July 6th, 1994
We associate the summer movie season with a certain type of blockbuster. There have been many years where the biggest movie was about a Batman, a Spider-Man, a Terminator, some dinosaurs, some Jedis. 1994 had a different approach – the real behemoth was a cutesy romp through 20th century American history, a bit of a comedy, a bit of a weepy. FORREST GUMP was the year’s highest grossing movie at the domestic box office (#2 to THE LION KING worldwide), its soundtrack album reached #2 on the Billboard album charts (also below THE LION KING) and went twelve times platinum. The movie won Oscars for best picture, director, actor, adapted screenplay, visual effects and editing, and it even inspired a chain of seafood restaurants. So fuck THE LION KING.
It’s funny, I remember going to see this movie right when it came out, not expecting any of that. I was going as a fan of Robert Zemeckis’ obsession with pushing technology forward. I had read about the scenes where Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump is made to appear in footage with John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford and other real people. It was a new technological feat at the time and this was the guy who had combined animation with live action so well in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and made a digital hole through Goldie Hawn in DEATH BECOMES HER. Remember how that seemed like the coolest thing ever?
So here was this gimmick with the news footage and we also had our minds blown by the speed ping pong and especially the scenes where Gary Sinise (OF MICE AND MEN) as Lt. Dan has lost his legs, and they erased them digitally, something we’d never seen or thought of before. Seeing it now I’m most impressed that they initially stage it with him laying on a bed so we’ll assume it’s the old magician’s illusion with his real legs hidden inside the bed – but then he’s lifted up. That’s showmanship.
While being amazed by that stuff I really didn’t realize until later that digital FX also combined many shots of extras to fill in the crowd at the Washington monument, as well as less showy things like changing skies and adding mountains and things. It seemed incredible when you read about it. Really? They’re using CGI in dramas now? Not for a dinosaur or a magic dagger with a face on it? And I thought it was seamless. Now I notice some of it but it just looks normal. This is how most movies are made now. Zemeckis got there first.
But when we remember FORREST GUMP I don’t think most people’s minds jump to technical stuff. It’s a story that got people emotionally invested, made them cry, made them feel inspired, that’s why it was a phenomenon. I do believe it’s that simple.
The amount many people were moved by it, though, may be rivaled by the amount other people hated it, or have come to hate it. I confess that I really liked it at the time, have not seen it in whole since the ‘90s, and had no idea what I’d think of it now. But every time I mentioned to anyone that I would be rewatching it for this series it inspired scoffing and negativity. In many circles it has a reputation as corny, manipulative, full of shit in its politics. I don’t entirely disagree with all that, but I do think it’s some 20/20 hindsight funny business to call it Oscar bait. If Zemeckis knew that his movie starring Tom Hanks as an intellectually disabled southerner who teaches Elvis how to dance and goes to ‘Nam and becomes a ping pong champion and gets rich because his shrimp boat survives a hurricane and invents “shit happens” and his wife dies of AIDS was gonna win best picture, then we better be asking him for the Lotto numbers. Whatever your opinions on its potentially middlebrow worldview it’s not a safe movie. It’s weird as shit.
I won’t go into much detail about the plot, written by Eric Roth (THE CONCORDE… AIRPORT ’79), adapted from the 1986 novel by Winston Groom. It’s the life story of this remarkably lucky individual, whose childhood leg braces lead to being chased by bullies which leads to playing football which leads to heroism during the Vietnam War which leads to success in the shrimp industry. Along the way he intersects with many historical figures and events, understanding none of them, and periodically reconnects with his childhood best friend Jenny (Robin Wright, HOLLYWOOD VICE SQUAD), whose life is more rebellious and difficult than his.
And all of this is told by him to politely nodding strangers waiting for the bus. Come on, Forrest, can’t you see this poor lady is trying to read People? It’s a very relatable public transit situation because there are people who will start monologuing at you no matter how little interest you show. But I too will be polite to them and more forgiving when they appear to have a disability.
