ABSTRACT
Writing in a recent issue of the New Yorker, Roger Angell reviews Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), the immensely popular film about a simpleton hero triumphing over the vicissitudes of American history which captured the hearts (if not the minds) of most Americans and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film, he tells us, is a “moony” and “fantastic” dream in which ignorance and niceness win out over historical consciousness and meaning. Forrest Gump presents “the shambles and the horror of our recent American past made harmless and sweet because the protagonist doesn't understand a moment of any of it.” Angell goes on to note, however, that at the same time, the film contains nary a trace of “what used to be called without irony the American dream: the faith that we all belonged somewhere in a rational and forgiving system” that provided not only one's just deserts, but also historical and ideological surety. 1 In essence, although Angell does not grant the film credit for its contradictions, the sweet Forrest Gump also presents a not-so-sweet vision of history and one's “rational place” within it. The complexity of diverse individual trajectories and their nodal coalescence in the massive “historical events” we see foregrounded as the film's background are ironically revealed as nothing less (while something more) than confusion: that is, notions of both rationality and system are undermined by the visible evidence that “History” is the concatenated and reified effect of incoherent motives and chance convergences.
