this trend is the film's soundtrack, which is filled with great artists that have stood the test of time: Elvis, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and so on. Yet, filling the background with a large amount of Vietnam protest music misrepresents the sixties as it forgets the widespread patriotism during the war and dulls the political and social bite of the musical counterculture. Paradoxically, rock and roll is remembered fondly as it is happening. The film's soundtrack is pure nostalgia, an exercise in historical cherrypicking that hides the true version of history. Despite the film's affection for the music of sixties counterculture, the actual billboard charts tell a different story. In 1966, at the beginning of the Vietnam protest movement, the number one song was "The Ballad of the Green Berets," a pro-military, ultra patriotic anthem. In the subsequent years of the sixties, none of the top performing songs can be considered protest music. In fact, most were catchy pop songs written or performed by The Monkees, The Turtles, The Archies, and, at best, The Beatles and Otis Redding. "Forrest Gump" distorts the fact that much of rock and roll, particularly the songs about political and social change, existed within the counterculture, which, by definition, was a minority. Only in retrospect does the counterculture's music, beliefs, and rhetoric become the defining aspects of the sixties. To honor the bravery and accomplishments of those young people, their story has to be told in the proper context, and in the movie, it is not.

The character of Jenny provides another example of how "Forrest Gump" generalizes history. Jenny is a walking cliche. Conveniently, she seems to be in tune with every cultural movement as they happen. She's a teenage runaway who quickly becomes a hippie in the sixties. She, of course, joins the Vietnam protest movement and even pals around with the Black Panthers. She then morphs into a night club jezebel in the seventies, complete with a heroin and cocaine addiction. Finally, and perhaps most offensive, she inexplicably contracts HIV in the eighties. The film refuses to explain how she got HIV and does not even care to address the subject of whether her son, or even his father, has the virus as well. Jenny's HIV diagnosis has no point in the story except to remind the audience that the AIDS epidemic occurred in the 1980's. Similar to the film's soundtrack, Jenny exists as an anthropomorphized historical backdrop. Her story is America's story told by one decade-long cliche after another.

The whole premise of Forrest Gump is that the main character "hilariously" stumbles into major historical events and, in some cases, even becomes the catalyst for them. We have Forrest to thank for Elvis Presley, John Lennon's "Imagine," the smiley face logo, the "shit happens" bumper sticker, and the success of Apple computers. But "Forrest Gump" commits its worst crime when it continually reduces some of the most important moments in our history to pure buffoonery. The film begins by relating how Forrest's name was an homage to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. This fact is a loaded plot point: it should have poignantly illustrated the rampant Confederacy worship and racism in the South. Instead, Forrest remarks:"And, what he did was, he started up this club called the Ku Klux Klan. They'd all dress up in their robes and their bedsheets and act like a bunch of ghosts or spooks or something. They'd even put bedsheets on their horses and ride around." That scene hits two birds with one offending stone. It not only mocks Forrest's mental impairment and lack of understanding, it glosses over one of the most notorious hate groups in American history. Forrest also explains that his mother gave him his name "to remind me that sometimes we all do things that, well, just don't make no sense." Not only must we believe that Mrs. Gump somehow existed outside the pervasive racism leading up the Civil Rights Movement, we must also believe that she named her son after a racist Confederate general as a reminder to be a good person. As Forrest said, we all do things that just don't make no sense. Another example of how the film uses humor to ignore dark situations is when Forrest's mother agrees to have sex with a school principal so Forrest can attend regular school instead of a special school that would cater to his impairment. The film shockingly finds levity in the situation when Forrest echoes the sexual moaning he heard inside the house. Even prostituting oneself has a lighter side in this film. Finally, in a scene depicting the desegregation of schools in Alabama, a major moment in a country riddled with racism, an African American student entering a school unknowingly drops a notebook, prompting Forrest to facetiously pop out of the crowd and return it to her. When told about the event, Forrest doesn't even understand its significance or the meaning of a popular racial epithet. He innocently says "Coons? When raccoons tried getting on our back porch, Mama just chased them off with a broom." Even desegregation is not immune to the film's need to inject humor into harrowing situations. 

"Forrest Gump" is entertaining and charming, but it comes at a price: the refusal to contemplate our shared past and learn from it. The scene that sums up the film is when Forrest wanders into the famous Vietnam protest rally on the national mall in Washington DC. In an intended comedic moment, Forrest is pulled on the main stage and asked what he thought about the Vietnam War. A military officer then disconnects the microphone cords, rendering his speech completely inaudible. As the microphones are reconnected, we can only hear the words "And that's all I have to say about that." Exactly. "Forrest Gump," both the character and film, has no wisdom or insight to communicate to audiences.