ABSTRACT
Trauma has recently been receiving much scholarly attention in the humanities. One explanation for trauma's rise to prominence within the humanities, resides in an apparent compatibility between certain theories of trauma and postmodernist critiques of history. This chapter contrasts an approach to Forrest Gump informed by psychiatric understandings of trauma, with an analysis informed by psychoanalytic understandings of traumatic memory. Reviews of Forrest Gump are shaped by conspiracy fantasies supported by survivor culture. Such reviews emphasize the film's capacity to overwhelm its audiences, but, like the trauma theories that underpin victim culture, they oversimplify the relation between the external and the inner world by stressing the film's impact upon a passive audience. Forrest Gump's 'memories' of recent US history are constructed by means of the insertion of its 1990s 'hero' into archive footage of earlier decades.
