The fact that boomers can’t stop thinking and talking about themselves means that they’re also intensely self-critical, or at least they used to be. Bear in mind that the movie was made 27 years ago, back when they were starting their slide into midlife crisis. It makes sense that they’d think of themselves as assholes.
I have known a lot of people who have done a lot of thinking and talking about themselves who have never shown a single sign of being self-critical. Just saying.
I don’t know about the “Wise Fool” part, but one thing I do think Forrest Gump embodies from the Boomers is the “first to grow up with TV” part. They were the first generation that had that, “…and you were there!” feeling for most of the major events in their lives. It’s like the classic boomer question, “where were you when you heard Kennedy had been shot?”
In previous generations, news always came at a delay. Newspapers and, later, newsreels at the movies put everything at a distance in time as well as space. Radio sped things up a bit, but hearing the news isn’t quite the same as seeing it, nearly live, every day on the 6 and 11pm news.
And that’s what Forrest really embodies - he lives through the 60s and 70s as a front-row spectator of all the major events.
And in thinking about my above hypothesis, I can go one better - Forrest is TV himself. He sees all, but understands nothing, merely acting as a conduit of information to others.
It’s also why Forrest Gump wouldn’t work as a movie about the 2000s. TV is no longer a passive reporter of news, it actively creates the news.
I’ve not seen evidence of this trait in boomers more than any other age group. If anything, it’s the younger generations who appear to be obsessed with boomers.
On the contrary, Millennials got tired of hearing themselves blamed for everything and went on the offensive. It’s a classic case of “you can dish it but can’t take it.” While it doesn’t make sense to me to blame the Boomers for the plight of Millennials, some of them have an utter lack of awareness of their life advantages that has resulted in them spewing hate at people who never got a fair shake. The schism is not really about age so much as economic opportunity.
Generalizing based on a huge collective of people is kind of silly anyhow, but the thing about Forest Gump is that it covers events that a whole collective of people actually experienced, so if you lived through that era you can probably see yourself somewhere.
You mean, like “Where were you when they bombed Pearl Harbor?”
Radio had the same effect in its day as TV.
The first publicly broadcast radio reports to the public of Pearl Harbor appear to have been about a hour after the attack began - after the attack was over. For Kennedy, the announcement was within minutes - while Kennedy was still being treated, and Oswald was still at large. I may be mistaken but it feels like for Pearl Harbor the radio reports were about something that had happened (Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor being attacked?) while for Kennedy the television reports were about something that was happening (where were you when Kennedy was shot?). But that may not be as big a difference as I’m thinking it is.
Plus watching Oswald get shot live on TV.
It’s still essentially the same thing: a major disrupting news event that is known all over the country in a very short time. Other things, much earlier, were known within a day due to telegraphs and cables (and newspaper extras). The sinking of the Lusitania, for instance, was a headline in the New York World the same day it happened.
Re: the “Boston” album cover - I remember how I noticed that the spaceship was a giant guitar, after I’d had the album for many years. I had set the album cover down upside down, and when I looked at it it was like “holy shit, it’s a guitar!” Not sure why it was so much easier to see upside down, but yeah…
I always knew the Boston cover was a guitar, but that was because I was working at a record store when the album was released and we made a huge display using an actual guitar made up to look like the cover. What I didn’t know until now is that the city enclosed by the dome on top is actually Boston.
Duh!
I thought Jenny died of AIDS as well when I saw the movie. Like you said, it fit the theme of the movie. But no, apparently the canonical answer is that she died of Hepatitis C.
At least that’s the published answer. The disease was never named in either the book or the movie. But Winston Groom wrote a sequel, in which he identified Hepatitis. However Eric Roth, who wrote the screenplay for the movie, also wrote a screenplay for a proposed sequel - and he identified the disease as AIDS in his script. Overall, I say Groom is the official authority here; he created the character and his sequel was published while Roth’s screenplay was never filmed.
Well, to be fair, the audience is the final authority.
But even to that point, since every theme in Forrest Gump was broadcast at ‘the volume goes up to 11’ level, yet the ‘Jenny has AIDS’ theme is done at volume negative 3, I can only assume she just had cancer or hepatitis C or something like that.
In the film, doesn’t Jenny mention it’s a virus but they don’t know much about it? And also kind of telegraphed by the scenes of her iv drug use. Yes, I know one can also catch Hep C that way but it never occurred to me it was anything other than AIDS. Not sure if Mr. Groom’s sequel counts in this instance.
Im pretty sure it was common for people with AIDS to actually die of other diseases, given that It essentially destroys your immune system. It’s quite possible she died from hepatitis because she had AIDS.
From another thread:
Oh. My. GAWD. I watched that show a million times, own the DVDs even … how did I never pick up on that?!?
There’s even a separate storyline about how Dale is unknowingly raising another man’s child and nobody ever mentions this to Dale even though it’s obvious to everyone. So we can assume they are doing the same to Hank.
Jesus. One of my favorite animated TV shows, turns out to be DARK, man.
Dale, through a cloud of cigarette smoke: “Guns don’t kill people. { beat } The government does.”
Bobby doesn’t look like Hank, but he does look like Cotton.
Dale knows. Sort of.
This isn’t particularly obvious, and the work isn’t very well-known outside the science fiction community, but it sort of fits in this thread.
When I was a kid we were given a tour of our fire department, and one of the weirder devices they showed us were glass spheres filled with liquid. These were “firebombs” or “fire grenades”. The liquid inside was carbon tetrachloride. The idea, they said, was to lob these into a burning building through a door, window, or chimney. The glass ball would burst, spreading the carbon tet everywhere. In the heat, it would vaporize and smother the fire.
I was surprised to learn that something very similar was once placed near furnaces in homes. If a fire started, the heat would burst the glass ball full of carbon tetrachloride, smothering the fire. Sort of a very low tech sprinkler system, or halon system.
Of course, carbon tetrachloride affects the nervous system, is one of the most potent liver toxins, and is a suspected carcinogen. It’s hard to believe today that the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments from my youthh had lots of experiments using carbon tet (and that it was so easy to get in those days). Websites about Carbon Tetratchloride Bombs warn about the danger of these items, and advise home owners to have them properly disposed of.
These sites have their use stopping in 1910 to 1940, but pretty obviously firefighters were still using them into the 1960s and 1970s, as my own experience shows. This article says they were phased out after 1954 (the vaporizing carbon tet turned into phosgene gas, which was used as a chemical weapon in WWI). Obviously not everyone got the word. Our bombs didn’t look as fancy as a lot of these – they were just plain unadorned glass balls
What’s the creative work? Reflecting on the history of carbon tet recently, I remembered Harry Harrison’s second novel in his Deathworld trilogy. In Deathworld 2 the hero finds himself on a world where knowledge of technology has regressed,. and specialized knowledge is in the hands of highly regulated and secretive guilds. The member of the one specializing in chemistry protect themselves by throwing glass balls similar to these Fire Grenades, except that they’re filled with hydrochloric acid. (They also use HCl-filled glass containers as booby traps in items they want kept secret, like internal combustion engines) .
I figure Harrison must’ve had the fire grenades in mind when he came up with the notion of HCl-filled personal protection devices.