Forrest Gump: A Smorgasbord of Feuilletons

Proposition: What the five highest­ grossing movies have in common (Jurassic Park, E.T., Jaws, Star Wars/Aladdin, and now Forrest Gump) is the infantile fantasy that we are able to overcome our fears of annihilation by remembering that we are omnipotent. Dinosaurs are scary, but we know they’re dead. We need not be afraid of extra­terrestrial beings: they are sweet, gentle and friendly. Sharks are a real menace, but they are only physically stronger than we are; we can outsmart them with our cunning. An adolescent­like Luke Skywalker can find his manhood by shooting his bullets down a channel to explode in orgasm if he has the courage, the “force,” behind him. If only we all had a magic genie (also spelled jinni). Wish fulfillments all, but only in our dreams.

From the first scene on, when we see a white feather drifting gently from the sky to land near Forrest’s feet, and the young black woman nurse, we are led to anticipate that the film has structured its narrative on a frisson of symbols. But this is and is not the case. Rather, we are presented with a confusing assortment of appetizers, and an entree which is chocolates. “Life,” says Mrs. Gump, Forrest’s mommy, “is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” This is said to me, a kid who grew up on Whitman’s chocolates, the box cover designed to tell you exactly what you’re gonna get. There is no question of destiny with Whitman’s. But destiny, a leitmotif in the film, is a mixed bag. “I don’t know if it was my destiny for you to be my son, Forrest,” says Mommy. Lt. Taylor

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screams that Forrest has robbed him of his destiny to die in action in the field. Forrest does not listen; Forrest is a butinsky (an interferer) and saves Taylor who loses his legs, becomes an alcoholic and then Forrest’s shipmate on a shrimpboat, and later is fianced to an Asian woman. Lt. Taylor thanks Forrest for saving his life. What is the message behind this fairy tale?

I am already confused, since Forrest as agent for interracial harmony would likely have gotten these liberal notions from his mother. But would this perfect mommy of infinite humanistic view name her son after Nathan Bedford Forrest who founded the KKK? Not unless she was ill-informed or simple. And is it necessary for this perfect mommy to explain complex matters simply, to blatantly lie to Forrest? How are we to respond to the snippet of The Birth of a Nation? Why are all of the friends but one of Forrest’s black? Mommy tells Forrest, “You’re no different from anybody else.” When asked by Forrest, “Where is my Father?” Mommy answers, “On vacation,… That means when you go away and never come back.” Worse yet, she brings home the principal of the school she wants Forrest admitted to, and Forrest hears the man’s grunts and groans, which he imitates as the principal leaves. Forrest may be simple but his response to being in on “the primal scene,” and his sense that his “mother sure wants to get you into school,”, that is, whored herself for him, stunts Forrest’s sexual development. His first view of Jenny’s breasts has him gagging and about to vomit during her first attempt to seduce him. It is only mommy’s “my time has come, Forrest,” and she dies that Forrest becomes amenable to Jenny’s seduction, and unknowingly impregnates her. Now as he lies in bed he does not have to say, “I sure miss mommy and Jenny.” He can forget about mommy.

What is one to make of all this? What we have in this film are pallets (20 definitions in the unabridged) of apperceptive ink blots, round, square, oval, of the last 40 years of our American history to which people young, older, and oldest bring their experiences.

I am offended by the film. To me, the film insults both whites and blacks. Message: only a mildly retarded person can be friendly with black men and women: only blacks are able to accept a low-I.Q. man. Bubba, Forrest’s closest army buddy cum business partner, has an I.Q. of about 50. The film lies. No man with an I.Q. of 75 puts together a rifle in record time like Forrest does. It is insulting to college athletes who graduate from universities. In trying to be clever the film outwits itself. Gump means simple and stupid; a simple word association is gumption which means shrewd with common sense. Jay Sherry writes that Forrest is similar to a “figure known in fairy tale studies a ‘the Dummling,’ the simple minded fellow whose simplicity and good fortune leads to undreamed of success.” I am mildly amused because I did not know of the figure, but I do know that dummy, which Forrest is also called, is a false nipple. Unintentionally funny? to whom?

The film mocks those who are heroic, patriotic, and makes fun of war itself, which it defines as a series of special effects. My grandchildren were not upset about the horrible war scenes not the ones in the hospital. They had read all about the special effects in the movie weeks before they saw it.

Debbie Tanzer reminds me that those of us in middle-age see before our eyes some awful truths we experienced these past 40 years: drugs, alcohol, and a virus called AIDS; the embarrassing vulgarities of President Lyndon Johnson who offered-up his gall­ bladder scar to the nation on TV; our Camelot President, John F. Kennedy, who turned the White House into a Whore House; of the smiling non compos mentis president who made millionaires and billionaires and increased an underclass centuple-fold while destroying a middle­class. Forrest’s “I gotta pee,” to Kennedy, and his showing his wounded buttocks to Johnson appalled me. An adult critic called the scene hilarious.

I keep viewing the film on at least two levels, the literal and the psychoanalytic. On the former, I quickly understand why I am never worried about Forrest. Like Tarzan in his ten-feuilleton series Forrest may get wounded but he will never die. (In conversation between Forrest and Jenny I often expect Forrest to say, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Or was it the other way around? And what was Tarzan’s I.Q.?) (When Forrest says, “I may not be the smartest person in the world but I know what love is,” I half­ expect Jenny to lip-sync Ilona Massey

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singing, “You don’t know what love is until “)

On a literary level I attempt to put Forrest in a tradition of Spenser’s Red Cross Knight in his 16th century epic, The Fairy Queen. He is all Magnanimity, all virtues together in one person. But he is too intelligent to be allied to Forrest. I think of I. B. Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, whose first line is “I am Gimpel the fool, but I am not a fool.” (The translation is not felicitous. Important is the mistranslation of the Hebrew word tam which means straightforward, direct.) That is, Gimpel knows what’s going on as Forrest never does. Of course, as we think of other archetypes the best is Melville’s Billy Budd or a Christ­like figure in literature. Billy hangs, blessing Captain Vere, and the white feather floats upward at the end of the film signaling to us that when Forrest and his son die they will ascend to heaven.

Psychoanalytically, we realize what this pasticcio of bits of our culture adds up to is so little that we rush to films that take us away on the wings of our deepest fantasy. We can stay “innocent” forever. Forrest never grows up. To do so Forrest has to learn to lie and to have secrets, two necessary requisites to separate from the mother. But he is not taught the difference by his mother who does both lie and keep secrets from him. Jenny is crippled, abandoned by her mother, and sexually abused by her father; she looks for affection anywhere she can get it and becomes a heroin addict who dies from AIDS. Forrest has an unconditionally­ loving mother but no father. But then we need to remember that Forrest, for all his worldly shortcomings is not human. He, like Jesus, is “Perfect Man.” Thus, for all of his experiences he remains unchanged and not any more grown up at the end of the movie than he is at the beginning. His favorite book is a child’s favorite, Curious George, about a mischievous monkey whose curiosity gets him into trouble but he always ends up safe back home. And this is what he passes on to his little son, who goes off to school with it as Forrest did.

The idealizing of a fool or a saint gets us into equal amounts of trouble. It gives us permission to never grow up. We can remain monkeys. God provides miracles and takes care of us.

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