FORESTING
When an actor and an act stalk you, you know you have seen something good. Forest does this for me. Of all the themes and images I have gathered about me like a lap blanket to keep warm with, a few continue to attract me the most. It is corny and boring to repeat the theme of aloneness in American life. Our writers and movie persons have been doing this forever. Since we left the comfort of small towns and villages to become members of amorphous cities. Since the beginning of this century, just ending. In particular, since then.
Forest is well known at this point, with all the publicity Tom Hanks has garnered. I went up to Sam's Club in Framingham and saw my first box of chocolates with the name, Gump, on them. This merchandising, like that of t-shirts and now pogs, delights me. It binds the culture, makes it whole. Pogs are bottle caps you snap about with a thing called a slammer. The last is more sturdy than the typical pog and comes in an OJ Simpson design, or you can get one with the likeness of Judge Ito. Or the N.Y. Rangers or something else. It seems we put our issues on things to remind us we have a unified culture and way of handling the world. I never thought there would be Forest chocolates, but I bet they are good.
Forest enters the world with good intentions. He is just slow and goofy. So he gets a fair share of abuse which he probably deserves. In any event it all washes over him. He never gets it. The ones around him all victimize or brutalize him, and one another, and Forest daintily steps around their evil, and proclaims for love and good cheer. Fortunately there are some good people who are exceptions to the verbal and physical battery endemic in his world. The army pal, Bubba, is one. What he does is live through it, blindly and mutely. He is like Disraeli who made a statement I like about whining and boring others with your troubles. He never complains, never explains. He lives each moment like the alcoholic, one minute at a time. His life is a tv. He is in a play he has no control over. Life washes over him and he reacts to a barrage of stimuli out of his control. The twist of the story is this that this idiot manages to master everything. Do it better than others. He gets rich, wins ping-pong matches, runs fast for Alabama, scores in the shrimp business, wins the girl at the end and sires a brilliant child-heir. Sheer fantasy. Unbelievable. Really a dumb story. What he does along the way, though, is show the parameters of aloneness. We as Americans are no longer lonely, but alone. There is a difference. Lonely means we want and miss other people dreadfully. Alone means we have come to accept the human tragedy. That we come to America alone and leave it alone, to go to the other side or to the void of death. Americans are beginning to make in -roads into solving the problem of what do you do to not mind being alone.
In time we have come to believe less in the big things in our lives. Government or religion. Forest in all his idiocy can understand the prime American thing. He is alone. He is of a dysfunctional family like the rest of us. He has nothing to fall back on but himself.. Most of us have ceased to believe that money will protect us. It won't, so why spend all this time taking it and hoarding it? I don't know. Another dead-end in the American labyrynth. So we have a Forest who faces the thing squarely. He is alone and if that is his condition , so it will be. He is a realist. He is simple enough to look out and see goodness, flowers and love. None of it is real , as it is down-deep, but he sees a world that, on the surface, is full of light and fluff. Scratch it and what you have is poison ivy and nasty , grabby people. Mean people who hate because it is fun to hate. They hate because they enjoy it. The sport of it. These are the haters I fear most.
Forest sees none of it. He is driven by something unseen. He is not aware of it either. He is too blind to see it. Love drives him. The sort of instinct that drives Martin Luther King or Mandela. He is a soldier in the army of love. He believes he can heal and transform the world by passing out sweet chocolates. He showers the world he inhabits with stupid little aphorisms that mean nothing really. Nothing real that will change anything. He is, in short, pathetic. Hopeless, but he keeps going. He persists in his daily lunacy. I think, because he doesn't know what else to do. If he stops, he will confront his elemental aloneness and that is too hard to bear, so he keeps moving, until he delivers us a babe that will save the world. A little Forest in his likeness from the legs of his woman, the one who committed every excess in the wilderness of the American 1960's. A fairy tale indeed. The character is alone. That is the point and why he resonates so, for Americans. The main reason. We never confront our aloneness. We can't. We axed the family and religion. Our country seems not our friend any more. The big organizations around us screw us relentlessly. The insurance company. Blue Cross. G.M. Thank god for 60 Minutes to expose this treachery. Otherwise our lives would be a long night. The character must be seen in this context. He is chained to a rock and vultures snatch at his guts. He cannot defend himself. He is alone. Alone, and he goes on because he can't but do anything else. He has to get to the end of the movie. His life is a movie.
