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.
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 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