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Screen 2008 49(4):450-461; doi:10.1093/screen/hjn055
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved

The unanswered question of Forrest Gump

Victor Fan


  Abstract

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) is often interpreted as a film that restages a series of traumatic events survived by the baby-boomer generation. However, perhaps these historical events are not traumas until we define them as such, while their reinterpretations and reactivations are merely paths that allow us to get close to a traumatic core that has always been inaccessible to us. In this article, I explore the function of Jenny Curran (Robin Wright) as a symptom of the character Forrest Gump, and of the baby-boomer spectators. As a symptom, Jenny insists within the subjectivity of Forrest as a piece from the Real, which resists forming any relationship to the Law of the Father. For the baby-boomers, Jenny is a witness who acknowledges with the new generations that the countercultural movement, for which the baby-boomers had fought with their lives, had indeed failed. For gay baby-boomers who are caught between two deaths (the death of Vietnam and AIDS that have been executed but not yet), Jenny is potentially understood as a phantom from death, whose continuous insistence within the life of Forrest offers a force of resistance that could dissolve the Law of the Father once and for all.


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