Forrest Gump at 30: Defund, Forrest, Defund

Is there a more quintessentially 90s movie than Forrest Gump? I was too young to see it when it was in theaters, but old enough that I can remember it was everywhere: "Life is like a box of chocolates," "Run, Forrest, run," Lieutenant Dan, "Stupid is what stupid does," the Weird Al song summarizing the entire plot, the parody scene in Mafia!, the call-out in Fight Club. The box office titan of 1994 second only to The Lion King, Gump was a zeitgeist smash. There are obvious filmic reasons for its success—the judicious deployment of historical deepfakes made with cutting edge CG tech, an irresistably cloying Alan Silvestri score, a talented cast led by Tom Hanks in his first superstar role—and sure, that'll make a movie money. But the secret sauce, the thing that made it so of its time that it is hopelessly dated now, is the way it perfectly crystallizes both the detached irony and the neoliberal bootstrap Boomer politics of the Clinton years.

It may sound odd to call a movie as box-of-chocolates sweet as this ironic, but it absolutely is, in the worst possible way. Its entire MO is to take subjects the audience knows are contentious if not outright horrible, and filter them through the eyes of a character who is incapable of registering horror. The very first thing Forrest tells us is that he was named after his ancestor Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan—some ‘funny people’ who ‘liked to wear sheets.’ His mother gave him the name as a reminder that “sometimes we all do things that, well, just don't make no sense,” which is about as convincing a reason as saying you cover your walls with Soviet Realist art to remind yourself of the evils of communism.

There’s a double-think at work here, where the audience first has to know what the Klan are, and know if not agree that they were a monstrous organization, so that the movie can then reframe them as something silly and ‘Forrest’ as quaint and naïve. The incongruity is nominally the joke, and perhaps back in 1994 it was easy enough to see it as such and laugh. In hindsight it feels like the uncoupling of history from weight and values, and the mainstreaming of shock humor that would later express itself in South Park and then 4Chan, through which the ironic racism eventually circled back around to being sincere and monstrous again.

The KKK stuff is a disorienting way to open what’s supposed to be a sentimental comic tearjerker, yet it is appropriate. Everything is filtered through this ironic attitude, including Gump himself. Although the movie positions him as an admirable paragon of self-made can-do optimism, it also, by virtue of its sense of humor, is laughing at him, with several jokes that can be summed up as 'Gump doesn’t get this obvious figure of speech, isn’t that hilarious.' It is just so incredibly condescending. 1994's other cultural giant, Pulp Fiction, caught a lot of heat for its detached ironic attitude and had a racism problem of its own, but Forrest Gump's posture of aw-shucks simplicity and innocence is vastly more insincere. It's morally suspect to boot, like giving a turd to a child who can’t smell and calling it chocolate.

For it's not just American atrocities that get travestied and bowdlerized, but also the characters within the story. All of the friends Gump makes along the way are brutalized, nearly always in some clever reversal. Lieutenant Dan warns his troops to watch their legs before losing his; Bubba's dying moment, the tragedy of Vietnam in a nutshell, is grist for a classic Gumpism (BUBBA: Why is this happening...? GUMP: Because you got shot.), and Jenny the ignorant slut gets molested, slapped by, or embarrassed in front of the men in her life who aren't Forrest before delivering him Baby Gump and dying of God's punishment for slutty slutty slut sluts, a 'mysterious disease' the movie is too cowardly to name. And all this is more or less because these characters, unlike Gump, have agency and aspirations. Dan at least ends up happy, but only because his (inane, insane) goal in life was to die in war like his ancestors; Bubba just wanted to open a shrimp stand, and all Jenny wanted was a pair of wings to fly away from the horror show of her home life. In the moral universe of Gump, if you actually try to get anything out of life you are punished severely for it.

The first thing Gump tells us is that he’s named after a Klansman. The second thing he tells us is that his Mama refused to put him, a mentally handicapped child with a 75 IQ, into special education because he’s “just as good as all the other students.” It’s the animating philosophy of the entire movie: don’t let life get you down, you can overcome any adversity. This is expressed visually soon enough. Young Forrest is fitted with leg braces due to his curved spine, and soon after his spindly dancing inspires Elvis Presley to swivel his hips on national television, he is chased by some bullies. In the process of running away he sheds his braces like an old chrysalis and learns that he can run—which gets him onto his high school football team, which gets him onto Bear Bryant’s college All Star team, which gets him a team meeting with JFK, which which which….

It’s surely missing the point to try to deflate this fantasy with recourse to believability. No one is expected to take this literally, any more than anybody thinks that making talking cartoon animals realistic is a good idea. This is not a a bleak neorealist movie about a handicapped southern boy whose mother names him after a Klansman and refuses him accommodations for the sake of making him ‘normal,’ we’re not supposed to take this as depicting actual disability, it’s a metaphor for the audience to apply to themselves. I have made such an argument before. And yet, American society in Forrest Gump’s time did more or less expect the disabled, and anyone else who fell through the cracks, to just try harder. The movie certainly didn't invent the idea that that the unfortunate can just will themselves a better life, but it's doubtless one of the most pernicious expressions of it put to film.

Mama Gump, in her Oscar moment, tells us "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get." And sure, the movie thinks it's telling us to be modest and find meaning and joy in whatever life brings us, that we are all feathers in the wind that will go where we need to go like in the opening shot that was far and away my favorite part of the movie—but let's be real. Gump isn't finding the magic hiding in plain sight in quotidian life. He's stumbling ass-backwards into every culturally significant moment of postwar America, which is to say that the story of Forrest Gump is the story of the Baby Boomers.

