Has Forrest Gump Aged Well? | Den Of Geek

This is not a love story about a meeting of the minds, or a discovered sense of commonality between the far left and right during those agonizing years. It’s a parable about conventional values where the all-American straight arrow who’s too square to be part of Jenny’s scene is the one who ends up befriending three presidents and getting rich by investing in Apple Computer stock (which only happens after he steals his dead Black friend’s idea for starting a shrimping business and then shares its greatest wealth with Lt. Dan). Conversely, Jenny spends her whole life unhappy and is then punished for chasing the California Dreamin’ ideal by getting AIDS in the ‘80s and dying. She lives long enough to bear Forrest a son, and her purpose served, is extinguished.

Considering Hanks starred in and won an Oscar only a year before this for the also dated, but still richly rewarding and nuanced, Philadelphia, it feels odd to see him in a film with such a regressive point-of-view.

Of course at the time Forrest Gump wasn’t meant to be regressive. It was a celebration of a past its target audience all went through, with all that great music, and all those unfathomable sorrows and pointless assassinations, now revisited with a sweet, life-affirming touch. What does the character of Forrest Gump actually have to say about those times? We don’t know. At the anti-war protest Forrest accidentally wanders into, he’s asked what the Vietnam War meant for him. He begins to offer a long and thoughtful answer. Unfortunately though, at that very moment another disgruntled military man disconnects Forrest’s microphone so no one, including the audience, can hear what he has to say.

The sequence is meant to make fun of both sides, the censorious, anti-free speech “silent majority,” as well as the overzealous and self-righteous far-left who think silence is like a deep answer, man. But was Forrest glad he went to Vietnam? Was he horrified by Vietnam? It’s up to each viewer, and presumably their own political persuasion, to fill in Forrest’s dialogue bubble. Besides, the past is the past. Can’t we just hug it out with Jenny in the pool?

But alas, the past is never past. Recent tragic events have caused Americans to reexamine how far we still remain from racial equality, and even hard-won victories from Forrest and Jenny’s day have turned out to be ephemeral. After all, it is one of their contemporaries, Baby Boomer and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who penned the leaked U.S. Supreme Court decision that appears prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade and, thereby, allow men once again to command potentially up to penalty of death what women can do with their own bodies. And on the notion of the past never being past, Alito cited “common law” from an English judge who hanged women for witchcraft in the 17th century as legal precedent for his logic.

Forrest Gump is a feel-good movie that truly feels good when viewed uncritically. But its sunny disposition obscures a frightening lack of self-awareness for the decades it remembers, as well as the culture it seems to be celebrating.