‘Forrest Gump,’ 25 Years Later: A Bad Movie That Gets Worse With Age
www.indiewire.com
"Gump" backlash is nothing new. But these days, it's even more problematic than it used to be.

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.

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.