Loss of innocence: 'Forrest Gump' at 10
Occasionally the broad, roiling river of American popular culture enters the narrows, where its varied elements are squeezed and filtered through a single work that defines the times and maybe even changes them. Think of "Sgt. Pepper," "Roots," "Thriller," "Bonfire of the Vanities" -- each a cross-generational Topic A for weeks, with reverberations that spilled into the months and years.
Think of Robert Zemeckis's "Forrest Gump," which turns 10 years old on July 6. Even before the epic Tom Hanks comedy-drama won six Oscars (including best picture, actor, director, adapted screenplay, and visual effects), its runaway success proved that a film set in the past could speak profoundly to the present.
But how loudly did it speak? Did "Forrest Gump" focus voter dissatisfaction on the fractious complexities and excesses of the Clinton administration? Could it have played a part in the overwhelming Republican victory in the 1994 US congressional elections? Or was the movie just another symptom, rather than a cause?
Such questions will never have an answer, but they're still worth asking, especially at the moment. Friday saw the release of "The Terminal," a Steven Spielberg film in which Tom Hanks Gumps us once again as an Eastern European lost soul trapped for months in the International Arrivals area at JFK airport; it's a delightful and heartwarming movie that nevertheless patronizes non-Americans as the world's adorable extras.
More to the point, Michael Moore's incendiary documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" arrives in theaters this Friday, its landing preceded by rapturous receptions at the Cannes Film Festival and at star-studded premieres in LA and New York.
"Fahrenheit" promises to divert the pop culture flow through its narrow banks in much the way that "Gump" did, only this time to the left instead of the right. Whether the film will live up to that promise (or threat, if you're pro-Bush) and whether it can focus voter sentiment in November may depend less on whether it's a good film than on if it's an entertaining one.
For, make no mistake, "Gump" entertained. The sequences in which the hero meets Elvis, John Lennon, George Wallace, and a full complement of US presidents are breathtaking in their technical ingenuity. His knack for tripping over the salient moments in our recent history -- for starting the jogging craze or phoning in the Watergate burglary without quite realizing what he's doing -- is the source of deep and satisfying belly laughs.
"Forrest Gump" works as comedy because it reveals everything in American culture to be connected by one man who is himself profoundly disconnected. The movie treasures that disconnect, in fact. That's where its problems begin.
The movie that none of the studios wanted to make became an official phenomenon its second week in theaters, when the box-office take was 1 percent less than the week before. In a business where second-week box office earnings drop anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent, this was unheard of.
"Gump" was a word-of-mouth smash from the start, the final metamorphosis of Hanks into Everyman, and a startling upturn in the fortunes of author Winston Groom, who quickly boiled down his little-known 1986 novel into a best-selling book of "Gumpisms."
That transformation is telling. The original Forrest Gump weighed 245 pounds, drank, took drugs, cussed, and had sex; the book reads like "Huckleberry Finn" on growth hormones. The movie's Forrest, as repurposed by the trinity of Hanks, Zemeckis, and screenwriter Eric Roth, is a slender and virginal innocent prone to Hallmark Zen koans like "Stupid is as stupid does," and "Life is like a box of chocolates -- you never know what you're gonna get" (a markedly different sentiment from the book's "Bein' a idiot is no box of chocolates").
Like the feather that opens and closes the film, Forrest is buffeted by the crosswinds of the counterculture era; he's a national Candide seeking the best of all possible worlds in the worst of all possible times. As such, he was embraced by Clinton-era audiences exhausted from parsing the moral ambiguities of three decades of boomer history. How much simpler is life, asks the film, when you're a good-hearted moron?
A month after its release, around the time that "Forrest Gump" was halfway to its final domestic gross of $329 million, political conservatives started praising "Forrest Gump" as a return to core values. Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pat Buchanan said the film "celebrates the values of conservativism, of the old America, of fidelity and family, faith and goodness. And the way of life this film holds up to be squalid and ruinous is the way of Woodstock."
Over on the left came the backlash. Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film as one in which "obliviousness parading as purity, stupidity parading as honesty, and xenophobia and narcissism parading as patriotism triumph over gross misrepresentations of the counterculture values of the Sixties and Seventies."
Film critic Pauline Kael came out of retirement to bash the film on a book tour; by year's end, New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin had gone from mildly praising the film in her initial review to putting it on her worst of 1994 list, describing Forrest as a "hollow man" who's "self-congratulatory in his blissful ignorance, warmly embraced as the embodiment of absolutely nothing."
The irony is that's why audiences loved the movie. "Forrest Gump" conflates "simple-minded" and "single-minded" and says they're the same: the holy source of all that is good and decent in this world. The mass audience that took the film to heart agreed without articulating it as such, but they didn't have to, since conservative commentators did it for them. Michael Medved told The Philadelphia Inquirer, "For me, the great secret of the film's popularity is that it connects with our tremendous national yearning for innocence, and for recapturing lost innocence."
Medved is correct: There is a bone-deep desire in this culture to not have to deal with the complicated stuff, especially when it sheds unflattering light -- or even threatens to -- on American motives or methods at home or in the larger world. He just thinks it's a good thing, whereas history tends to prove we ignore the past at our peril.
And "Forrest Gump" does ignore, streamline, and steamroll the past, most perniciously in its portrayal of the 1960s counterculture and the people within it. This is what pops out even more clearly on a 10th-anniversary viewing of the film: how absurdly the deck is stacked against youth in general and antiwar activists -- excuse me, hypocritical, girlfriend-beating sleazebags -- in particular. It was all a terrible mistake, says the film, everything from Vietnam until the 1980s, and Forrest's lifelong-love Jenny (Robin Wright Penn) is the martyr who takes the era's sins and consequences upon herself, from drug addiction to death from (sshhh) AIDS. Only Forrest, an Adam blessed to remain without self-knowledge, remains pure of heart and untouched.
It would be nice to think it worked that way, wouldn't it? That's what stories are for, aren't they? Unfortunately, life is one gray zone after another, with heroes and villains -- let's call them people -- on all sides of the counterculture trenches. One minute of a documentary like "The Weather Underground" will tell you more about the ideals and mistakes of the American left than all of "Forrest Gump."
Not even Zemeckis seems to have realized how reactionary his own movie was, so intent was he on fashioning an emotional ride. "Who wants to see a normal guy going through the '60s and '70s?" the director asked in a 1995 interview. He was being rhetorical, but the obvious answer is: We do. Our children do. As long as it's fair and doesn't sugarcoat, bring on exactly what "normal" people went through. You can even make it entertaining.
"Gump" is wonderfully entertaining, but it feeds our national addiction to not knowing. We so dearly love to not have to think, in fact, that we've created an entire entertainment industry dedicated to the principle of enjoyment without awareness.
This is the real devil's bargain we made in the '60s -- if it feels good, do it, remember? -- and the fallout crosses all political boundaries, right, left, and center. In retrospect, what's most unnerving about "Forrest Gump" is that it made the bargain explicit. And that Stupid Is leads so easily to Stupid Does.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com 