He is a martyr. Such types lead exciting lives. They have to be at the head of the line, lest someone not see them. Anonymous martyrdom would be a waste. Forest knows enough to get front and center. His stupidity propels him to the front of the line. Of course he stand out naturally in all his goofyness, so hiding is really out of the question. He serves as an example, pays the price and enlarges our world. Like a ball, he bounces from one hard situation to another, barely aware of who or what he is. He knows he is alone. He must be strong to the end. He knows that much. His iron resolve is that of a religious zealot or fervent patriot. But what is it he believes? He idolizes love. The love of the whole world and everything in it. Sweet morons do. They find themselves unable to distinguish between one thing and another. They paint the whole universe in love. They cannot do what we mortals do. Distinguish between evil and good. This moron of ours does not know prejudice or how to distcriminate between one person and another. He has no hierarchy of who is better, because they are higher up than someone else. He is a natural affirmative action hero. He has not a whit of superiority to him and he assumes all other people are like him. Good Forests. Like him. It gets him in all sorts of trouble. I wish his mother had not set him up by telling him to go out and master the world; she never told him it would be a suicide mission. She set him up. She should have said, "Forest, climb under a rock and never come up. That way they will never even know you're there. You freak!" That would have been more charitable. But we never would have had a movie, if Forest had done the sensible thing of being a cipher, a nothing. Maybe a clerk at the local store, a gravedigger, a car wash person, a domestic. Someone you could say to , "Forest, would you like to take home a piece of this pie?" And Forest would genuflect and kiss the mistress's hand in gratitude, maybe leaving a tear on her outstretched hand. Oh, Forest, you lucky dog. Only Forest and his mother don't have enough sense to know that our hero will walk into a buzzsaw and suffer mightily through his whole life. His mom sets him up to think he is as good as anyone else. He's not. That is obvious. Why can't they see it? We can and we don't even know these people we are looking at on the screen. Well, life is that way and people do surprise us, don't they? What would life be like, if everyone did what we expected all the time? We say things like that. This is how we talk to pass the time until the next game starts on the tv or the next sitcom.
Fact is, we don't need people anymore. Forest doesn't either. Not really. He thinks he does, but in the end, he does not. His people let him down or they die on him. The best image I have of him is when he is alone and framed in the bow window. So desolate and so alone. He misses mommy. The same one who offered him all that bad advice of going out and competing in our mad society. Gump has his beliefs. That is all he needs. He is a quaint zealot. He is like a Marxist or a fundamentalist Christian, a die-hard Rush Limbaugh-ist. A Devout. He needs no-one because he has his Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jesus and Mohammed, to fall back on. He has belief, in humankind. He is a bumbling believer. He is hooked for life on a belief, one that has the power to sustain him. Only he is an idiot and doesn't mask it like we do. It is clear, however, that he masters the problem o aloneness in America and he does it the old-fashioned way, by working for it. He achieves strength in his real life. We are less than alone because we seek deliverance in our machines and can no longer handle real and everyday life. Forest, you see, is a quaint, village idiot.
This is the first generation of humans in America and othe America-like countries, who have decided to go without the family. All alone. To the stars. Lone astronauts on the rocket called achievement. We rise by merit. We make important decisions, go to Harvard, become lone lawyers. Do operations on patients as wise surgeons, plead before the bench , all alone like Marcia Clark. The point is the individual does it alone. The family would be a drag, so we raise our humans to achieve alone, for themselves. To achieve and stand out, is to be alone. The family , to drag it along, would be an unnecessary impediment. The aloneness allows us to rise to the top, as Forest does in this fairytale on the screen and the only price is that you are doomed to be alone forever and a day. The bulk of us do not believe in anything deeply, like Forest does. We find comfort in our cable, our vcr, our Blockbuster, our multiplex cinema, our on-line and modem. We plug into our machines for deliverance and, if there is power from the plug in the wall, they deliver. All we need is fossil fuel, nuclear energy or hydroelectric power and we can survive nicely. Machines are the family. They can answer all our informational and sexual needs. They do that now.
Forest is alone. He is alone with his beliefs in the perfectability of woman-man. His values drive him to do the right thing in a wrong- thing universe. He stands out and takes a pummeling. Most of us are cowards who hide in our things. We escape daily and nightly into the new world of the soap or the sitcom or the cop drama or the basketball game. To forget, that we are alone. If you stop and look, you quickly see you are alone and can't stand it, so you do stuff and turn on buttons or plunk a computer keyboard to speak to some one in Singapore and you slyly ask if they, too, are lonely. The modern people have eschewed tradition. Old stories and phrases. They are, each of them, astride their own rocket. Their legs, astsride this rocket, that is built for one, only. It is a lone rocket and each modern sits with his or legs around the rocket and this rocket is their deliverance to the network in the sky. In death they will enter a heaven with five hundred stations that are on 24 four hours a day. The modern does not need tradition, religion or other people. That is fact. He need have but a finger, to press a button that will enervate the tv or the computer on line. In love with their machines. On line forever. The safe life of virtual reality and then you die and go to the stations in the sky. Gump suffers here, the fool. The idiot. Who doesn't know any better. That people are horrible. That life is better lived vicariously. It is less dangerous that way.
