![]() ![]() To illustrate this philosophy, in an early scene, Mrs Gump tries to instil in her son a belief that he is “the same as everybody else.” Despite the fact that the young Forrest is mentally slow and has to wear braces on his legs, he is entitled to the same opportunities and has the same human dignity as everyone else. You’ve got to do the best with what God gave you.” On her deathbed, Mrs Gump summarises this philosophy: “I happen to believe you make your own destiny. None of us can control fate, but in an important sense we make our own destiny by the ways in which we respond to it. Dan gets his legs blown off in the war Bubba is killed in Vietnam while others survive. Forrest is born mentally disabled, and with “a back as crooked as a politician” Mrs Gump’s husband has left her Jenny’s only parent, her father, is abusive Lt. Dan, Bubba – are dealt their share of suffering and grief. The film shows that by contrast, people don’t get what they deserve, and life isn’t fair it’s more like a box of chocolates: “you never know what you’re gonna get.” All of the main characters in the story – Forrest, Mrs Gump, Jenny, Lt. The real target of Forrest Gump’s critique is the (typically Protestant) American notion that material rewards are the inevitable outcome of a virtuous, industrious life. Forrest Gump is about these sorts of choices. ![]() Likewise, if we choose resistance or peace, then this is what ‘humanity’ has become for us. If we choose a holocaust, says Sartre, then this is what we have made of ‘human nature’. This is an enormous responsibility, because, since humanity has no essence, each of us is literally responsible for creating our humanity. Our common predicament means that we must give moral shape to our lives through our free choices. Thus our condition limits us in various ways, but it does not compel us to behave in particular ways. While these necessities are fixed and universal, Sartre stresses that there is nothing about this condition that determines the kind of life we must lead, either as individuals or as groups. We find ourselves thrown into the world, and we share the necessities of having to labour and die here. Nevertheless, he argued that we share a universality of condition. Sartre rejected the idea that we possess a generic nature, in the sense of an essence that can be found in each and every human being. In Existentialism and Humanism (1946) Jean-Paul Sartre distinguishes between human nature and the human condition (p.45 ff). Thus in many ways the film’s message is existentialist. While we can’t decide what happens to us, we each have important choices to make in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. But the film’s emphasis is not on fate itself, but on our responses to what fate deals us. These two symbols, the feather and the chocolates, illustrate the film’s true key theme: Fate – the uncontrollable events that make each of us what we are. Gump is sitting on a park bench in Savannah, Georgia, a box of chocolates perched on his lap. Forrest Gump deserves to be rediscovered.Īs the film opens we see a white feather fluttering on the wind as it gradually floats down, eventually landing next to Forrest Gump’s dirty-tennis-shoe-clad foot. ![]() ![]() Yet the film never suggests that making the cover of Fortune magazine (as Forrest does) is where our human aspirations ought to lie. By contrast, Forrest wore his country’s uniform, invested wisely, went to church, and made a mint. And in typically literalist fashion, right-wingers in America lauded the film as a thinly-veiled assault on the counterculture, arriving at an astonishingly simplistic interpretation of the film: Jenny, Forrest’s sweetheart, took drugs, hung out with anti-Vietnam types, and was rewarded with AIDS. The liberal elite delivered the resounding verdict that there was no serious moral to the story, or else there was a highly suspicious one. In 1994, when Robert Zemekis’ cinematic sensation Forrest Gump topped the box office and waltzed away with six Oscar nominations, the critics were firmly in two camps: either the film was unworthy escapism, or it was an ultraconservative conspiracy to communicate an outdated message of traditional values such as patriotism, capitalism and the family. SUBSCRIBE NOW Films Forrest Gump Terri Murray reviews a classic satire. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |