Forrest Gump and America’s Return to Innocence
A Christmas Essay
“Life is like a box of chocolates.” Well, Forrest, let’s take a look at what’s inside. In this beautiful country, on this vast landmass, surrounded by oceans and orbiting a star among billions in a vast universe.
What Winston Groom gave us in Forrest Gump—and what Robert Zemeckis brought to the screen with that masterfully curated soundtrack of America’s integrated poets—wasn’t a caricature of cognitive disability. It was something far more radical: a way to experience America from the inside, through eyes uncorrupted by the interpretive frameworks that keep us at a distance from immediate moral reality.
The contemporary left dismisses Forrest as offensive, as derogatory toward the cognitively handicapped. But this cynical reading reveals more about our moment than about Groom’s project. We’ve become so sophisticated in our analysis of power, so trained to see everything through frameworks of oppression and privilege, that we’ve lost the ability to recognize innocence as a form of wisdom. We can no longer imagine that someone who doesn’t calculate might actually see more clearly than those who do.
Because Forrest doesn’t calculate. He responds. Lieutenant Dan needs him, so he carries him out of the jungle. He promised Bubba, so he builds the shrimp business. Jenny needs love without conditions, so he loves her without conditions. There’s no gap between ought and is for Forrest—not because he can’t comprehend the gap, but because he hasn’t learned to separate them.
And this isn’t a deficit. It’s a kind of moral clarity that the rest of us have sacrificed in the name of sophistication.
Consider the world Forrest moves through. Vietnam. Watergate. The counterculture. Civil rights. The sexual revolution. These are the defining upheavals of 20th century America—moments when the nation was tearing itself apart trying to figure out what it believed, what it valued, who it wanted to be.
And here’s where the genius of that soundtrack comes in. Dylan asking “How many times must the cannonballs fly / Before they’re forever banned?” CCR warning “It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate son.” The Doors proclaiming “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” Simon & Garfunkel wondering where Mrs. Robinson’s saviors have gone. These are America’s poets processing the chaos, trying to interpret, trying to make sense, trying to position themselves in relation to power and meaning and history.
Sophisticated stuff. Beautiful stuff. Necessary stuff.
And Forrest is at Woodstock looking for Jenny because he loves her.
