Forrest Gump BY ROGER EBERT / July 6, 1994 Cast & CreditsForrest Gump: Tom Hanks Jenny Curran: Robin Wright Lt. Dan: Gary Sinise Directed By Robert Zemeckis. Running Time: 135 Minutes. Classified PG-13 (For Drug Content, Sensuality And War Violence). I've never met anyone like Forrest Gump in a movie before, and for that matter I've never seen a movie quite like "Forrest Gump." Any attempt to describe him will risk making the movie seem more conventional than it is, but let me try. It's a comedy, I guess. Or maybe a drama. Or a dream. The screenplay by Eric Roth has the complexity of modern fiction, not the formulas of modern movies. Its hero, played by Tom Hanks, is a thoroughly decent man with an IQ of 75, who manages between the 1950s and the 1980s to become involved in every major event in American history. And he survives them all with only honesty and niceness as his shields. And yet this is not a heartwarming story about a mentally retarded man. That cubbyhole is much too small and limiting for Forrest Gump. The movie is more of a meditation on our times, as seen through the eyes of a man who lacks cynicism and takes things for exactly what they are. Watch him carefully and you will understand why some people are criticized for being "too clever by half." Forrest is clever by just exactly enough. Tom Hanks may be the only actor who could have played the role. I can't think of anyone else as Gump, after seeing how Hanks makes him into a person so dignified, so straight-ahead. The performance is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and sadness, in a story rich in big laughs and quiet truths. Forrest is born to an Alabama boardinghouse owner (Sally Field) who tries to correct his posture by making him wear braces, but who never criticizes his mind. When Forrest is called "stupid," his mother tells him, "Stupid is as stupid does," and Forrest turns out to be incapable of doing anything less than profound. Also, when the braces finally fall from his legs, it turns out he can run like the wind. That's how he gets a college football scholarship, in a life story that eventually becomes a running gag about his good luck. Gump the football hero becomes Gump the Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, and then Gump the Ping-Pong champion, Gump the shrimp boat captain, Gump the millionaire stockholder (he gets shares in a new "fruit company" named Apple Computer), and Gump the man who runs across America and then retraces his steps. It could be argued that with his IQ of 75 Forrest does not quite understand everything that happens to him. Not so. He understands everything he needs to know, and the rest, the movie suggests, is just surplus. He even understands everything that's important about love, although
Jenny, the girl he falls in love with in grade school and never falls out of love with, tells him, "Forrest, you don't know what love is." She is a stripper by that time. The movie is ingenious in taking Forrest on his tour of recent American history. The director, Robert Zemeckis, is experienced with the magic that special effects can do (his credits include the "Back to the Future" movies and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"), and here he uses computerized visual legerdemain to place Gump in historic situations with actual people. Forrest stands next to the schoolhouse door with George Wallace, he teaches Elvis how to swivel his hips, he visits the White House three times, he's on the Dick Cavett show with John Lennon, and in a sequence that will have you rubbing your eyes with its realism, he addresses a Vietnamera peace rally on the Mall in Washington. Special effects are also used in creating the character of Forrest's Vietnam friend Lt. Dan (Gary Sinise), a Ron Kovic type who quite convincingly loses his legs. Using carefully selected TV clips and dubbed voices, Zemeckis is able to create some hilarious moments, as when LBJ examines the wound in what Forrest describes as "my butt-ox." And the biggest laugh in the movie comes after Nixon inquires where Forrest is staying in Washington, and then recommends the Watergate. (That's not the laugh, just the setup.) As Forrest's life becomes a guided tour of straight-arrow America, Jenny (played by Robin Wright) goes on a parallel tour of the counterculture. She goes to California, of course, and drops out, tunes in, and turns on. She's into psychedelics and flower power, antiwar rallies and love-ins, drugs and needles. Eventually it becomes clear that between them Forrest and Jenny have covered all of the landmarks of our recent cultural history, and the accommodation they arrive at in the end is like a dream of reconciliation for our society. What a magical movie.
Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996) 419-444 History Re-Membered: Forrest Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of the Counterculture by Thomas B. Byers “Since memory is actually a very important factor in struggle (really, in fact, struggles develop in a kind of conscious moving forward of history), if one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. . . .” . . . And when you see these films, you find out what you have to remember. --Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory” “. . . [T]he undisputed image of man can only be created at the expense of woman.” --Susan Jeffords, “Narrative as Violence” This double account is mirrored in conflicting comments on the film by Steve Tisch, one of its two producers, on the one hand, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich on the other. Gingrich, speaking first, called Gump "a conservative film. People went to see it as a reaffirmation that the counterculture destroys human beings and basic values. Maybe being simple but good, and decent and romantic, is a lot better" (qtd. in Barnes 5). In response to such assessments Tisch, accepting the 1995 Best Picture Oscar, said "[a]ll over the political map, people have been calling Forrest their own. But Forrest Gump isn't about politics or conservative values. It's about humanity, it's about respect, tolerance, and unconditional love" (qtd. in Courier-Journal A7, in a banner headline on the op-ed page). Like Forrest responding to the media, Tisch explicitly rejects politics and implicitly erases history (Forrest erases history by denying causal relations; Tisch does it by universalizing). Like Forrest invoking his momma, and like the film itself in its treatment of the counterculture, Gingrich admits that the recent past is a problem, and he implicitly affirms the popular audience's effort to turn their back on it and put it behind them. …. As Tisch's and Gingrich's statements mirror Forrest's own contradiction, they also reflect two somewhat different, though imbricated, tendencies in the operations of the film itself: the forgetting and/or emptying out of history on the one hand, and its re-membering and rewriting on (or in) the other--a hand that at times proves to be remarkably heavy. The protagonist's naiveté and the film's comic-romantic veneer serve the emptying out and help lend the film a certain level of "deniability" against political critiques….Ultimately (and these are words I never expected to write), I find myself largely in agreement with Gingrich's analysis: Forrest Gump is an aggressively conservative film--in fact a reactionary one. Its erasure of history is not simply a matter of universalizing, as Tisch suggests it is; rather, it clears the space for a programmatic, highly politicized re-vision of the period that the film recounts. Of course where the Speaker and I disagree is that he would point to this re-vision as disclosure of a previously buried truth, while I cite it as a performance of what Foucault takes to be a basic function of popular films about history: "to obstruct the flow of th[e] popular memory" of struggle against structures of oppression (91). Barring the flow of memory, covering over the text written by it as events occurred, the film is, in psychological terms, an act of repression. And the status of history in it is, from one point of view at least, that of the repressed: that which is at once overtly forgotten/denied by consciousness and laboriously misremembered/displaced into more
acceptable inscriptions, and which all the while threatens to return despite the elaborate defenses against it. .... Something similar happens when we see George Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door" at the University of Alabama. This sequence offers the film's only depiction of the Civil Rights movement and the racism against which it struggles. Once again, Forrest simply does not comprehend the racism, and again his non-comprehension of it has the effect of downplaying its historical importance. Moreover, once the university is integrated, representations of racism disappear from the film, in favor, for instance, of the notion that Black and southern white GI's in Vietnam were naturally each other's best friends. And even in the moment, the construction of the white male leader works to separate him from, and to displace the focus from, racial issues. In one of the few instances where the film allows an explicitly political discourse to be heard, George Wallace is seen in close-up, claiming that "we are awakening the American people to the dangers that we have spoken about so many times, which are so evident today--the trend toward military dictatorship in this country." Thus in his own words--words that, the film is careful to show, elicit the applause of the crowd gathered around him--Wallace becomes not an apologist for state-enforced racism, but an early prophet of contemporary Republicanism (of course he was in fact both). While one who brings to the film a prior sense of the historical link between Wallace's words and the racism for which he was standing can see the scene in that light, the film itself does not make the link; moreover, its erasure of racism from this point on is consonant with Wallace's own concealment of the issue. .... In order to understand how all of this works, it will be helpful to examine further the film's remembering of the histories of gender, the counterculture, and the generational/political rebellion of the sixties. As should seem clear from the list given above of his traditional masculine roles and achievements, Forrest is, by and large, a representative of the ideals of All-American "straight" culture in his period. Jenny, on the other hand, is the figure of just about everything the New Right means by the counterculture: she is a folksinging bohemian, a "loose" woman (she is promiscuous, and she appears in Playboy and works in a strip club), an acid-dropping flowerchild who hitches a ride in an old VW to San Francisco for the summer of love, an antiwar activist and lover of a radical leader, a disco-dancing cocaine addict, an HIV-positive single mother. The assignment of all of these roles to one woman is much more symbolic than realistic. For instance, the coeds who posed for Playboy were not generally the ones who identified with Joan Baez (who, needless to say, did not sing her concerts at strip clubs). 9 And the HIV-positive single mothers of the late 1980s were not, by and large, coeds in exclusive southern women's colleges in the mid-sixties. But the symbolism is perfect for the revisionist version of the counterculture, which collapses together (as "liberal" and evil) any and all behaviors that deviate from the repressive norms of the 1950s: in this view the idea of sexual liberation or a woman's control over her desire, the "free love" sexual experimentation of bohemians and hippies, the sex industry, and AIDS are all of a piece; Playboy bunnies and anti-war activists are cut from the same cloth; and the cultures and politics of acid rock and discomania, LSD and cocaine, are utterly continuous. Once again all historical distinctions are blurred--in this case for [End Page 432] the purpose of constituting all deviations from traditional "family values" and codes of behavior as a single, destructive, and implicitly "liberal" other.