Forrest Gump (1994)*
Director:
Robert Zemeckis
I. Does Forrest
Gump support the myth of the American Dream--the belief that “everyman“ can
find wealth and prosperity in America?
A. The makers of the film have consistently
promoted a reading of the film that calls Gump an “Everyman.“ Tom Hanks, in his acceptance speech for best
actor Academy Award, praised the film as important and popular precisely
because it is about an ordinary person.
In Robert Zemeckis’s acceptance speeches for best film and best director
followed the same pattern. In fact, this
reading is encoded in the film itself:
Gump’s mother tells Gump repeatedly that he is just like everyone
else: “Don’t ever let anyone tell you
that you’re not as good as they are, Forrest.
If God, had meant for everyone to look alike, he’d have given us all
braces on our legs.” The problem with this reading is that the film consistently
undercuts the proverbs it sells to its audience. Gump notes that his mother could always say
things so he could “understand them,” while trying, in vain, to disentangle
himself and his leg braces from a storm sewer.
B. One of the
explicit messages of the movie and its promoters alike is this: “This is a movie about someone who is just
like you, someone with whom you can and should identify with. That gives “you” and IQ of 75, which, notes
the movie itself, is “below normal” it makes “you” a holder of a college degree
despite your IQ and the fact you spent your entire five college years doing
nothing but playing football; it makes “you” and incredibly gifted athlete (“I
could run like the wind blows”), and All-American college football star; it
makes “you” a self-made “gazillion ire” who managed accidentally to invest
large sums of found earnings in a fruit company--a fruit company named Apple
Computers. This plot summary displays
exactly the kind of ideology that keeps lotteries, among other things, running. A good part of the film seems to rest
precisely on a naïve reading of the movie as a feel good romance, and of Gump
as a “guy” like everyone else either is, or wants to be.
C. This “popular”
reading obscures a more sophisticated reading of Forrest Gump as a satire of
America itself in the latter part of the twentieth century. To explore this
idea, one must first look at the protagonist’s name:
Forrest
Ÿ
Comes from
someone he calls a “Civil War hero” Nathan Bedford Forrest. Although he was an accomplished solider, he
was probably more famous for 2 incidents--both of them from the 20th
century perspective, profoundly racist: 1) For being part of the beginnings of
the KKK and for being the commander at the infamous Fort Pillow Massacre.
Ÿ
Forrest’s mother
named him Forrest to remind him that “sometimes we do things that just don’t
make no sense”--at this point the movie reproduces a reference to D.W. Griffith’s
film Birth of a Nation, in which it depicts the beginnings of the clan
as an innocuous “club”
Ÿ
By this
reference, the film appears to have an anti-racist view, particularly if you
read Forrest’s mom’s comment as referring specifically to the senselessness of
the KKK
Ÿ
However, encoded
within the film is pointed commentary
directed at the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the antiwar
movement
Gump
Ÿ
The dictionary
definition of a “gump” is an idiot or a dolt. Winston Groom’s novel made much
of this aspect of the name. The novel
begins, “Let me say this: being an idiot
is no box of chocolates.” Gump calls himself an idiot throughout the novel,
even taking university English courses on the idiot in literature.
Ÿ
The movie,
however, tells us that Gump is not an idiot--Gump constantly says, “stupid is
as stupid does” and Lieutenant Dan tells the hoes on the New Year’s Eve never
to call Forrest stupid. His mom even
says Forrest is the same as everyone else--even agreeing to sleep with the
principal to ensure Forrest gets the same education as everyone else.
Ÿ
If the audience
of the film is to identify with Forrest, then the movie becomes a very
sophisticated satire, with its own audience as the subject: America the
gullible and adoring audience, America the market, America the
slow-witted.
II.
Memory and Constructing Concepts of Nation
a. One aspect of Postmodernism that Forrest Gump employs and that will later be revisited in Fahrenheit 451 is the idea that history
is a narrative like any other and that narrative can always be played
with. Figures like Forrest can be
inserted into history just as easily as other figures can be expunged.
b. In manipulating history, movies, novels, etc. can
manipulate how one views a particular aspect of history, particularly an era a
person may not have lived through—for example, WWII has been looked as a romantic
era by movies and novels, and often gloss over the gruesomeness of the
era. Also, TV shows like Leave It to Beaver glamorized the
nuclear family as the cornerstone of the American identity when in fact real
life was not as picturesque.
c. One writer has coined the term “prosthetic memory” to
describe the way mass cultural technologies of memory enable individuals to
experience, as if they were memories, events through which they themselves did
not live. Prosthetic memories are those
circulated publically, that are not organically based, but that are nonetheless
experienced by one’s own body, and they have the potential to significantly
construct or deconstruct the spectator’s identity as any experience that he or
she actually lived through.
d. Forrest Gump manipulates prosthetic memory in order to offer an
alternative view of American identity, one that reevaluates particularly the
sixties and seventies and how those eras affected national identity
Notes taken from “Prosthetic Memory/National Memory: Forrest Gump” and “’Like a Box of Chocolates’: Forrest Gump and Postmodernism”