Content area
Full Text
Forrest Gump revises popular memories of the 1960s through its representations of gender and race and its visualization of postwar history. This essay examines how political conservatives used the film to articulate a traditional version of recent American history and to define their political ground in the 1994 congressional elections.
The cold war's end gave Americans only a kind of abstract triumph-and left a void. The collapse of communism and the Soviet empire suddenly removed the dark moral counterweight by which Americans measured their own virtue. Chronic recession, the rise of Japanese and European economic competitors, the vast inflow of immigrants from non-European sources (strangers to the older American tradition), the shrinking of the buffering Atlantic and Pacific oceans (jet travel, satellites, global distribution of goods), all these have eaten away at the long American smugness, the postwar sense of superiority, of grace.
-Lance Morrow, "Folklore in a Box"
"Littered with the unorganized and unassimilated marvels and griefs of recent years," Lance Morrow argues, the United States has increasingly become a "nation that has lost many of its defining ideas about itself." In the politically and culturally turbulent final decades of the twentieth century, America has sought to "restock its repertoire of folklore and self-images and archetypes." Thus, Americans began to comb through the events of the decades after World War II to find the point, the historical moment, at which the course of U.S. history went awry. Yet the wide-scale effort to "redefine America" is itself defined not by consensus but by conflict. American popular culture has become the battleground on which the "war of American myths, a struggle of contending stories" is fought.1 Providing a map through uncharted cultural territory, narratives about American history in popular culture are instrumental in constructing popular political sense. The 1994 film Forrest Gump, about a man with an LQ. of 75 who narrates his journey through the last four decades of American history, tells such a story.
Since the transformation of Forrest Gump from film to phenomenon, several scholars have tried to explain the overwhelming popularity, cultural resonance, and ideological impact of the film's visualization of postwar history.2 Peter Chomo discusses in detail the main character's role as a social mediator and as an agent of...