After reading this opinion piece in which the father of a Down-Syndrome child objects to a comedian’s DS joke, the movie “Forrest Gump” popped into my mind. Gump is never explicitly declared to be mentally retarded, but he does appear to be intellectually disabled, and there’s a substantial amount of humor in the movie that derives from that.
Is that acceptable? Or is this “making fun of intellectually disabled people,” and therefore worthy of being placed in the same boat as fat jokes, retard jokes, and a whole bunch of other categories of people who are angry about being targeted for humor?
I do not recall Forrest being made an object of ridicule for being stupid. I do recall most of the humor coming from the reactions of ther “smart” people around him to his Candide-esque innocence.
But I admit that I only watched the film once, back when it first came out.
Not particularly by the characters in the movie, but comical circumstances were made to arise from his limited understanding of the various situations he encountered. Example: his unawareness that Lt. Dan had invested him in a budding computer powerhouse, made clear when he described Apple as “some kinda fruit company”. Or his awed reverence at the thought that Jenny had achieved her dream of being a singer, not really grasping that she was performing in a strip club where nobody really gave a damn about her music. Or his misunderstanding of Lt. Dan’s joke (regarding the similarities between Forrest and Bubba), “Are you two brothers?”
Yeah, I remember it as more situational than ridiculing him personally. When all was said and done, he was presented as the wisest person in the entire movie.
Nitpick: I thought he was declared mentally disabled at the beginning, when the school administrator is explaining to his mother that his IQ is too low to go to normal school and he’ll have to go to the “dumb kids school”. This is the impetus for his mother sleeping with the administrator to get him into the normal school.
“Forrest Gump? Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain’t retarded!”
Boy, do I ever disagree with the article in the OP. Almost diametrically opposed.
Forrest Gump was definitely slow. And it was definitely a main theme of the movie. Did they make fun of him? I really don’t think so. If anything, the biggest jokes in the movie were about the people underestimating Forrest. But it was certainly a plot point, and it seems equally certain that the dad in the OP’s article must disapprove of the Oscar winning Best Picture of 1994.
No, Forrest Gump makes fun of smart people. They’re all running around after kicks or causes – that’s what ultimately does for Jenny, she is a slut and is punished for it. Forrest is smarter than them all because he has a good heart and always does what society says he’s supposed to.
That is what is so horribly pernicious about the film – it sends a clear and a false message that virtue is more important than intelligence, not in any abstract scale of values but in terms of material, financial success. Forrest’s shrimp boat is the only one left afloat in the harbor after the storm, apparently just because Forrest has been going to church and making nice with God (none of the other shrimpers went to church?!). And thus he grows rich. In real life, rich Forrest Gumps who did not inherit their money are perhaps not unknown, but they are very extremely rare.
Adreed 100%. It made you feel like the best way to go through life is not smart. It has a clear anti-intellectual message and it offended me greatly, and still does. I think we have enough of that in this country anyway, a country that somehow gets offended at the mention of arugula
:dubious: She got molested throughout her childhood, her character strives to deal with it. If you’ve taken away the message ‘sluts get punished’ from this movie you might be projecting.
“They gave you, an imbecile, a moron who goes on television and makes a fool out of himself in front of the whole damn country, the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
I like the movie, but deep down I think it is really about making fun of its audience. I wonder if the joke’s on me.
I definitely think they dumbed it down from the book. The way I remember the book, Forrest was rather unlikable - he was “slow,” he knew it, and he was bitter about it.
He somehow makes it to college (as a football star), gets into combat in Vietnam and gets shot in the keester, and wins the Medal of Honor, and his shrimp business makes him rich after he survives a storm in the Gulf. And he convinces the embittered Lieutenant Dan to live.
No, you couldn’t prove by me that he was retarded.
I envision the movie as directed by, say, Martin Scorsese. Everything we see in the 'real ’ FG movie is filtered through Forrest’s ‘retarded’ understanding. At Alabama, he’s just one of the kids that everyone lets score a TD because they want to give him a good time, not a real star. The MoH is just a dime-store bauble given to him by his 'friends". When he goes to China to play ping pong, in reality, his buddies taken him down the road to a bar, and he plays against a local. He can barely hit the ball. All his ‘friends’ cheer him on, but are really patronizing and laughing at the “retard”. They tell him he won. What does Forrest know about how far China is?
Since everyone pretends that Forrest is competent and popular, he gets a totally different view of the world. And since no one actually hurts him, he’ll never know.
