20. Mama Always Said You've Got to Put the Past Behind You Before You Can Move On

Gump is for the children...

Dear reader, life is like a box of choc-lits. You never know what you’re gonna get. Or do you? Can’t you look at the box you’re handed at birth and have a pretty keen idea of what’s going to be at the center of one of the dark mounds lurking within? Is the future inherently that much more mysterious than the past, the boxes your ancestors scarfed?

Sure, genuine surprises abound. Tech CEOs who eschew college but end up industry kingpins. Celebrity athletes leaping from slums. Art stars borne from obscurity. Americans worship these stories of unlikely one-in-a-million successes, when some combination of talent, luck, and pluck transforms a life—and ours—adding another coat of calcium to the enduring and seductive myth that anyone can potentially do anything at any time. There’s an alternative to the hyper-individualistic success story narrative (I mean, there are lots): that we’re essentially trapped in a prison of the past, our individual choices telegraphed by the systems established before we were born. This too is problematic, and it’s also a feature of many school environments. I mean, at some point, you don’t show up and never read and snooze through class because you choose to do these things, not because you’re following the contours of a script carved into your brain and arms and legs and eyes and ears by external factors.

Ironically, even if we preach communalism—this isn’t a competition, we’re a community, support one another, wear a mask (circa 2021-22), blah blah—teachers often know on some level that, while all students deserve the care of a village, they also tend to do great things when they look out for themselves—when they seize a scholarship opportunity on the East Coast that will take them away from family and old friends, when they leave an overbearing home instead of settling in for security, when they refuse to get sucked into the spirals of those closest to them, even if that means being a little cold to a person in need. 

The underdog world-beater narrative is one of the most powerful and worn stories in American life, consecrated in our cultural pond scum, and while I won’t even attempt to trace its path through history via a dazzling web of deeply researched and astutely curated references, I will direct you to one solitary work…

Forrest Gump. The 1994 film version, of course, a superlative product of and commentary on the American myth-making machine. A work substantially better than the “revolutionary,” “edgy,” and “indie” Pulp Fiction (which it whupped on at the 1995 Academy Awards). I wish I could go back in time and slap the 15-year-old me for thinking otherwise.

I teach the movie to my Lit 12 students as part of a two-unit exploration of, essentially, how the past is understood in the present, of how we see individuals and groups attempting to define themselves, seeking purpose, finding modes of expression, beneath the weight (or before the rocket engine blast) of what has come before. Students read Isabel Wilkerson, who compares America to “an old house” requiring renovation by its current tenants, who bear responsibility even if they directly caused none of its problems; the house is special but ugly secrets lurk in its foundation, and they must be dragged into the light of day, the problem resolved, the walls patched up. They read There There, which illuminates a vital contemporary urban American Indian identity that has been ignored and denied expression, just as ancestors were exterminated, their stories “developed over,” the “truth…out of circulation.” With its polyphonic narrative, the mosaic of community voices, always distinct, sometimes an echoing chorus, restores the “unreturnable covered memory” mourned by one of its most compelling characters. They read George Saunders’s forever-wicked “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” which sees a “self-made” businessman’s amusement park dedicated to America’s supposedly glorious 19th century past collapse—thanks to ills both ancient and modern. They (will) read Clint Smith on Civil War reenactments. I always squeeze in lessons from contemporary politics and education—the 1619 Project controversies, school board protests by white parents distraught that their children may not learn a history that paints their ancestors as cuddly heroes, Youngkin’s crackdown on “critical race theory” in Virginia, the DeSantis model for scrubbing college curricula clean of “woke agenda” indoctrination, and so on. Later, down the dusty trail, we’ll go international and back with the novel Homegoing and more. That’s another phase though, a post for another month.

But first, Forrest Gump.

“Print the legend,” goes a journalist in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), a fantastic classic Ford western, when he learns that a senator’s political career was sparked by the (false) myth that he shot a notorious outlaw who was terrorizing a town. A bit of a world-beater himself—at least for a while—Napoleon cranked out vivid propaganda about his battlefield exploits, dictated his own memoirs, and once (supposedly) characterized history as a “set of lies that people have agreed upon.” Real postmodern, these guys…

I’d say that Forrest Gump is too: an epic Hollywood confection, dripping with nostalgia, a brutal satire at its gooey center.

But don’t take my word for it. The movie’s greatest achievement is that it gives the viewer a choice, like the classic kid’s video game Oregon Trail, when you were seven and could decide the route you’d take before your entire family died of cholera and dysentery. 

