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.
I hate Forrest Gump. I’ve always thought of it as a boomer anthem. A man bounces from victory to victory through a world he is incapable of understanding and endless opportunity and success are lavished upon him and he doesn’t even really understand that this luck isn’t happening to everyone else.
Perfect metaphor for the white boomer male experience. Except they’re so oblivious to their luck, they actually believe they worked hard