"Forrest Gump" 30th Anniversary Retrospective: A Conservative Yuppie's Wet Dream

It has occasional charm, but Robert Zemeckis' '90s juggernaut is a feast of boomer bullshit.

April 20, 2024

On August 28, 1963, 250,000 people participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to advocate for equal rights for African Americans.

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The final speaker of the day was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he hoped for a nation in which people were "judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

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Over the next five years, Dr. King was the foremost figure in the Civil Rights Movement, including being the chief organizer of the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, the first of which saw officers in Alabama brutally assault over 600 unarmed protestors.

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But despite numerous impediments, including government opposition and the ceaseless stress of championing the nation's most worthy and hotly-contested cause, King’s influence helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or sex; that year, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Four years later, while organizing the Poor People’s March on Washington, King was assassinated while standing outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, devastating the nationwide Black community…

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or, to have Forrest Gump tell it, “Afta they shawt that nice black man in Tennesse, well people was rayl sad afta that.”

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Somewhere, buried deep under the saccharine sentimentality that fuels Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 cultural juggernaut is a movie attempting to say something: a critique of modern Conservative culture, a repudiation of the old-fashioned ideals that allow Americans to be so summarily galvanized into stupidity and left open to exploitation by those we trust most, ultimately placing faith in nonsensical abstractions led by figureheads created entirely from our projections.

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It’s all in the man himself: Forrest Gump, a simpleton born in Greenbow, Alabama, is named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the famed Confederate Army General and inaugural Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It is not an honorific namesake; his mother wants him to remember how senseless the world can be. The KKK imagined themselves a clan of white justice warriors, snuffing out racial equality in a world not intended for darker folk. In reality, they were nothing but a group of looney tunes race purists dressed up as ghosts riding around town like idiots.

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Years later, when Forrest has inadvertently started a cross-country running cult of loyal followers exalting him as a philosophical svengali just past the massive rock formations of Arizona’s Monument Valley, he stops. He does not want to run anymore. He turns around and goes home.

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It’s a bizarre thought 30 years after its meteoric run: Forrest Gump, the cable staple widely adored for being a box of chocolates where you know exactly what you’re gonna get, could do more than satisfy a sweet tooth. His simple-mindedness allows him to unmask ludicrous social constructs or undermine them entirely. He isn’t corrupted by the world; his childlike perspective undermines our antiquated ideas about American exceptionalism.

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But this is not the film that became a global phenomenon, winning six Oscars and grossing $678 million worldwide. The film that did those things is a profoundly cynical tale of a man who devalues every historical event he touches with sentimentality and ignorance.

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One could argue that it’s all a continuation of the stage set in the first scene, where Forrest tells us how he got his name. The Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal, George Wallace’s stand-in at the University of Alabama as schools tried to integrate in 1963. All the senseless racial tension, political crises, and needless violence get dismantled by Forrest’s irrepressible ignorance of the goings-on around him. If only we could see the world through the eyes of someone unable to comprehend anything but the most surface-level concepts. Then, we too could rise above.

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Unfortunately, the film lacks the credibility to make this a concrete, or at least supportable, idea. Zemeckis is quick to sprinkle in a '60s throwback for his predominantly boomer audience, layering them so shamelessly and in such quick succession the movie becomes a moving photo album inside the sleeve of a greatest hits compilation. To be true: the film’s soundtrack, the first disc features hits from Aretha to CCR, Hendrix to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Elvis to Dylan, sold over 12 million copies worldwide.

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Its many run-ins with history are less a commentary on socio-political brainwashing than opportunities to make us forget the tediousness of watching the simple-minded Forrest stumble and bumble through life. Whenever his "romance" with Jenny becomes too burdensome, it cuts to a gimmicky effect, like Forrest sitting beside John Lennon on the Dick Cavett Show and inadvertently inspiring “Imagine," a song that, ironically, is as trite and meaningless as Forrest Gump itself.

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When it runs out of wars and political assassinations to exploit, it again taps into the nostalgia well, be it with an Apocalypse Now-style explosion or a Midnight Cowboy “I’m walking here!” across a bustling New York street, Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” in tow. During his cross-country running expedition, he inadvertently creates the “Shit Happens” bumper sticker slogan and plasters the iconic smiley face image on a t-shirt. Everything in the world: every iconic marketing slogan, every brush with political tragedy, every run-in with social propaganda, every dust-up with civil reactionaries, exists only because one simple-minded white man made it so and in utterly impractical ways.

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It’s a cheap ploy to use nostalgia to create a sense of story when, in fact, we’re just witnessing a man hop from one thing to the next without context. There’s no sense of individuality or aim to do anything but poach the art of more imaginative filmmakers and exploit the tragedies of generations past to gouge audiences for money. What opportunity there was to set itself apart is wasted on the idea that a simpleton’s inability to understand the world around him can anchor a 142-minute film; this is especially damning when his intellectual shortcomings get played for laughs in moments that are not comedic. Jenny’s sexual abuse at the hands of her pedophilic, alcoholic father, which ultimately sends her down a path of rampant drug abuse and promiscuous sex, gets played for laughs. Oh, silly Forrest, not catching on that her father’s overt physical affection was an indication of sexual deviancy!

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The character’s very nature invites disdain for the things that happen to him. Jenny’s sexual advances, though typical of survivors, are confounding in practice when one considers that Forrest may very well be incapable of consenting to sexual intercourse.

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Bubba, a similarly handicapped soldier whom Forrest befriends in basic training, dies in his arms during Vietnam. It should be moving: the death of his one true friend, his dreams of owning a shrimping company vanishing with his final breaths. Instead, Zemeckis frames the dialogue to draw another calculated snicker from the audience. What little value the movie had as a commentary on the nature of people and our propensity for believing in things that, when reduced to their simplest form, lack sense, vanishes.

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It could have done this if it had any cultural awareness or at least enough self-awareness to know that one cannot condemn in the same breath it commits the condemnable act. The only black characters are stereotypical: the "simple-minded darkie," slow-talking and incapable of picking up on basic social cues; the poor southern family, frolicking in the yard with not a penny to their name until the kindly white man cuts them a massive check for capitalizing on an idea his black friend had; the angry black man, a drill sergeant cut from the R. Lee. Ermey cloth, screaming in the face of the useless maggots in boot camp; the enraged brotha in the underground resistance movement, whose only purpose is to spout abstract rhetoric about race relations in America. There’s even a magical negro to introduce Forrest to ping pong and a loyal collection of house servants waiting on him and Momma Gump hand and foot.

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It’s the ultimate exercise in cinematic irony that Forrest Gump, with its half-hearted aim at social commentary, would quickly discard that for shameless money-grubbing. The man himself, played with admitted aplomb by Tom Hanks, would despise it. He doesn’t keep Bubba’s share of the company; he gives it to his family. He doesn’t complain about abandoning his blossoming enterprise to tend to his dying mother; he bolts home at lightning speed. He doesn’t leave dying men clinging to their final moments in the sweltering Vietnam heat; he readily sacrifices himself to save those around him. He’s a well-intentioned, matter-of-fact, do-gooder idealist placed squarely into a movie more conniving, calculated, manipulative, and cynical than he could ever conceive of being.

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It doesn't make it unique, but it’s frustrating nonetheless. Forrest Gump hints at being one thing, becomes everything that thing would despise, and revels in being that despicable thing. It reduces history to a comedic punchline, social inequality to a “can’t we all just get along” knock-knock joke, and is in every way that fabled box of chocolates with the menu card tucked neatly inside.