Forrest Gump was one of the big hits of the 1990s. It was the highest-grossing movie of 1994, making more than blockbusters like The Lion King, True Lies, and Speed. It went on to win six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The story of the eponymous slow-witted man (Tom Hanks) who traipses through major events of the 1960s and 70s while never losing sight of his true love, Jenny (Robin Wright), was uplifting for audiences and it’s not difficult to see why. However, beneath the memorable aphorisms and Hanks’ eminently imitable performance, Forrest Gump is a surprisingly cold-hearted movie that behaves with an uplifting attitude belying its deeper nihilism and indifference to important events. The recurring joke of Forrest Gump is that he’s too slow to pick up on all the important things happening around him; it’s a joke that has aged poorly.

What makes Forrest Gump such an irritating film today is that it makes no distinction between Forrest accidentally wandering into something relatively unimportant, like the creation of the “Have a Nice Day” t-shirt, and accidentally wandering into something that’s incredibly important to a lot of people and to American history, like a meeting of the Black Panthers or a protest of the war in Vietnam. Because Forrest approaches life with great simplicity, the movie follows suit, and treats his naiveite and ignorance as comical virtues. But through this lens where everything is treated as a joke because Forrest fails to recognize its importance, the recurring motif of Zemeckis’ movie basically becomes “lol nothing matters.”

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Image via Paramount

Some might argue that Zemeckis is setting up a meaningful juxtaposition. We know that the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement are important, so Forrest’s obliviousness heightens the impact. But the movie knows where to draw its lines and it draws them in a half-hearted manner. Forrest Gump knows not to treat the Vietnam War like a total joke so it has Bubba (Mykelti Williamson) die a sad death in Forrest’s arms. But the movie doesn’t want to make A STATEMENT on an incredibly unpopular war that saw 58,220 Americans die for no reason. Instead, the most it can do is show the personal loss to Forrest—Bubba, who knew a lot about shrimp and seems to have no life beyond that—and then in the next scene Forrest is happily eating ice cream while he recovers from being "shot in the buttocks." Forrest’s simplicity is the movie’s guiding ethos, so it can’t dwell on anything that matters unless it personally matters to Forrest.

This creates an odd kind of selfishness even though Forrest is not a selfish character. Forrest is present as some of the biggest moments of the 20th century, and because he’s simple, these moments don’t register for him. Even the concept of assassinations becomes an odd kind of running joke, first stated with seriousness with the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and then as a kind of a background noise with the attempted assassinations of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. The movie doesn’t seem to really have an opinion on this violence as much as it’s something that’s sad and then we got used to it and now we don’t really deal with it anymore. That would be a potent message if the movie also didn’t hold up Forrest’s obliviousness as a charming quality that allows him to float on the winds of history like the feather from the opening credits.

Forrest’s obliviousness can’t be read as indifference because he doesn’t understand the import of history or culture, but the general audience does, and Forrest Gump works hard to let them off the hook. If you worked in a lab to make a movie to soothe baby boomers who had sold out their values and simply looked back at the 60s and 70s as a crazy time in history, it would look a lot like Forrest Gump. Zemeckis’ movie basically pounds in the final nail in the coffin of the movements that the Reagan era obliterated (the story pretty much ends in 1982 when Jenny dies). The film takes all these momentous moments and rather than recontextualizing or examining them, it renders them into kitsch. Protesting the Vietnam War ends up having as much value as a “Shit Happens” bumper sticker.

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Image via Paramount

If Forrest Gump isn’t being callous towards mid-20th Century American History, then it’s being openly vindictive about personal choices within that era. An observation that many others have made (and I agree with) is that Forrest does as he’s told, and he’s constantly rewarded. By greeting life with simplicity, fame and fortune smile on him even though he’s too simple to appreciate or be changed by either. That’s in stark contrast to Jenny, who lives a free-wheeling life filled with sadness, conflict, and looking for love in all the wrong places because she was sexually abused by her father, and the film punishes her by giving her AIDS.

So why is a movie that’s so callous and vindictive revered as such a feel-good classic? Because Zemeckis knows how to give it a crowd-pleasing sheen. The movie’s comic timing is generally on point. Tom Hanks is one of the most charming and endearing actors who has ever lived. Alan Silvestri’s score is ridiculously gentle and triumphant. And then the movie hammers you at the end with the resolution of Forrest’s story with Jenny dying, Forrest openly weeping at her grave, and then being a single dad sending little Forrest (Haley Joel Osment) off to school with a bus driver (Siobhan J. Fallon) who apparently hasn’t aged in 40 years. Then the feather from the beginning floats away, and how are you not supposed to get emotional with all that happening?

If you think I’m being a little too hard on the film, consider these comments from screenwriter Eric Roth on what they wanted to do with a sequel [via Yahoo! News]:

The sequel was going to mirror the original plot of the film, placing Hanks’ lovable hero in key moments of history throughout the ’90s. The plot called for Gump to be riding in the back of OJ Simpson’s white Bronco during his notorious 1994 police chase, with the screenwriter explaining, “He would look up occasionally, but they didn’t see him in the rearview mirror, and then he’d pop down.” The screenplay also had Forrest earning fame as a ballroom dancer, with the titular star dancing with Princess Diana during a charity event before her untimely death in 1997.

 

Roth also offered insight into what became of Forrest’s son and confirmed that Forrest’s love interest in the previous movie, Jenny, died of AIDS. He explained, “It was gonna start with his little boy having AIDS… And people wouldn’t go to class with him in Florida. We had a funny sequence where they were [desegregating] busing in Florida at the same time, so people were angry about either the busing, or [their] kids having to go to school with the kid who had AIDS. So there was a big conflict.”

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Image via Paramount

Roth said that they had to scrap the sequel because while the film included the Oklahoma City bombing as a plot point, 9/11 made that the film feel “meaningless”:

“He meets on a bus a Native American woman and finds his calling, as a bingo caller on a reservation. And the big event in that, which you could see was diminished only in tragedy, I guess, because it’s the same tragedy, but every day he’d go wait for his Native American partner. She taught nursery school at a government building in Oklahoma City. And he was sitting on the bench waiting for her to have lunch and all of a sudden the building behind him blows up… So when 9/11 occurred… everything felt meaningless.”

And that’s kind of the guiding ethos of Forrest Gump—time diminishes all things, especially when they’re divorced from context. History happens around Forrest, but the importance of that history can never really be considered. Forrest, through his simplicity, becomes the great equalizer where all historical events are distilled down to the viewpoint of someone who doesn’t understand them, and everything is rendered into a punchline.

If Forrest Gump were a sharper movie, that would be the satire—the distance of time makes our history look small despite its undeniable importance. Americans love throwing everything down the memory hole and moving on to what’s new and shiny. But because Forrest Gump wants to be a feel-good drama, it avoids discomforting its audience. You don’t earn over $300 million domestic in 1994 by making people feel like shit for selling out and doing what they’re told.