Vietnam%20War%20Film.(2):%20Forrest%20Gump

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Vietnam War Film.(2) Forrest Gump

• Forgetting History by Re-writing it

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Starting Questions

• 1. What do you think about the following famous
  lines from the film?
•  e.g. "Stupid is as stupid does"
• "Mama always said life was like a box a
  chocolates, never know what you're gonna get."
• 2. What do you think about the ways history gets
  presented in this film (e.g. Vietnam war, the
  Hippie generation, Watergate, Ping-pong diplomacy,
  etc.)?  And the views of history?
• 3. What do you think about the relationship
  between Jenny and Forrest?  And the way the
  blacks are presented?

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Outline

• Forrest as a Disadvantaged Person
• Forrest in American History even a fool plays a
  role.
• Forrest as a savior to the People around him
• Why is the film so popular? (wins Oscar in 1995
  ???? was popular in Taiwan, too.)
• References

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Forrest as a person and his Mother

• Three parts in his life 1) discriminated
  against 2) lucky and persistent 3) helpful and
  influential (without knowing why)
• (1) The mothers practical wisdom
• Mrs. Gump
• You have to do the best with what God gave you.
• Life was like a box a chocolates, never know
  what you're gonna get.
• You are no different from the others.
• "Stupid is as stupid does
• Forrest turns disadvantages into advantages by
  persisting and mere physical strength e.g.
  running, eating ice-cream when wounded in the
  buttocks stays through the storm (God showed
  up) on the shrimping boat.

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Forrest and American History His Intersections
with HistoryOr Signs and Stereotypes in History

1. History chance (floating on a breeze) and
   destiny
2. History luck

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(2) Lucky Coincidences

• Civil Rights Movement -- the first Black female
  student enters the University of Alabama, Forrest
  carries her books.
• Political Assassination -- football team ?all the
  VIPs-- JF Kennedy (mentioning the others being
  assassinated Robert Kennedy, George Wallace,
  John Lennon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan are
  all equalized as victims of lunatics but not
  Martin Luther King or Malcolm X) (clip 1)

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(2) Lucky Coincidences

• -- Vietnam (clip 2)
• 1) The good thing about Vietnam is there was
  always someplace to go.
• 2) Simplification of Anti-war movement, Jenny
  (If youre going to San Francisco the flower
  generation) and the Black Panther.
• 2) Withholding interpretation
• -- Forrests speech
• -- Linton Johnson
• -- acceleration of involvement in Vietnam

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Forrests Intersections with HistoryOr Signs and
Stereotypes in History

• the All-American Ping Pong team
• somebody said that world peace was in our hands.
  But all I did was play ping-pong.
• -- meets Richard Nixon
• ? sees the men with flashlights in the darkened
  offices of Democratic Headquarters? cannot sleep
  ? reveals the watergate event.

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Undifferentiated Association with Celebrities and
Politics

• Nathan Bedford Forrest -- whom Forrest
  identifies as one of his own ancestors, as a
  "great Civil War hero," and as the founder of the
  Ku Klux Klan.
• Forrest's explanation a club of men who ran
  around in bedsheets, pretending to be "ghosts or
  spooks or something.
• He sounds baffled by this, and says his Momma
  chose his name "to remind me that sometimes we
  all do things that, well, just don't make no
  sense."

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Celebrities and Politics

• Presley initiated the dance steps
• Lennon Lennon (clip 3)
• the source of Imagine Forrests talking
  about China
• "Some years later that nice young man from
  England was on his way home to see his little
  boy ? assassinated for no particular reason

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Forrest and History

• Forrest powerless and passive influential
  accidentally.
• History as chancy and purposeless ? Forrest does
  not act purposely, nor mean to change things
  (only wanting to rescue Jenny.)
• History presented as a mess, filled with mad
  people killing others, and lost souls wandering
  around.
• ? a very superficial and stereotypical
  presentation of counter-culture and the war.

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The only moment of comprehension

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(3) Forrests Influence on the Others around him

• Forrest gt passive, obedient, run away from
  trouble, incomprehensive
• Why does Forrest turn to be a savior?
• -- Lieutenant Dan
• -- Bubba
• -- Jenny
• -- the followers

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Bubba Lieutenant Dan

• Bubba
• His Mama
• Shrimp business
• Dan
• violent, depressed, self-indulgent.
• -- commanding on the boat
• -- mad in the storm, shouting to the enemies
  (like Emmet in In Country)
• -- surviving his trauma because of Forrest.

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Dan and Jenny

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Jenny

• Molested as a child
• Wants to be a folk singerHer dream had come
  true. She was a folk singer.
• Rescued by Forrest many times. You cant keep
  doing it, Forrest, Jenny.
• On the road ? hippie, anti-war activist in the
  Black Panther group, drug addict,
• Prostitute ? AIDS patient.
• Jenny "How could you do it?" throw stones at the
  tumble-down house "You don't want to marry me."
• ? In the novel, she is not ill but she chooses
  to leave Forrest.
• ? In the film, Forrest gets the house bulldozed.

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Why Does Forrest Run after Jenny leaves him?

• "for world peace . . . for the homeless . . .
  for women's rights . . . or for the environment .
  . . or for animals. . . .?"
• His responses
• . I just felt like running."
• "My momma always said you got to put the past
  behind you before you can move on. And I think
  that's what my runnin' was all about."
• ? Shit happens. Smiley. Gives people hope.

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Why is the film so popular?

• The film as
• the re-membering of patriarchy (Byers)
• appropriated by political conservatives and the
  uses to which it was put to further the
  Republican "revolution." (Wang) e.g. their call
  for family values

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Loss of masculinity in U.S.Society

• "sixties (Cf. Byers)
• The loss of the Vietnam War
• the rise of late capitalism's global economy and
  the concomitant demise of American economic
  dominance and security and of men's capacities to
  be sole breadwinners
• the reconfiguration of the family,
• certain aspects of the sexual revolution,
• and the emergence of second-wave feminism and
  gay liberation as concerted political and
  cultural threats to that masculinity's
  traditional prerogatives.

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Conservatives revolution in the 80s and 90s
(For your reference)

• Acting as a "discursive relay station," Gump's
  presentation of the sixties counterculture thus
  reinforced the discourse of disease and social
  abnormality that conservatives (i.e. the
  Republicans represented then by Clintom and Gore)
  rhetorically associated with liberals.
  Conservatives used Gump and its selective
  spotlight on sixties images to identify publicly
  the source of the disease-- End Page 104 the
  feminization and racialization of post-sixties
  culture. (Wang 104-105)

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Conclusion

• What the film does to history (Cf. Byers)
• In this periodizing and othering, supersession
  of the bad father and subordination of the
  (temporarily) independent woman, patriarchal
  fantasies of presence and selfhood, succession
  and superiority, are re-membered and restored.

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References

• Jennifer Hyland Wang. "A Struggle of Contending
  Stories"Race, Gender, and Political Memory in
  Forrest Gump Cinema Journal 39.3 (2000) 92-115
•  Thomas B. Byers History Re-Membered Forrest
  Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of
  the Counterculture Modern Fiction Studies 42.2
  (1996) 419-444