REAL LIFE IDIOT reacts to FORREST GUMP: How realistic is it?
Forrest Gump was the first "movie super hero", and the beginning of the marvel "cinematic universe"
Forrest Gump is the prototype of the current movie “super hero” archetype. I’m unfamiliar with the book and you can bet your ass I’m not gonna read it. who has time for that just to make a point on the internet. suffice to say the books and movie are supposedly very different. I am mainly interested in the movie version, and in the books only insofar as they relate.
Structurally Forrest Gump is a Super Hero. Tragic backstory leads to a life of service and selflessness, and you hide the narrative flaws by coating it over with some vague bullshit about “choice”. My dying uncle ben told me, life is like a box of chocolates: it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t hold inherent value, and meaning is projected onto it by the subject, through the act of “arbitrary choice”.
When they tell you “life is like a box of chocolates” the purpose is to express that a box of chocolates is life. It is quite literally first and foremost an attempt to sell you chocolates - or in a wider sense, consumerism itself. It is a presentation of a theory of value, which is 100% psychological and arbitrary.
Forrest Gump owns nothing, and is happy. To present him as an aspirational figure is a simple attempt of making you eat the bugs, of chocolate. He is the man of the 21st century. Because that’s what he was written to inspire. An aspirational idiot.
Having not read the books I assume this is the basic difference between the books and the movie; in the books he is a vulgar idiot savant, who is not supposed to be aspirational but a deconstructive, critical, and ironic figure. and in the movie he’s a loveable retard who’s saving grace is being “too dumb to be sarcastic”, being too dumb to be anything but sincere. Because that’s the difference between the mediums in the first place.
The aspirative aspect of movie-Gump; his “super power” that the audience watches to imagine themselves having for emotional catharsis, is “being too stupid to not be sincere”. This is the aspiration, the dream of the American man. “Man I wish I was stupid so I couldn’t see how shit things are”. If I’m stupid enough, then I’m innocent of sin, and then I get to enter Heaven on a technicality.
Manic pixie dream girl, stoic lumbering giant dream man
If you want to be more like Forrest Gump, if you envy him his innocence and go-getter attitude, then you are the male equivalent of girls who colour their hair because they are insecure. You are the male manic pixie dream girl. You are Scott Pilgrim vs the world. Forrest Gump Ruined a Whole Generation of Men.
I am sorry to inform you that you have been advertised to.
Just like in the real world where bipolar women with a history of sexual abuse which they overcompensate for by acting like a cartoon exaggeration of a purposefully sexualized childishness do not make for good life partners, so in turn does being a completely idiot not make you happy, or feel complete, or not feel anxious, or feel more in tune with the natural world, or whatever signifier you imagine. In the real world, real world Forrest Gumps are fucking miserable.
quick case study: today, real world Forrest Gumps are known as “lolcows”. of people who don’t quite realise they are making fools of themselves, village idiots in the global village. Your andrew dobsons, your chris-chans, your moviebobs of the world. They’re miserable people.
Here’s the key to understanding the situation:
“Drinking to forget” works. You just don’t get any happier, you only forget why you are miserable, you are still exactly as miserable as you were before. But now you’re also confused and have lost track of time, and increasingly anxious because now you feel bad for no apparent reason.
How Then Do We Into a Sincerity
If we have lost access to truth in postmodernism and all grand narratives are called into question, and we live in a state sponsored universal scepticism and positivism and scientism, and all truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, what we have to do is obviously to take the lies and forcibly reshape them into the shape of truth through raw force. If all you have is lies, make liemonade.
Have you heard the conspiracy theory that Robert Zemeckis knew exactly what he was doing when he made Forrest Gump and that it's secretly a subversive critique of the audience he knew would love it?
Forrest is the naive boomer. His "Life is like a box of chocolates" philosophy can be contrasted with the Buddhist symbology of the lotus flower: beauty growing from shit. Unlike the Buddha, who recognizes that life can be made worthwhile despite the inherent shitty nature of it, Forrest Gump is rubbing your face in the shit. He sees no distinction between a good life and a meaningless one. He's eating shit, and he loves it.
The horrors and atrocities of the 20th century are completely lost on him, he attains success because it doesn't take intelligence to be successful in post-war America.
Forrest is also the ultimate cuck/simp. That Farah Fawcett Charlie's Angel with the invisible nips boomers had hanging from their dorm room walls? Forrest got the real-life version of that. An abused girl who became the town slut, who became a national slut, who returns home to strap Gump with a kid that she somehow knew wouldn't be anything like him (hint: it's not his).
That everyone saw the movie and thought, "I wish I was like Forrest" was Zemeckis' last laugh. You already are Forrest. Your government sends you off to die in pointless wars, your sports and business games are designed to be won by idiots, and you've been conditioned to desire unfaithful women. Your life is a sick comedy, but you think it's Oscar-worthy because Alan Silvestri did the soundtrack and the MSM tells you so.
You think you love Forrest because he's profoundly naive. They want you to love Forrest because willful ignorance is just as good as unquestioning obedience.
Fuck