MotW: Forrest Gump

It has its moments, but last time I watched it I thought it was too much of a 90s melodrama. Put it together with Fried Green Tomatoes, How to Make an American Quilt and Legends of the Fall. Forrest Gump's comedy puts it above those, but it still has the style that every movie trying to win an Oscar was going for in the mid-90s.

In recent times, there's been a lot of debate among social critics and scholars about questionable world views and political themes present in Robert Zemekis's Forest Gump. So, I went back and personally analyzed Forrest Gump, and after little research I confirmed that Forest Gump really is ONE OF THE BIGGEST PIECES OF FACIST PROPAGANDA OF THE 90s!

I grew up with Forest Gump, but just like Star Wars, I would NEVER defend this stupid conservative garbage, no matter how many awards it won for its filmmaking. Holy shit, where do I even begin with this film?? How do I even attempt to explain the level of fascist propaganda present in this seed of evil?

First of all, the mentally challenged recruits were NOT treated well in the Vietnam War. In fact, most of them were used as warzone fodder by the US military. Prior to the Vietnam War, most mentally retarded people were strictly exempt from military service for their own safety as well as the safety of the people around them. But shortly after America started the Vietnam War, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara enacted the highly controversial Project 100,000, which greatly lowered the qualifications for being drafted into the US military. As a result, people who were severely mentally retarded (I've heard in some cases something like a IQ of 50/100) were now being forced into military service with false promises of veterans benefits to come for their duty in the war; I say "false" because most of McNamara's Morons (as they were called) never met the service requirements to obtain these military benefits that had been promised by McNamara, so as a result those McNamara's Morons that didn't die in service (many of them did) became homeless after they returned to the United States. These "impossible to meet conditions" are a long-running and returning theme in american conservative administrations for the military AND even the education system as well. Under an ideal or "perfect" conservative administration like the George Bush Jr. era for example, american society wouldn't make exceptions for anyone, even special needs kids. As a special needs kid I can confirm this. The Bush Administration was trying to reenact Project 100,000 during the Iraq War, and it came at the expense of all the special needs kids. The Department of Education targeted and hobbled special needs kids through police brutality via child abuse as a way to prevent them from developing psychologically, thus making them easier to groom. As a child I personally was absorbed into the conservative party and was policed for 7 years of my childhood, starting when I was 11 and ending when I was 18. Kind of like if Young Link was sent to hell for seven years upon pulling the master sword from its stone instead of warping to the future. I was policed so bad by the Bush Administration and under Scott Walker's tenure that by the time I was 18 years old, I had been physically abused over 100 times throughout my childhood. The most commonly selected children for the Special Ed. department were undersized boys that came from abusive households; these were often the easiest for teachers to persecute as a result of their diminutive stature and lack of friends, meaning school staffmembers often could just other children to beat them up rather than do any of the dirty work themselves. Indeed, adults were rarely used to physically abuse special needs kids; more commonly, school staff members simply used the old "look the other way" trick to break these kids, i.e. after they got public rallies going against them, they would just watch idly as the other classmates pummeled them with their fists and their feet out of xenophobia. Larger boys were almost NEVER persecuted, even black and native american boys; the reason being is because these boys could yield the best results in school sports and the aforementioned military, so as long as they didn't suffer from extreme mental issues, they were left alone to develop normally. In fact, in most cases, the school outright catered to these oversized alpha males owing to america's commitment to male dominated societies and toxic masculinity. I think that goes without saying that it wasn't just boys who were thrown into Special Ed. for reforming, but many girls, too. Usually very pretty girls with fair skin, lightly colored hair and blue eyes. Since these were the girls who were the most heavily persecuted by the boys AND who were often the subject of extreme jealousy for the ugly, advantaged, oversized female jocks, they tended to be the most emotionally disturbed, so into the Special Ed. department they went, for many years of psychological POW-style torture. Despite the fact that the american military doesn't rely nearly as much on women, these girls were still seen as too much of a nuisance to the conservative jocks and honor-roll Chirstian zealots, so in they went, at the request of the zealots and the jocks. 

Anyway, I have digressed on this point. About Project 100,000 AKA McNamara's Morons: Simple History made a great video about it a few months ago. Take a look:



I'm glad they dedicated a video to Project 100,000 because it's an extremely overlooked example of far-right fascism in America and there aren't many videos that I can find about the topic on Youtube. It's very creepy how closely american facism mirrors the facism of Nazi germany. In this case, Project 100,000 resembles Aktion T4, a euthanasia campaign run by Nazi Germany that also advocated the removal of mentally impaired people from society and in fact served as Germany's first step towards the holocaust. Aktion T4 is another car crime that I personally believe is extremely overlooked by schools and the general public. In far-right fascist first world countries like America and Germany where human life is treated like a business, history has proven that the mentally impaired are always the first to go.


Secondly, the film's portrayal of mental retardation is complete and total hogwash. Robert Zemekis treats mental retardation in Forest Gump as if it is some kind of superpower. Despite Forest Gump being a mentally retarded man with an IQ below 75, he somehow manages to be a champion runner, an all-star school athlete, a slavishly obedient foot soldier, a prodigy at assembling/disassembling firearms, a legendary war hero, a lucrative businessman, an international champion at ping-pong, and a responsible father for a cognitively normal child that he produced. 

B U L L S H I T ! 

Science exists for a reason: to debunk the bullshit pseudo-science portrayed in nationalistic gospel tripe like Forest Gump. Here's the reality: the mind controls the body, not the other way around. And if someone has a brain that's supposedly as defective as the brain of a mentally retarded man with an IQ of around 75 like Forest Gump, then they're not going to be able to do any of this stuff. I've done homecare work for mentally retarded men, and I can confirm that they usually move far slower and more clumsily than Forest Gump did in this movie, where he is portrayed running as swiftly and elegantly as a thoroughbred. In reality, most mentally retarded people suffer from processing defects that impair their physical coordination. You'll never find an olympian athlete who's mentally retarded because they could never exist. No top-level athlete could be mentally retarded. It's been scientifically proven false. Even in 1994 when this movie came out every physician knew this.


Finally, the way Forest Gump glamorizes the military and conservative politics is beyond unforgiveable. I think this quote by....

Edit: SHIT! Some american conservative asshole edited the wikipedia page and drastically trimmed down the re-evaluation segment of the page, removing a quote from a female (I think) journalist about the film that I was planning on using! I didn't even get a chance to save the link to her review! It was JUST there a week ago! OH, there's NOTHING that pisses me off more than american nationalists like Scipioafricanus and Dunce E Kool suppressing science, democratic commentary and progressive journalism like they did with this film's wikipedia page or that thread about liquor that I posted.

I can't BELIEVE those assholes deleted that. Ok, well, basically this film critic denounced Forest Gump as being nothing more than a conservative fantasy for american moviegoers. BINGO! This girl gets it! Give her the Pulitzer Prize for film criticism! Because she nailed Forest Gump. I wish I could remember her name but sadly I didn't save the link to her review before it was removed from the wikipedia page for no good reason.

It's true that Forest Gump is just a conservative fantasy. It glamorizes the military, the deep south, and the american dream, portraying it as something that anybody can achieve if they simply put their mind to it, and portraying America as this utopia-like country while glossing over all of the intense mis-use of government powers that occurred during the conservative eras of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Forrest Gump is a one-sided film full of fluff with nothing valid to say about anything. I give it a 1/5.

Yes, I mean, I don't even like the movie, but that felt a bit too much.

scipioafricanus - Fight me!   All those 1994-96 movies about characters reminiscing the past tied to american history in very open day shots of suburbs and "cute" orchestral music with a mixture of light tone and heavy melodrama... Forrest Gump is the best of them, but it's still one of them and I'll stand on this hill thank you so much.

You are probably right, never thought about it.  I look at it from a different angle.  This was a brief time when regular actors played special needs people for Oscar bait.  Jodie Foster in "Nell," Sean Penn in "I am Sam," to name a few.  Never really understood it, since it really isn't that hard for a normal actor to pull that off.  Now imagine the opposite, a special needs person doing "Henry V" for example, now that would be Oscar worthy.

I do think he was the first, and don't really think he deserved it for that one.

Alright, time to get angry. To quote Arnold:

"Waht da FUCK did I do wrong?!"

-Arnold SchWARzenegger, Total Recall, 1990

Seriously, what the FUCK did I do wrong, Centipede? All I did was take an introspective, journalistic approach to reviewing one of my most hated films of the 90s. And what the hell is wrong with that? I grew up with this god-forsaken piece of propaganda, so I should have the right to disown it, shouldn't I?

Should I start posting one sentence reviews or something smaller like that? Should I start suggesting only the films that I have a positive opinion of? Should I stop mentioning our conservative posters like Scipio or Dunce E Fool in my posts about movies/entertainment? Is that what ticked you off?

Please tell me what the issue is because frankly I would love to know. I saw next to nothing offensive with my blog about Forrest Gump. In fact, I think it's one of the most constructive posts that I have made here in weeks, if not months.

This is exactly what it is.