Forrest’s story is more palatable if you take it as a goof than as a grand portrait of 20th century American life or some shit. But it can’t help but come across as the magnum opus of watered down boomer nostalgia, cataloging all things they considered so important – JFK, Elvis, Vietnam, hippies (if not Woodstock), a little bit of the civil rights movement, investing in stocks – but in a light-hearted and purportedly non-political way, and intentionally soundtracked with the most obvious, recognizable songs of the era. It’s clear that deep cuts weren’t allowed, but I didn’t previously know that Zemeckis forbade anything that wasn’t American. He “felt Forrest would only buy American,” whatever that means. But that’s why there’s none of his beloved Beatles, or the Rolling Stones, or Crosby Stills Nash and Young, or even Bryan Adams. (But Galt MacDermot wrote “Age of Aquarius” and he was born in Canada – sucker!)
So many things in FORREST GUMP (life is like a box of chocolates, run Forrest run, my name is Forrest Gump people call me Forrest Gump) are so ingrained into the cultural consciousness that it’s hard to even step back and accept them as an organic part of the movie. But I remembered most of the cute shit more clearly than the crazy shit. It really is right at the beginning that Forrest says he was descended from the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and named after him as a reminder that “sometimes we all do things that, well, just don’t make no sense.” But he calls Nathan Bedford Forrest a “great civil war hero,” and his only understanding of what didn’t make sense was riding around wearing bed sheets.
There is something both sweet and condescending about this notion that lacking awareness of the invented concept of race Forrest’s default is to be kind to everybody, like you obviously should be. I’m sure some people hate it but I actually think the scene where he witnesses segregationist asshole George Wallace at his school is really funny. Forrest talks to some slur-spewing bigot about integration and clearly doesn’t get what he’s talking about. Then he ends up in news footage standing behind Wallace with a great paging-Mr.-Herman type look on his face. He doesn’t know what the fuck these guys are talking about but just assumes it must make sense. I don’t think he knows there are things in the world that don’t make sense.
The score by Alan Silvestri (SUMMER RENTAL) helps make it feel saccharine sweet, but Zemeckis and Roth have to know there’s something darkly humorous about a guy going through all this and maintaining a positive outlook on life only because he’s monumentally oblivious. He doesn’t understand why the Klan is bad, what segregation is, or what the Black Panthers are about, or what the war he fights in is about. Even as a grown man looking back he has no clue that Jenny was molested, describing her father as “a very loving man” because “he was always kissing and touching her and her sisters.” I used to think it was kind of a cheat that we don’t hear what he says to the anti-war march, because it allowed you to make up your own world view for him, but I was ignoring that that’s the whole joke. He had nothing to say and lucked out because nobody heard it.
Many people have read FORREST GUMP as a conservative film. That includes people criticizing it (like this Eric Kohn piece on Indiewire that says it “celebrates family values and obedience to the system over anyone who clashes with it”), as well as people praising it, like this National Review “Best Conservative Movies” list that says it’s about “an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s.”
It’s an interpretation that seems to make sense, even though it’s ignoring both the feather metaphor and the box of chocolates simile to say that lifestyles lead to predetermined outcomes. It’s true that Forrest succeeds wildly in life by following a code of mama, God, Jenny, and cumming in his pants the moment he touches a boob, while Jenny dies of AIDS after she protested wars and racism, enjoyed music and sex and drugs. Only… nobody outside of the National Review ever said “That Jenny, she got what she deserved.” The movie loves Jenny as much as Forrest does, and understands her more than he does. And both the movie and Forrest agree that this shit isn’t fair exactly because Jenny knew about shit and cared about shit and tried to do things.
And anyway, what would that mean about all the famous people Forrest meets and then notes that they were later shot – was it their fault? And can we include George Wallace as part of the “lethal values of the 1960s,” or only John Lennon? It would be good for everyone to be nice like Forrest, but this is not a story about “do as Forrest does.” Think of all those people who saw profundity in his jogging across the country and started literally following him, only to be confused and disappointed when he abruptly got bored and went home. You need to find your own path, your own meaning.
