When Jenny gets sick and eventually dies at the end, what did she have? I had guessed AIDS, but then how come Forrest, Jr. didn’t get it, I don’t think it would have surfaced and ran its course in 4 years. Anyone, anyone?
Aids
Actually, it IS possible that Forrest Jr. has it, but hasn’t been diagnosed yet.
Meanwhile, Jenny could not have died of AIDS, exactly, since AIDS has never killed anyone. What is does is weaken the immune system until some other horrible disease can take over and kill you. Most people die either from pneumonia or a form of cancer, but AIDS is a major contributing factor.
As for the actual cause of Jenny’s death, I don’t think they ever came and and confirmed it was AIDS. We’ll have to wait for the sequel.
yeah, it was implied that it was AIDS. She presumably got it after she had Forrest Jr., or it didn’t develop into AIDS until after she had him, or something like that. And she got it, IIRC, before much was known about it (so there was little information that could have helped her), so it could easily have run its course in 4 years.
I always got the idea that it was AIDS. Why? Well, it was a slow-acting progressive chronic disease. That describes a range, from leukemia to brain cancer to all the other diseases people lose sleep over. But it was hinted that her lifestyle (being a slut in the 60s-70s) contributed to it, which narrows the range. Finally, it was diagnosed in the 80s-early 90s, when AIDS was the known ‘big bad bug’ going around. Not very convincing, I know, but you work with the information you’re given.
Jenny actually died of a rare modern case of “old movie disease.” It was very common in the 30s and 40s. One of the most famous cases of it was Greta Garbo’s in “Camille.” The disese caused the actress to get weaker and weaker and more and more beautiful the sicker she got. One sure way way to know if it’s a case of old movie disease is the presence of swelling strings on the sountrack. Ali McGraw had a really bad case of it in “Love Story.”
There are two other things to consider. One, Jenny was sexually abused by her own father–who may have been a really sick man in more ways than one. He could have had herpes or God knows what. Two, she took drugs in the 60s; she seems to have been a full-fleged hippie while Forrest was in Vietnam getting shot in his seater. It’s possible that one, or the other, or both, of these factors could have made poor Jenny a pushover for diseases more fortunate people would be fully immune to. 
Close; it was a very common variant called Stuck-in-a-Sucky-Movie disease (Cinema horribilis), which unfortunately doesn’t kill as many people as it should.
Maternal to fetus trasmition rates for HIV are only about 25 to 30% for live births. There is good evidence, however, that mother to child transmition earily during pregnancy can induce miscarriges, so likely the figure is higher. Since Forrest Jr. is alive the figure of 25 to 30% still applies.
We have no idea how long she had been infected. It was four years between diagnosis and death, but she may have been infected long before.
caircair-
This is not true. Cecil Adams on the subject:
Didn’t Yul Brynner(sp?) die of Old Movie Disease both on and offscreen?
There’s a Significant Moment in the film when you see Jenny inject herself with heroin (or some needle drug) after someone else has used the same needle. It’s made clear that that’s the moment when she’s infected with the HIV virus, although no one says that. In the same way, it’s made clear that she dies of AIDS, even though the name of the disease is never used.
Selmer writes:
> Jenny actually died of a rare modern case of “old movie
> disease.” It was very common in the 30s and 40s. One of
> the most famous cases of it was Greta Garbo’s
> in “Camille.” The disese caused the actress to get weaker
> and weaker and more and more beautiful the sicker she
> got. One sure way way to know if it’s a case of old movie
> disease is the presence of swelling strings on the
> sountrack. Ali McGraw had a really bad case of it
> in “Love Story.”
Yeah, Selmer, I remember reading the Mad parody of Love Story too. That is where your taking this idea of “old movie disease” from, right?
I wrote:
> That is where your taking this idea of “old movie
> disease” from, right?
Before someone else gets the chance to make fun of me, I will make fun of myself for using “your” instead of “you’re.”
Is “Old movie disease” a variant of Opera TB?
I could be mistaken, but I thought I read several articles at the time the movie came out saying that while it was implied that she died of AIDS, that couldn’t have been the case since, based on the years in which the movie took place, AIDS hadn’t emerged or come into existence or whatever the term is. Or, she would have been the absolute first case, long before any doctor had any idea whatsoever that such a disease even existed. Or maybe it was just that for a woman (even a needle-using one) to have the disease would have been so incredibly unusual during the very early AIDS outbreak that it was kind of far-fetched for the movie to imply it.
I am just going by memory - haven’t checked IMDB or anything - so I might be wrong.
Which- I think- was part of the point; the way the movie is set up, Gump is supposed to be marginally involved in some of the most amazing and defining events of the 60’s-80’s (met JFK, Nixon, made the call that started Watergate, went to China on the ping-pong team, showed LBJ his butt, started the national jogging craze, etc.), so having his “girlfriend” be one of the first to die of AIDS seems appropriate given the movie’s theme.
You’re right that it’s very unlikely that a person could have contracted the HIV virus at the time the film suggests that Jenny did. It’s clear though that the film is saying that Jenny did die of AIDS, so one of the ways that the film is anachronistic is by having Jenny get the HIV virus too early.
Good point, John - I hadn’t thought about it that way. I suppose the filmmakers (hey, does she die in the book too?) could have made it AIDS in keeping with all the other “firsts,” even if it likely wouldn’t have happened that way in real life.
I think the movie implied that it was AIDS. Examples…(1) she had lots of sex partners, (2) she shared needles (remember that one scene), (3) she was deteriorating overall from an unknown disease (and AIDS was not really known back then), (4) it’s the most obvious thing for the audience to guess, and (5) it fits the overall theme of big things happening to ordinary people.
IIRC, gays in the late 70’s recognized the symptoms of AIDS (wasting, Karposi’s (sp?) Sarcoma, etc. But they just attributed it to associated things: IV drug use, STDs, poor nutrition.
AIDS has probably been around for a long time. It was just its introduction into a couple of fluid-sharing groups (IV drug users, male homosexuals) that caused the epidemic
My very-pointed-and-jaded summary of Forrest Gump, a film that I hated:
“If you’re a moron and do what your mother tells you to do, you’ll end up fine, but if you live your life the way you want to, you’ll die of AIDS.”
Anyway, the disease Jenny passed on to Forrest Jr. was the ability to see dead people.