I was gonna do a writeup but this author sums up my thoughts pretty well. I always hated how the movie portrayed Jenny. It's like the movie tries to punish her for daring to move against the broader (white, patriarchal, militaristic, conservative) culture. Notice how she only receives redemption when she functionally gives up her counter-cultural ways and accepts her role as a mom. And even then she still gets "punished" for her "sins" by dying of AIDS like it's some Grimm fairy tale. Feels a bit like incel fan-fiction, in hindsight.
And of course the movie panders to white reactionary notions of the Black Panthers. They were just angry black men who were reverse racists. Gross.
Forrest Gump is incredibly reactionary and it's terrible. It's the conservative boomers' attempt to tell a morality tale in which they are the ultimate victors over their contemporaries who dared for something different.
Okay sho (schniff) Foresht Gump isch a movie yesh yesh a movie about the psychoshexual desire of all white americansh to be lobotimized it isch ableisht and reactionary and sho on and sho forth.
Not a good movie, Tom Hanksh givesch a very mediocre performansch. It isch a liberal nostalgia for itsch arrogant preschumption about the end of hischtory. (gleeks wad of phlegm onto floor) A victory lap for ideological perverts to maschturbate over stripsch of celluoid and then literally project their maschturbation onto the eyesch of an entire nation!
Foresht? He isch presented as a sort of parody of what the diseased neurotypical mind thinksch anyone that isch not the Aryan norm isch. (licking fingers, dipping them into bag of cocaine, then aggressively rubbing the cocaine into gums) The film isch also racist, it steals its conventions from old American minstrel schows. Tom Hanksch is only momentsch away from smearing schoe polisch over hisch face and singing "old man river" or schomething like thisch. Disgusting. The directors contempt isch clearly seen in their depiction of the Black Panther Party. Foresct Gump is racist.
And the worscht part of thisch (snorting sounds, the crackling of cocaine being huffed by what could be mistaken for a truffle hog) yesch good shit okay - the worscht part of thisch is that America loved it!!
For schome reason they make thisch Foresht man a reincarnation of Hermes, he can only run very fast and schow up in historical eventsch, but never change them. He isch an omen ov neoliberalischm and entropy. And like hisch counterpart Mercury, he isch profane and maddening.
Lacan says that the anal neurosis can be impeded when it loses itsch natural antagonischt and rivalsch (clears throat, hacks up hairball of fiber glass, wool, and dandruff) and sho without the Schoviet Union, Amerika began to produce these filmsch of decay and celebration.
To conclude, Tom Hanksch should be shot.
:zizek-ok: okay? okay yesch
As soon as we renounce fiction and illuschion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictionsch from reality, reality itself loses itsch discursive-logical consistency.
I hate Forrest Gump. I've always thought of it as a boomer anthem. A man bounces from victory to victory through a world he is incapable of understanding and endless opportunity and success are lavished upon him and he doesn't even really understand that this luck isn't happening to everyone else.
he doesn’t even really understand that this luck isn’t happening to everyone else
He does understand that it isn't happening to his childhood sweetheart.
But the audience sees this as a consequence of her moral failings - being a hippie, doing drugs, kissing black men, being a woman, and not being a good American. In the end, he grants her absolution through his horniness and she rewards him with a child that isn't "broken" like he is. This proves how Forest is virtuous and demonstrates how his virtue is rewarded.
Forest isn't strictly lucky. He's hard working, brave, compassionate, and independent. The movie isn't about him winning because of good-fortune, but because of his dogged adherence to the Protestant Work Ethic. He succeeds thanks to his righteousness. And you can succeed, too, if you are as righteous as he was.
Read a bit deeper, and you can even see Forest's lack-of-intelligence as a kind-of curse inflicted onto him by his forebearers. His ancestor - Nathan Bedford Forest - betrayed his nation. And so his family was karmically cursed. Forest Gump must take on a series of Herculean Labors in order to redeem his family line.
The subtext of the movie is absolutely abhorrent. But it is the kind of abhorrence that Americans gleefully devour.
Perfect metaphor for the white boomer male experience. Except they're so oblivious to their luck, they actually believe they worked hard
Holy shit, the absolutely SEETHING chuds in the comments section of that article.
This is literally the worst and most superficial way to look at a movie. Drop your political lens once in a while dude.
lmfao "Critical analysis is superficial, just shut off your brain and passively absorb media because that's deeper"
I never interpreted this movie as pro-conservatism. In fact, I’ve always seen it as a pretty straight forward anti-war statement
If anything, I’ve always seen this movie as a pretty profound statement of the harm American conservatism has done to generations of people
Like 3 pages in and I finally found a comment that disagrees with the article without being a complete moron. Still lib as hell, but way better than the oinking rabble in the rest of the comments.
after all, Forrest’s box-of-chocolates metaphor works just fine
No it doesn't! I've never seen a box of chocolates that didn't have a sheet of paper explaining what they all were smh
Decent article otherwise though lmao
I thought the point was he is a very stupid guy and doesn't know to flip the box over
cuz, like a gumball machine, life is going to give you some old, dried out, flavorless bullshit to chew through before dying, amiright
It’s the conservative boomers’ attempt to tell a morality tale in which they are the ultimate victors over their contemporaries who dared for something different.
