The Good, the Bad and the Gump: Irony and Performative Ideology

Having decided to rewatch a popular film from my youth, Forrest Gump (1994), which came out the summer after my sophomore year in college, I thought I would follow up by checking in on all of the things wrong with the movie. I knew vaguely what they were; then I watched it again and I was reminded of them, but I was also reminded of why the movie is a beloved classic, which is undeniable, even if you hate it.

I typed “the worst things about Forrest Gump” into Google. There are 13M results. Here is a sampling of the headlines:

‘Forrest Gump,’ 25 Years Later: A Bad Movie That Gets Worse With Age (Indie Wire)

9 Reasons Why "Forrest Gump" Is Actually The Worst (in case it’s not obvious, this is from Buzzfeed)

16 Extremely Messed Up Things About Forrest Gump That'll Change How You See It (Ranker)

Why I Hate Forrest Gump with the Heat of a Thousand Suns (winner for best title, personal blog)

Forrest Gump: Not Just Bad — Bad for America (Crooked Marquee)

14 Reasons Forrest Gump sucks, according to Reddit (at least SheKnows she’s being honest about where all shitty takes come from)

Why Forrest Gump is a poisonous film (GQ UK)

‘Forrest Gump,’ 25 years later: Why this classic doesn’t hold up (NY Post)

Why we loved - and hated - ‘Forrest Gump’ (CNN)

Clearly, there are a few reasons to dislike the movie. The most convincing, in my opinion, are the tonal complaints—it’s too sappy; also Forrest’s “stupidity” sometimes seems to fluctuate depending on the requirements of the situation. Writers also cite conservatism, conformism, racism, cartoonishness, anti-intellectualism, sexism, dehumanization and ableism. And that’s just the beginning. It’s also cliched and annoying, they tell us, features storylines about rape and abuse that aren’t treated correctly, centers a hero who has no agency that things just happen to accidentally and who also takes credit for things black people actually did; its general take on history is incorrect in a thousand places to the point of being propaganda; and it mocks a disabled person by making the audience laugh at his antics.

I’m not here to argue with all of these interpretations, per se. There are aspects of the film that are problematic, when looked at in a particular way, and it’s also true that it has been somewhat embraced by the right as reflecting, you know, old-fashioned values and such. But there are a few things I find interesting about the way people interpret this movie now (it turned 25 in 2019, which was the occasion for many of the articles linked above).

Many of the critics, in addition to detailing how terrible the movie is, also admit how incredibly well-made it is, from the production design to the performances, to the writing and directing. Some of them come from the position of “I loved this movie when I was a kid who didn’t know better but now I do and I hate it now.” Savvy viewers recognize the ways in which talented filmmakers manipulate them, of course, but it depends a lot on the subject matter of the movie whether this is a compliment or not. For example, typically Hitchcock’s manipulations were seen as masterful, even before he was recognized as a serious artist. Robert Zemeckis, on the other hand, is seen as (transparently) manipulating audiences for maudlin, sentimental effect, or in the service of bad political takes—similarly to a common take on his mentor, Steven Spielberg.

There are also complaints about Forrest’s lack of action—that, rather than make choices that lead to drama, and growing and changing, like a good character should, he just wanders stupidly through the movie and is accidentally involved with history. This is one of a number of what I would call dramatic structure complaints—educated people who know some things about how drama usually works complaining about obvious violations of those precepts. There are many stories, of course—one thinks of picaresques, like Candide, for example—in which the agency of the lead character is negligible. There are also many, many stories in which the characters function more like symbols or metaphors or stand-ins for something else than like “real people.” Surely that, in and of itself, is not a reasonable complaint. Forrest Gump is a picaresque that, like Candide, centers on an extremely naive character. His experiences—which are fictional, of course, but which intersect with many historical events—are like anyone’s experiences, in a sense. They are mysterious (to him, but not to us because we know they’re famous moments in some cases), he can’t adequately interpret them, he can’t say what they amount to but he feels like they amount to something, a life, and they are his experiences from his perspective, which is an exaggeratedly comical perspective.

What about irony? Is Forrest Gump intended to be a history lesson? If so, it’s a miserable failure indeed. But what if the audience is actually assumed to be more knowledgeable than that? Maybe almost everything that happens to Forrest is meant to be understood ironically by the audience? That is, the point is the gap between what Forrest seems to understand about an event and what we understand about the event, the importance he attaches to it versus the importance we attach to it. Complaints about historicity in films often suffer from a strange disingenuousness. Critics and other smart film watchers claim to want films that are provocative, “made for adults,” thoughtful, subversive; yet when a film fails to perfectly represent historical events these viewers will complain about a “dumbing down” of history, or the irresponsibility of artists who aren’t showing things “truthfully,” or the dangers of fictionalizing things, as if the most important task for movies is teaching less savvy viewers what “really happened,” less savvy meaning not as well-educated as the critics. We understand irony, they say, but what about the normies? Shouldn’t you hold their hands a bit, filmmaker? When you do, we will condemn you for being obvious and literal-minded, but never mind.

Then there are the complaints about all the -isms. Clever people learn to make arguments about things, which is a crucial cognitive skill with huge implications for society (it’s called critical thinking), but they often don’t stop to ask whether they might be completely missing the point. Is there racism in Forrest Gump? Ableism, sexism, ageism, conformity? Fuck yes there is. Are some of Forrest’s own attitudes and understandings imperfect? Well, duh—he has a 75 IQ and he’s also a human being. Are some of the characters racist and sexist and ableist? No shit. Are the symbolic structures in the film somewhat simplistic in a way that’s unrealistic? Definitely. Everything bad in the world happens to poor Jenny, so she can be the Experience to Forrest’s Innocence. Are the touches of realism somewhat simplistic in a way that lends itself to a more symbolic interpretation? Yeah, that, too. None of this makes the film racist or sexist, or anything else, unless you require films to, for some reason, promote an ideal world that has never and will never exist. If you believe Forrest Gump is saying, This is meant to be as close to a realistic depiction of life on earth as we can make, well, no, it’s obviously not saying that. If it’s not intended as realism, how is it intended? Maybe it’s a metaphorical exploration of the way ordinary people experience life, completely ahistorical, but ironically set against a painted backdrop of Boomer historical events, that focusses on a completely naive and innocent character who cannot change, even as the world changes around him?

What both troubles and fascinates me about the way many people read this film is that it seems like ideological performance. That is, liberals (and conservatives) feel the need to react to the film from the context of their own politics and, in so doing, perform their ideological commitments, which we always do to some extent, but in a way that willfully twists the film to align with their worldview, rather than attempting to wrestle with what the film is on its own terms. On its own terms, Gump is not entirely successful. But it’s also brilliantly made in almost every technical way that counts (the score is admittedly pretty bad) and offers some very thoughtful, serious and even mildly subversive ideas about our relationship to history and narrative.

I’m mad, too, still, that Gump won all those Oscars that should have gone to Pulp Fiction, but I can’t take that out on the movie. I also prefer movies to be less sappy and more serious, but I think I ought to recognize the powerful craft brought to bear in this case. That’s really hard to do. If I was once more susceptible to the sap, well, that’s growing up—but it doesn’t diminish the art required to elicit those responses. And, just because I could identify problematic ideas raised by the film, that is not the end of the critique but the beginning.