But one think I think is very conservative about the movie is that the only fictional characters who come across as strident jerks are Jenny’s Black Panther friends and her activist boyfriend Wesley (Geoffrey Blake, THE LAST STARFIGHTER, FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAIN FOREST). The latter I don’t mind because I think it’s important to show there are lots of dudes who pass themselves off as righteous left wingers but are sexist, abusive assholes. But my eyebrow is raised that the Black Panthers are such cartoons. At least make them funny, then, like the ones in I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA.
One thing I really noticed this time is that despite his many hardships and the sacrifices his mom (Sally Field, HOOPER) makes for him, Forrest is very privileged in the sense that his mom inherited a huge home that “had been in Mama’s family since her grandpa’s grandpa’s grandpa had come across the ocean about a thousand years ago” and was able to live off of renting the rooms out to people. Keep in mind that Forrest’s ancestors include Nathan Bedford Forrest, who in real life grew up poor but managed to buy some cotton plantations and become one of the wealthiest people in the south. He was considered one of the top four slave traders in Memphis, and is believed to have sold thousands of human beings for profits of hundreds of thousands of dollars. A Tennessee newspaper hyped up that he supposedly sold Frederick Douglass’s daughter. Then he was a confederate general whose troops massacred several hundred surrendering soldiers (most of them Black) in one of the most notorious atrocities of the civl war. But after the war he went unpunished, and continued the cause as the first national leader of the KKK as they terrorized polling places to scare Black voters and office seekers. He eventually tried to dissolve the Klan and disavowed racist violence, but I’m not ready to nominate him for a humanitarian award. He was also running a farm labored by convicts who were reportedly treated just as brutally as slaves.
So people descended from that bastard, including Forrest, were born with the benefit of his blood money. And Forrest is able to lead a life of incredible adventure and accomplishment, with few worries. Meanwhile, Jenny grows up in a crappy little shack “as old as Alabama” where her dad abuses her, and goes on to live an abbreviated life frequently contemplating suicide.
Lieutenant Dan’s inheritance is “a long, great military tradition. Somebody in his family had fought and died in every single American war.” So that would include the one Nathan Bedford Forrest got to survive. Like Jenny, Dan spends many years suicidal, believing it was his duty to die in the war. And Bubba (Mykelti Wiilliamson, MIRACLE MILE) inherits a love of shrimp after at least three generations on his mother’s side cooked it… as servants to rich white people. To his credit, Forrest ends up breaking that cycle by giving a cut of his shrimp profits to Bubba’s mother (Marlena Smalls), and she has a white person serve her shrimp. So this sort of stuff is on the movie’s mind.
Forrest also lives his whole life with a Black maid, Louise (Margo Moorer), one of the few characters in the movie who does not receive a page on the otherwise very thorough Forrest Gump fandom.com wiki. Hmm.
So my view is that there’s more going on here than some people acknowledge, even if I’m not sure what all to make of it. How much did Zemeckis, Roth or Groom intend/think about these themes? I don’t know. But they don’t seem to be included by accident.
I found some somewhat cryptic comments from Roth on an episode of an episode of the podcast Script Notes. He told host John August that many consider FORREST GUMP “a poke in the eye at liberalism… I don’t have the same feeling about it,” but also that “Zemeckis and I are quite different” and “the movie was criticized probably rightly in some respects,” but also “it’s supposed to be a satire, you know.” I’d like more insight into what he specifically considers it to be satirizing, but it’s an intriguing implication that he and Zemeckis might’ve been working somewhat at cross-purposes. (Not in a combative way. They have recently united for the upcoming film HERE.)
So what do I think of FORREST GUMP after watching it in 2024? That’s a tough one. I can’t help but resent how it ends up being sort of a K-Tel compilation of hit songs and historical moments, implying that these are all the most important things that happened in the period but showing them through the perspective of a person who has no opinion on them or even a basic understanding of them. Which actually would be fine because we don’t have to follow suit, but the problem is, this guy is so nice! I would like to be able to hate a motherfucker who went to war because he liked running and came home without many further insights.
But it still manages to pull me in, partly through Zemeckis’ meticulous filmatistic construction, and partly by having a such a unique tone. The heaviest part happens right after the wocka-wocka joke that he’s been waiting for a bus for hours and then finds out the place he’s going is like a block away and it’s easier just to walk. Somehow it totally meshes. I watched it with more cynical eyes than I ever had before but it still managed to pull some tears out of them at the end. I was like Romy and Michele “making fun of” PRETTY WOMAN.
