my forrest gump essay for hist243

A Historical and Historiographical Film Review of Forrest Gump

The story is simple enough: Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks), an intellectually-challenged boy from Greenbow, Alabama in the United States, makes it big through sheer hard work and a little help from Lady Luck. Along the way, he chances upon various momentous events in post-war America. He teaches Elvis Presley how to swivel his hips, shows former President Johnson his innocuously-positioned bullet wound and helps to notify the security guards at the Watergate building about the infamous break-in, amongst other things. However, the one thing that evades him to the very end is his true love Jenny Curran (Robin Wright), who is relentless in her pursuit of freedom.

After the film premiered in 1994, it was a spectacular box-office hit. Not only were the audiences lapping up every bit of Forrest Gump, the judges at the Academy Awards also showed their favour by awarding it six Oscars at the 1995 ceremony. This testament to its critical and mainstream appeal has made it an enduring modern classic.

The film owes its success partly to its innovative (at that time) use of computer-generated imagery (CGI). The depiction of Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise), who lost his legs during the Vietnam War; the amazing table tennis skills displayed by Forrest Gump; and the various meetings that Forrest Gump has with three former Presidents and celebrities, along with the other CGI sequences in the film, are integral to its plot. Without them, it would have been a very different story.

While the special effects were indeed impressive (the film did win the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects), they undoubtedly will “further rupture relations between the screen image and the real material world.”

Why does this prospect both frighten and excite movie-goers and those in the film industry? With CGI, filmmakers have been able to create realistic and believable sequences that were only imaginable in the past. The only limitations – their imagination and the film budget. Moreover, CGI allows them the opportunity to eradicate mistakes and accentuate backdrops in films. This translates into an even better viewing experience for an audience always eager for bigger and noisier special effects.

Yet, others are wary of the “possibility that this technology [CGI] might one day produce images that are so realistic it is impossible to distinguish them from objects in the real world.” This argument is especially relevant to the film at hand. The seamless weaving of Forrest Gump’s meetings with important political and entertainment personalities during actual filmed events has been likened to the misappropriation of primary evidence. The fear is that those in the audience ignorant of world events might be misled into thinking that the meetings did really happen. However, I believe that the majority of film-goers will be able to discern the difference between fact and fiction.

Actually, how important is it to know if a scene is digitally altered? I think the main objective in people’s minds when they watch a film is to be entertained and not to ascertain if a certain scene is indeed enhanced by CGI.

Another contentious issue regarding CGI in the film is why it was chosen over the use of look-alikes, as in the scene where Forrest Gump teaches an Elvis Presley impersonator to dance. Such a method, although cheaper, would definitely not have been as realistic and clever as CGI. The CGI effects in the film might have caused some in the audience to do a double take when seeing Forrest Gump at certain milestone events, but it was nevertheless impressive and a pioneer in doing so.

In the film, most of the CGI sequences are used in flashbacks, as Forrest Gump relates his tale to those waiting for the bus. Through the flashbacks, audiences are able to remember the past as the flashbacks not only “give us images of memory, the personal archives of the past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past.”

Interestingly, historical events, like the anti-war protest at the Mall in Washington D.C, unfold in the background of the flashback sequences. While the emphasis is on the storyline, the film’s producers have ingeniously used these events as a timeline to chart Forrest Gump’s progress over the years. For example, the passage of time is visible through the changes in the United States’ presidency. All of these events have been strategically chosen such that the audience can tell when they occurred and the order in which they took place.

Nevertheless, this method, though ingenious, is vulnerable to criticism. As the film deals with past events, it is impossible to completely recreate the scenes as they would have happened at that moment. The film manages generally to achieve this, as Forrest Gump is usually at the event as it occurs.

However, one interesting anachronism I discovered dealt with Forrest Gump’s appearance on The Dick Cavett Show with John Lennon, where the former appears to provide the inspiration for Lennon’s single ‘Imagine’. Tom Hanks has gone on record as saying that he wanted Forrest Gump to only be in events that actually occurred. But when John Lennon did indeed appear on the talk show in 1971, it was to promote the aforementioned single. Thus, the actual event and the CGI scene were one of the few unsynchronised historical events in the film.

The music in the film, fortunately, could not be similarly faulted. Not only were the producers in tune with what was popular at that time, they cleverly chose songs that contained “intertextual jokes and puns”. It was ironic, for instance, that the United States’ national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, plays in the background as Forrest Gump alerts the security guards to the Watergate burglary.

One major event that Forrest Gump participates in is the Vietnam War. Noticeably, there is a “careful ambivalence about the turmoil of the 1960s” in the film. All the quotes about the war by Forrest Gump are non-political and non-judgemental – “We would take these real long walks and we were always looking for this guy named Charlie…The good thing about Vietnam was there was always some place to go … and there was always something to do.”

The film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, intentionally did this as he wanted to “present this generation without commenting on it or taking a position or explaining it.” Was this done to reflect Forrest Gump’s character, who is often ignorant about his surroundings, or was it purely a commercial decision by the producers to appeal to as wide an audience as possible?

While Forrest Gump remains noncommittal on touchy issues like the Vietnam War, Jenny is his direct opposite, taking a stand on almost every major development that occurs. She embodies everything that Forrest Gump is not, in a countercultural manner. Such a contrast effectively offers the audience the opportunity to view and understand the historical events from differing perspectives and come to their own conclusions.

Unfortunately, the anti-war protesters’ characters are not as fleshed out as the two leads. They are portrayed one-dimensionally, as if their only purpose in the film is to provide some laughs and an opportunity for Forrest Gump to meet with Jenny again. The audience is shown the tough decisions the protesters had to make for the cause they believed in and thus cannot relate to them. This shallow depiction of the protesters just perpetuates the stereotypical view of the protesters as free-loving hippies and directionless young people.

In general, however, the depiction of the various historical scenes is quite accurate. The film producers successfully manage to evoke the different eras through well-chosen clothing, make-up and settings. Why is it so important to get all the details correct? Would the film be lesser without this thorough dedication to historically-accurate detail?

The lack of detail might affect the atmosphere of the film in helping to conjure up an image of the past quickly. But is history not just an interpretation of the past, dependent on the person doing the inferring? Therefore, there is no one correct view of history and no exact object that must be included in a scene or attitude that must be held from that time period.

Although the film has been unique in managing to attract audiences across the different age groups, its target audience is most probably the generation of 69 million baby boomers in the United States, who were born between 1943 and 1960. As most of the dramatic highlights in the film occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s, it is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for this generation.

Why did the film’s producers decided to centre most of the story around this period, when they could easily have also focussed in on incidents at other times, such as the relationship between Jenny and Forrest Gump in the 1980? Baby boomers are generally not considered to be the largest or most frequent demographic of film audiences, so why this catering to them? Furthermore, it is noted that the film differed quite significantly from the book, Forrest Gump by Winston Groom, on which it was based. How did the producers decide which historical events from the book to include in the film?

The questions I have raised and tried to answer are just the tip of the iceberg for a richly detailed historical film like Forrest Gump. However, I think more importantly, we should be thinking about what lessons we can learn from this charming movie about a simple boy who believed in love and never gave up. “And that’s all I have to say about that.”

Bibliography
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