Oh, and to a long-ago comment:
Jenny almost certainly had herpes, though that wouldn’t have been what killed her. It’s a lot more common than most people realize. Something like a quarter of the sexually-active population has it, and the figure would be much higher for someone as sexually active as she was depicted.
Also, since this thread was last active, we’ve gotten a new forum for discussion of the arts, Cafe Society. I’ll let the mods know so they can move it.
A truly prescient remark.
Nah, The Sixth Sense came out in 1999 and he made his comment in 2000.
chick cancer
[moderating]
Twelve years ago when this thread started, we didn’t have a Cafe Society forum, so it was fine in General Questions. Now that it’s been resurrected, I moved it to its appropriate (current) home.
[/moderating]
Here’s the man himself, telling you from the grave what killed him:
I just happen to be reading And the Band Played On and although this is a zombie thread I thought it would be worthwhile to cite it (and this is an 80’s book so there are surely more known cases now) that by April of 1982 AIDS was known to have struck 300 Americans and killed 119, 10 of them heterosexual women.
Some are still around but can’t get to the computer anymore due to rickets.
Rickets… that’s what I hear when I tell jokes.
I’m hearing it now.
So has anyone even thought that it could have been hepatitis C? I mean obviously it was to soon for her to catch AIDS OR HIV. But hepatitis had been around just not know much. Just a thought.
Huh. I heard AIDS never killed anyone.
Remember, she said the doctors didn’t know what she had. Hep C is pretty well known.
From Wiki.
It had yet to be identified at the time but a teen who died in St. Louis in '69 was found to have HIV when his preserved blood & tissues were tested in '87.
Yes, I remember my father calling this disease to my attention. Seen mostly in classic Italian operas, it is a form of tuberculosis which causes the patient to sing loudly and clearly even though her lungs are failing to the degree that they could not possibly move enough air to support that level of vocalization.
One of which was Jen-nay.
Google is silent on the question of whether Winston Groom had a specific disease in mind for Jenny’s fatal illness.
Or maybe she had Pancreatic Cancer, or any one of a host of different real world diseases which stay dormant until such a time and then spread rapidly. Come on people, go figure.
Read Zsofia’s post above.
I don’t know if either of these posters are still around, but I feel compelled to say, Dignan, that Montfort is right. Maybe Jenny didn’t exactly live the life she wanted to, but she lived a life disobeying “the rules” while Forrest lived a life obeying “the rules”.
Jenny died because she deserved to. She was a slut who didn’t mind her place, and this is what happens to wicked little sluts who don’t mind their place! They die. Horribly. Because they deserve to.
Forrest gets to live and raise his son because he was a good boy who followed the rules.
This movie is not even remotely subtle.
Why would it have been too early for her to have AIDS? She didn’t die until sometime in the 80’s, near as I can figure. (She nearly went off the roof during the Age of Disco, and IIRC that was before she got pregnant with the kid who was school-age when Forrest came to get them.) I’m a bicentennial baby, and I clearly remember my fourth grade teacher making a big deal of talking to us about how you couldn’t get AIDS from hugging or kissing or dirty toilet seats or any of the other stuff people were freaking out about. That would have been in '85 or '86, after Ryan White was already a big deal.