But that’s okay. If Forrest doesn’t have to have an opinion on anything, why should I?
ADDITIONAL NOTES:
Trivia:
There are all kinds of behind-the-scenes stories about people who famously were considered to direct or star in FORREST GUMP, I won’t get into all that, but I want to mention two little things:
1. Paramount got it from Warner Brothers by trading the script for EXECUTIVE DECISION. (Sub-note: Kurt Russell reportedly dubbed Elvis’ voice.)
2. Tupac Shakur’s wife Keisha Morris told Uproxx that they saw FORREST GUMP on their first date; he wanted to see it because he had read for the part of Bubba. Boy, that might’ve really changed the trajectory of things if he’d gotten the part!
Aborted sequel:
At the time I wondered if we were supposed to consider whether or not Forrest Jr. (Haley Joel Osment, Walker Texas Ranger) was born with HIV. After rewatching it, I felt I had been overthinking it. But then I read about the sequel Roth wrote (separate from Groom’s sequel book Gump and Co.), and apparently yeah, he had the poor kid being HIV+, experiencing discrimination at school and then dying! What the fuck! And he put Forrest into
‘90s historical moments so, this will sound like a joke if you haven’t heard this before but I swear it’s true, he says he had Forrest ducked down in the back of O.J.’s Bronco. He also had the Oklahoma City bombing happen right behind Forrest and when 9-11 happened one day after turning in the script he and the studio immediately agreed that the world didn’t need this movie anymore. If they had made it it’s hard to imagine a scenario where it’s not an infamous fiasco, but then again, FORREST GUMP might sound like one if you described it before it existed.
Other stuff that probly wasn’t in the script but I hope was: Forrest inspires the lyrics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Forrest is in the limo with Tupac when he gets shot, Forrest accidentally starts a fire in a mansion that Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes takes the blame for, something about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Forrest gives Seinfeld the idea for a show about nothing, Forrest is an extra in the coffee shop on Friends, Forrest invents the Furby, Forrest convinces Michael Jordan to play baseball, Forrest is on the balcony with Michael Jackson when he holds up the baby…
Summer of 1994 connections:
The famous floating feather at the beginning and end have some similarities to the scene in THE LION KING that follows some dust from Simba to Rafiki. The version of the scene in the remake is much closer to the FORREST GUMP version and a later evolution of it in Zemeckis’ THE POLAR EXPRESS.
Like BABY’S DAY OUT, FORREST GUMP has a Hindi language remake (LAAL SINGH CHADDHA [2022]).
July 11th, 2024 at 2:26 pm
There has always been a group of very bitter PULP FICTION and/or SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION fans who say that this movie didn’t deserve the Best Picture Oscar, but fuck that. You don’t have to like FORREST GUMP, but you have to acknowledge that it’s a film making miracle. It’s a huge special effect extravaganza that never looks or feels like it and was maybe even a bigger FX quantum leap than JURASSIC PARK, considering how they used computers for often completely invisible, not show-offy things! And even without that it is a goofy comedy and a tear jerking drama, but there isn’t one scene where the tones clash.
And yes, I always took it as a satire. Forrest lives the american dream and becomes the most interesting man in the world, but he doesn’t even know what’s going on around him most of the time and doesn’t seem to appreciate it. Jenny on the other hand tries to pick her battles and change the world, but always gets the short end of the stick. The “good American” is basically born ignorant. (And also white and male.) I can see how this can be twisted into a “Shut up, put your head down, obey the rules and you will be rewarded” message, but if you do that, you really ignore Jenny’s side of the story. She isn’t the antagonist in Forrest’s life. She doesn’t get punished for being a selfish bitch. She tries to do the right thing and the movie agrees that everything that happens to her is absolutely unfair. But so is life.
Also man, the bit about him waiting for the bus to reach a close destination hits way too hard. This happened at least thrice to me. That’s why I learned to check Google maps for the walking distance first if I have to go somewhere I’ve never been before.