You pick the narrative you prefer. 

Is Forrest Gump about the greatness of the American promise? That a guy this dumb can achieve greatness on the strength of a great heart? Descended from the Klan founder, Forrest is refreshingly apolitical, not “woke,” indifferent to presidents of any party, blind to celebrity and all the luxury that power, status, and wealth affords. But he’s (mostly) relentlessly optimistic—even when he encounters horrors—and he listens to his mother. His allegiances and devotions are personal: Mama, Jenny, Bubba, Dan, Forrest Jr. He builds churches and doesn't “see color.” He doesn’t surf any waves of turbulent 1960s history but he knows what love is. Unlike Jenny, who always tries to be the essence of a moment in time and ends up personifying each moment’s capacity to wreck a person’s life and render them pathetic or ridiculous, Forrest floats through the waves, as the feather motif makes sledgehammer-clear, and while he grieves the personal losses—Jenny, Mama, Bubba—he is basically the same the whole time, unchanged, true to himself—even if he could never make a sophisticated and bold announcement about what that self is. He does more (in an American-as-apple-pie-flavored objective-oriented sense) than anyone could imagine doing—sparking viral cultural change, making shrewd investments, being a star athlete in multiple sports, war heroism, etc—without ever trying. He does it in America. Where else could such magic transpire?

Or does it impugn the myth? An intellectually disabled man with a crooked spine stumbles into success after success, dodging bullies, bullets, diseases, and poverty. He doesn't bend his environment to his way; staggering achievements just happen to him—which we know is not how things work (outside of the wild fantasies of ill-read high school students). History, as Tommy Orange writes, really can “land on a face,” but it doesn’t land on Forrest's. He may be an idiot, but he’s white and he’s a man and, as the movie makes clear, despite his humble roots, he’s not vulnerable to predatory and violent men like Jenny, and his family has not been impoverished and terrorized like Bubba’s for generations. You could not imagine Forrest a woman, gay, Black, indigenous, or an immigrant. He’s inserted Zelig-like into archival footage, creating the obvious fantasy that he, Forrest, was real and present when George Wallace tried to halt school integration in Alabama and President Kennedy invited All-American football players to the White House. He teaches Elvis how to dance and reports Watergate. The befuddled American everyfool is always drifting through, rendering moments of tragedy, drama, or comedy all equally absurd. 

Somebody shot that nice young president. (For no particular reason).

And then it’s on with the show. And, yes, Forrest does witness the suffering of others: Bubba, for example, dies and his family is saved from continued poverty only by Forrest’s generosity; this is a neat twist, a joke (that the people who, for generations, served whites, would now be served by them), but again, it comes at the expense of reality. What a heartwarming, poignant notion, and yet, Bubba’s family is representative; Forrest is a point of light or whatever, but he could never reverse the anvil of history for other Black people who’ve been cheated and mistreated. This isn’t about reparations of any stripe—healing, justice, vengeance, or progress. It’s about this nice young man.

And maybe the film is truly tragic because Forrest gets everything he never wanted and loses the only things that matter to him. He recounts forty years of American history from the unique position of someone who accidentally shaped its course but has never tried to understand any of it—as he waits for a bus to take him to Jenny, so she can tell him he’s a dad and that she’s dying.

I naturally ask students what they think before I start ranting (as I have been in these paragraphs). I ask them what the movie says about history, not just what’s happened in this country, but how it tells a story, how it creates an alluring narrative about the past and a person’s place in history, any way you slice it. It gives you what you want regardless of what you want. You can snort and cackle through it or you can cry or you can think it’s a love story or an absurdist comedy or feel-good fluff or whatever. 

Maybe art does this for any text and any audience, but Forrest Gump winks at the crowd like most movies of its stature won't. I am manipulating you, the film announces, how do you feel about that?

You never forget you’re watching A Movie. The cinematography—goofy montages, slow-motion chases, shaky war footage—references movies above all, the way other stories have been told to us in film. Vietnam (weed, rock and roll, ambushes, nihilism), sports (“runnnnnnnnn”), love (students appreciate the scene in Jenny’s dorm—a lot), 1960s counter-culture tropes (stern Black Panthers, loudmouth activists, vans of guitar-strumming hippies). It knows the lore we know and how we expect it to look. The right song is always playing to match a mood and era (and a song is almost always playing, period). Characters are pure clichés. Like Lieutenant Dan, the disabled vet, angry and forgotten and mocked, but not by Forrest, who keeps him from following the contours of his seemingly preordained script. Not so for the others. Those chocolates aren’t surprises. Jenny, a casualty of drugs and free love, goes from abused girl to lost woman, doomed essentially from birth. Bubba, the best friend—the Black guy who dies—is otherwise comic relief, a dim but endearing man who could never be the protagonist in the lens of this particular camera. 