Its cool that the fantasy of "stubborn not-so-smart guy goes out into a storm and gets lots of shrimp, thus founding a multi-million dollar restaurant franchise which solves all his money problems overnight" Boomer prosperity gets fleshed out by a literal branded restaurant chain started with seed money out of a Hollywood blockbuster's advertising budget.
If I was the kind of guy who thought about the role of media in politics or in any way analyzed material conditions, I might read something into this.
Isn't it crazy they started a whole restaurant chain off the movie.
the shrimp there isch very bad, every time I engorge myself on it? I get very sick, puking and shitting and sho on and sho forth. thisch isch not a problem when I feed on shrimp in Slovenia.
Still crazy that those places exist. Like after the boomers die off no one is gonna care about this movie so what’s the point.
I admittedly have a soft spot for Bubba Gump's cuz I'm a sucker for oddly-specific-gimmick restaurants, and I used to go there with my late grandma.
i fucking hated this movie even before I became a communist. never understood the hype. it was funny to see the OG author lose his mind over all the changes they made in the adaptation though.
Yeah my understanding is that in the book Forrest is an asshole who is also a big bully.
Feels a bit like incel fan-fiction, in hindsight.
There's literally a scene of Forrest seething while listening to his mom and some guy fuck. Elliot Rodgers did the exact same thing with his sister.
I counted this as my second favorite movie as a teen (after The Matrix) but I've never watched it as a leftist adult to reasses. Maybe I should avoid doing so to preserve my childlike innocence about it :agony-shivering:
It's still great entertainment, I watched it yearly and had 11th grade us history students write up essays elaborating on the OP. @zifnab25's post sums it up well
It’s a “comfy” movie, which is not surprising as it’s made primarily for nostalgic boomers
You'll probably find it a bit boring now I think, it's certainly no Roger Rabbit (the better Zemekis film)
I still like that movie. Yeah, it has bad politics, but so does everything else.
I've also been reassured every time I post a screed on here about media that "consuming media isn't politics" so... :shrug-outta-hecks:
how is someone going to write an article about Forrest Gump to critique it without getting into the normalized SA of a intellectually disabled and highly suggestible person? even in the theater when that flick came out and was a total boomer popcorn flick, there was a weird vibe when that scene hit and someone said, "what". but the movie went on and we all memory holed it immediately and glossed over it to focus on how haley joel osment is a cute, smart kid so how we got him doesn't matter.
that movie is fucking crazy. the plot is there just to create opportunities for the whole green screen/deep fake technology that was new at the time, so boomers could mainline their nostalgia, but man it's full of crazy ass shit.
that said, i will always laugh at how the hardass drill instructor "loves" gump, loudy, publicly lavishes him with praise, and the line that if it wouldn't ruin a perfectly good enlisted man, he would recommend him for OCS (Officer Candidate School) and how gump is going to become a general someday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONH-pxBMJu4 there's a severe criticism of the military in there that still makes me laugh.
I heard the source material was a satire of Boomers - I think in either the original book or the sequel, he goes to space with a monkey.
Also the part where Tom Hanks as Forrest gets shot in the ass, narrates the line "It felt like something jumped up and bit me" and then screaming "It bit me!" is pretty funny regardless.
Right, in the original, he did a secret mission for NASA and crash landed on an island of cannibals or someshit (still was questionable, in different ways from the film).
The film stole Forrest Gump's soul, he was a character with flaws, not just a saintly Murican observer, when he fucked up life quickly turned to kick his ass. He also swore on like every page, fucked all the time and smoked dope with Lt. Dan (who was a manipulative bastard). That's what got me the most, they turned a mildly anti-war novel into an outright pro-war one.
That's exactly what sold all those tickets, I remember boomer parents coming out of the theater crying
Very good programming, the best programming
I’m glad that my dad, while raising me on 80’s and 90’s movies, never showed this to me. I don’t plan to see it :cringe:
For the longest time when I was a teen I had a more nihilistic take on this movie: life fucking sucks and you could work hard all day in your life only for some lucky chump to take it all.
Jenny spend her life trying to pursue what she wanted while Forrest just bumbles through his life and got everything going his way. Lieutenant Dan wanted to become a big American warrior hero, something cruelly denied from him while Forrest became one without any intention to do so. Bubba died pointlessly. Then there's the running sequence where Forrest who were just running for no reason at all came across numerous people struggle with their dreams and solves it for them unknowingly as he passes by.
But yeah, as a leftist now the reactionary subtexts are much more apparent and my reading was the result of my at the time ignorance of American culture at the time, which says a lot that I perceived what was supposed to be a conservative triumph story into a story about how life is cruel and arbitrary.
