Forrest Gump (1994) / Glenmorangie Nectar D'or Single Malt Scotch [20:34-25:34]

to see something beautiful in the world, Forest also has that desire. If you have a desire to experience love and belonging and relationships that matter to you, you got Forest Gump wanting the exact same thing. Dude, the moment where he's worried about passing on his lack of intelligence to his son is heart-wrenching. And like, who can't once you've had a child relate with that fear of like, oh man, like, what if I passed down one of the worst parts of myself to my child? Like, and there's, like, I could go on and on and on. Like, I want to be the kind of person that doesn't let money and fame change me. Oh, guess what? Forest Gump is also that. And the thing is, you could read all of those things and be like, well, there's your problem. He made a perfect character that doesn't have any flaws. But the beautiful thing about Forest Gump is that he doesn't stand emotionally distant from the world around him. Like, the way he shows terror when he is trying to save Baba, when he thinks he's passing down his lack of intelligence to his son. The joy that he has when he sees Jenny in Washington, D.C. Like, he engages with the world around him in such a emotionally vulnerable way that he's not just this blank slate of a character. He is somebody who has motivations and has desires. And I just, like, I don't know how Zemeckis does it. Because I'm with you. I know that one of your main points on this is that the broad strokes are tough to swallow at times. I just, I think he nails it, man. Man, how do I want to respond to this? I think maybe let's try to arrive at the end of framing the debate around Forest Gump and I'll answer your points with what I would assume to be the pushback. Now, I don't necessarily agree with all this, but I think for me watching it this time, the biggest flaw with this movie is that it kind of wants to have its cake and eat it to when it comes to how it presents its characters as metaphors for a tumultuous time in American history. And what I mean by that is, like, it wants you to understand at the most basic level that Forest Gump is a simple man who has simple American values and perhaps not as a result of those values, but, and also, Forest Gump winds up wildly successful. At the same time, his best friend, Jenny, is really representative of the sort of lostness of a generation of the baby boomers who went off seeking something fulfilling for a really long time. And perhaps not as a result of that seeking, but just, and also, they got themselves into some really deep shit. Do you know what I mean? And I think that where critics really started to dislike what they felt the movie was saying that you want to make that metaphor, but then you want it to stop right there and you don't want us to trace it to its logical conclusion. Right? Like, you have to kind of put yourself back in the historical context of this movie coming out. It's like smack dab in the middle of Clinton's first term. You're coming off of a decade plus of Reagan and then George H. W. Bush, where America, like, very loudly declared, like, we are returning to conservative values in America, whether that is social or economic. Like, this is where we have arrived as a nation. And I think that a lot of critics read this movie as like, whether or not Zamekis is trying to make this an apology for, you know, baby boomers kind of coming back into traditional American values. It certainly seems to uspouse that. And that Jenny, as an extension, is, you know, a portrayal of we went and sowed our wild oats as a generation, but now we're kind of coming back to conservatism. Now, again, I don't even know if I want to say that I see all that in this movie. I just think that that's kind of what the pushback on the movie is. Not that it is a conservative movie, but that it wants to paint forest and Jenny as these really kind of broad strokes metaphors, but then it never really wants to examine the implications of painting them in those metaphors. Like, what does it mean that forest gump is your simple American values representative because he's also developmentally disabled.