Whether it skewers these clichés or believes them is up to the viewer.

Now, for students raised in the app age, the flexibility appeals. They attest to how easy it is to dwell in your algorithm-curated vision of what this country looks like, what is really going on, and what matters. Faking the past has never been easier. Figuring out the truth has never been harder. Different ends of the political spectrum have very few shared truths (although I’d say one is currently interested in the concept and the other is not), and there’s a pervasive casual comfort level with made-up shit, and an increasingly trollish bent to discourse. Everyone is more exposed to conspiracy theories and misinformation, and most people are less equipped to sift through the muddied waters and see past them. There are too many sets of lies, too many talented carnival barkers, too much choice about everything. Blah blah—just writing that feels stupid, because it’s so apparent it feels like it doesn’t matter anymore.

Once innovative, the tech marvel of Forrest Gump now feels banal. Anyone can be inserted into the past. We can put ourselves there. We have deepfakes, face-swaps, CGI influencers like Lil Miquela, and “vintage” AI-generated “Polaroids.” Likewise, the dystopian notion that leaders could scrub textbooks or curricula clean to reinforce their power and worldview has become fairly straightforward policy in some places (like Florida). In the 2021-22 school year alone, there were book bans in 138 districts across 32 states!

I’m a reactionary hater of the Dallas Cowboys (because I liked the Niners as a kid and also because that helmet logo really has always felt like an easy symbol of the America I find most backwards and off-putting). Therefore I felt some satisfaction when I saw Jerry Jones materialize like a shitty Forrest Gump in a recently unearthed scene from 1957. The future Cowboys owner is pictured standing with a group of white students blocking Black students from entering (and integrating) his Arkansas high school. Unlike Forrest, Jones really was there, but deciding what it means is, I suppose, similarly up to the audience. I am not surprised to see Jones looking bigoty, preserved in amber. I suspect he was there because he was a bigot. 

Not according to Jones. “It was more a curious thing,” Jones said. “Nobody there had any idea, frankly, what was going to take place. You didn’t have all the last 70 years of reference and all the things that were going on.” 

This sounds like something Gump would say. Back then, I didn’t know what was gonna happen in sevunty-five-uh years or some-thin. There Jones is though, muddling into a moment of major implications, being there but understanding nothing. Maybe that's what we largely do in our present, to varying degrees. I do have crystalline pictures in my mind of the long-graduated MAGA boys in full Trump regalia from 2016. When students walked out after Trump’s victory, they put on their red hats and shirts and drove around the procession of mostly Latino students (the school demographics) in a jeep bumping racist country music. If a real photograph of them (pink, yellow-haired, leering, jeering) emerges in 30 years, how will they see themselves? How will others see them? It certainly won’t have the weight of that 1957 scene, but it’ll look mighty fashy. I gotta say: I’m not exactly oracular but I knew it wouldn’t age well then. My more conservative students today, though not Trumpy in spirit, are sensitive to the symbolism. Five years later, the MAGA hat means more than a voting intention or even a tribal affiliation, which is why none of them would wear it. In Gump's case, he picks up the book dropped by the Black student out of sheer decency, not realizing he’s taken a public stand for equality. For Gump, the gesture is basic kindness, not a symbolic blow against systemic racism. That’s either the joke or the serious argument for why he embodies what’s best about America.

In a sense, Gump threads the needle. He is individualistic in that he follows no movement and reaches towering heights of achievement—what a student! He is always trying to help people, but he also never thinks about the greater good, of the possibility of protest against large-scale unfairness, what Wilkerson, in her analogy, calls the “deeper ruptures” of the house. He cannot conceive of marketing himself and yet he inspires others and becomes iconic, within the film and for the people who watch it. 

You could show it at Oberlin (where I watched it for the 10th or 11th time in 2001).

You could show it at University of Florida-DeSantisburg (let’s say, ‘round 2035). 

Either way, you’ll know what you’re gonna get. The kids will love it.