Generational cohorts in general are bullshit, most often deployed to complain about college students of the day. Yet between the historical tourism and the relentless, obvious classic rock needle drops, the Boomer aspects really are inescapable. And not even for entirely bad reasons. They were the first generation to grow up with television as a vector of cultural transmission. Unlike their Silent Generation older siblings, who could only experience live news by radio, the Boomers were able to witness national and world history if not live than more immediately and immersively than ever before. Accordingly while American memory of World War II and its aftermath was manufactured by Hollywood movies, the experience of the 1950s and beyond was recorded—and, crucially, shaped—by broadcast television. Elvis's hips, the Kennedy presidency, John Lennon, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War—all were beamed directly into American homes on a daily basis, which could not help but influence thought and behavior, which would be recorded and broadcast in turn. History was no longer lost in the moment and imaginatively reconstructed through narrative and performance, but captured and revisited over and over, forever and ever, amen.^[1]

A picaresque across the latter half of 20th century America told in recreations of iconic newsreel footage makes a lot of sense, but Forrest Gump goes about it in the most insufferable way, by making Forrest not just present but the catalyst for all the great things people remembered about the Cold War and, conveniently, none of the bad. Forrest inspiring Elvis and Lennon and creating the smiley face are amusing if somewhat eye-rolling, but the 60s and early 70s were not all soul, peace, and chicken grease. They are still arguably the most turbulent era in American life since 1865, marked by unrest and assassinations, resulting in a collapse in faith in institutions that has never fully recovered. What's distasteful about making Forrest Gump the hero of postwar America is his lack of agency. He is simple, and sees the world simply. He is the point of audience identification because the goodness of his actions was self-evident to the movie's target audience of liberal Boomers fresh off their victory over George H.W. Bush.

But none of these things were self-evident in the 60s and 70s. It took conviction and courage to take a stand, but in Gump the marchers on the Pentagon and the Black Panthers are wallpaper for Forrest's and Jenny's insipid (and rather problematic!) relationship, wacky 'extremists' to contrast with Forrest's nonthreatening passivity. It would have perhaps been in poor taste to have Forrest bump into Nguyễn Ngọc Loan while he holds a pistol to Nguyễn Văn Lém's head, or pop a balloon on the grassy knoll overlooking Dealey Plaza, but it would be hardly more offensive than picking up Vivian Malone Jones' books during George Wallace's standoff with the National Guard over integration. It would at least be a lot less pandering.

This is not to indict everyone born between 1946 and 1964. The protests of the 1960s were a youth movement, after all. And a movie about this period from someone who was there need not be so myopic—Richard Linklater, often considered a Generation X 'slacker' due to his debut film of the same name but very much a Boomer, just the year before Forrest Gump came out made a masterpiece of nostalgia that also leans heavily on rock music.^[2] But it's hard not to read Forrest Gump's success as a generation, if not a nation, congratulating itself for being born into middle-class comfort in the most prosperous time and place in human history. Where Dazed and Confused uses its hyper-specific setting in the past to make a point about being present and in the moment, Forrest Gump's halting 2.5 hour run through as many decades of Life magazine is an argument that one can be a bystander in their own life, because history revolves around them anyway.^[3] The former did poorly in theaters and only on video attained classic status. The latter won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

History would have its revenge, Francis Fukuyama be damned. Although the 1992 presidential election represented the victory of the Boomers over what was not yet known as The Greatest Generation, by year's end Newt Gingrich would bring the counter-revolution to the 1960s counter-culture, to the House of Representatives. Bill Clinton's Democratic Party tacked right or ceded ground on several fronts: they had already passed a mammoth crime bill in September 1994 and would go on to slash welfare and deny recognition and protection of gay marriage and gay military service. Out went an ambitious safety net, and in came the dread neoliberalism, turning government mandates over to market actors. Befitting the times, entrepeneureal serendipity strikes Forrest and Lieutenant Dan: they start the shrimp company that was poor Bubba's idea, and business booms after Hurricane Rita destroys their competition, not unlike how the U.S. was the only industrial nation whose people and infrastructure were relatively untouched by World War II. They then invest and make millions, buying stock in Apple. The conflation of dumb luck and meritocracy, always a spectre hanging over discussions of success, is in Forrest Gump sanctified. Its own success, being the right movie at the right time, just becomes further provenance of its providence.

It's impossible to imagine a wistful traipse through recent history like Forrest Gump being made today. Not just because the Boomers have maintained a vice grip on government, but because the movie's vulgar positivism is so far removed from the national mood. Where the historical period leading up to Gump's release was a victorious rise to the last superpower standing, the country's subsequent trajectory is a story of protracted hubristic collapse. Only the most jet black comedy could put a light-hearded spin on a period that includes 9/11, the Iraq war, the 2016 election, and the 2020 pandemic and George Floyd protests. As it happens screenwriter Eric Roth did write a Gump sequel that saw the character popping up in the cultural episodes of the 90s, including the OJ Simpson car chase, and ending with his new Native American lover dying in the Oklahoma City bombing. Roth submitted his script at literally the last moment before history rendered its naivete obsolete, on September 10, 2001. Roth himself admitted the day after, "This story has no meaning anymore."^[4]