To love machines above all else, makes good sense to me. It is sensible in the world we now inhabit. It is, essentially, a fail-safe decision. It's as good a belief as any and covers the facts of life we have today. We seem to have no traditions that are known to matter. Not much of a family system left. Forest is a throwback, a vestige, of the time when we believed people make a difference. Love is his energy and we know where that leads to. Trouble. Fake reality is what we choose because the real world is too horrifying to contemplate. Good old Forest does look at the world squarely and he gets screwed over, over and over again. He comes back for more, our little idiot does, and he gets smacked again, like some figure from Abbot and Costello that is hit with pies again and again.
We believe in the machine. The Forest Person believes in love. Same result. Being alone. The human dilemma is always that . How do we live alone? It creates panic in humans and that is why they are too busy all the time, to talk, to play, to create art. The Depression in this country did a marvelous thing. It left us time to talk because there was no work, nothing else to do. Imagine a depression as having any positive effect! Well, it did that and now those in their 80's remember it, as a golden age, when we were humans, not extensions of machines, or mad hatters, running around in circles, or sitting in traffic jams.
Forest is a sympathetic character. He is a lovely human being who has the time to talk to people. He gives gifts. He stands and looks at other humans with adoration in his eyes. As a dog would his human. He is what people were like in the depression. He has time. He takes time. He is nice. Shares what little he has with others who have less. He cultivates his humanness and we like it. It reminds us somewhere in our minds that we used to be decent and good and caring, but we lost it in our machines somewhere along the way. We got in the car , cranked the airconditioning , put on the tape and got lost in our music. We turned on the tv and have kept it going in our minds since the time of Milton Berle. We would not know now, how to live in a village. How to walk down the street, as in the old Frank Capra movies ,and say good morning to everyone and how is your mother doing , Tom? I heard she had a touch of the flu. Those Main Street days are long gone. We rue the fact but they are dead and Forest, the idiot, comes along and educates us for the moment. He says that human relations are wonderful and the end is the same for all of us. We will be alone because the human condition requires it, but Forest says, I have had more fun than you because I lived out my philosophy, while all you did was crank buttons.
Forest knows the joy of life lies in the living of it. The trip is the all. He is flesh and blood. He lives life on the street, on the ballfield, in Viet Nam, on a boat in Louisiana. He is an ultimate realist. Life is not cnn to him. Not a movie of some big breasted human or a man with a gun. Life as life is always a pain. A pain in the neck because people around you have so many needs. To live only with machines is a cop-out. To live without tradition makes no sense. Tradition is our past, our history. Humans have always lived in villages, in family, in relation , one to the other. Why do these gosh-darned Americans think they can do otherwise? Because they are Americans, that's why. They are the consummate pioneers. That is the Americans' job one. As they say in the Ford car commercial. The American will lead us to the twenty-first century. Casualties may rival world war two, but that is the way it is. Machines as our salvation is an old idea. It was around in dirty, smoky England 150 years ago. It is the same idea. That we can ride the horse of the machine into a glorious future. Only we have to be used to being alone. With no people,only machines around. Today the fine machines we have as mates are user-friendly as they say. They don't ask for much back. They will also solve the aloneness problem. It is just a matter of time. Deathly ill people can get a Brompton cocktail. It has morphine or something that is very bad for you. Since you are about to die, it doesn't matter, so drink away. The machines are just such a soporific. Just enjoy as they say when you go to the Italian restaurant. Enjoy your meal. Forget the cholesterol and all that scary stuff. Enjoy. We get into our machines and don't come out. The solution to the aloneness problem, I suspect, remains for us to solve in the next century. Maybe by 2003 we will know, for sure, how to assure all people a safe delivery from that gnawing feeling we are alone and can't stand it. We may have to reinvent Divine saviours as we have in the past. Erect grand cathedrals in their honor. I don't think so. We will simply get lost in our machines. Take that Brompton cocktail to chase the blues.
Please understand me when I say I am not being facetious about the Americans being the pioneers. They settled the west, solved technology, created big cities, created the best art the world knows, lead in fashion. These are major achievements. I am serious. Our movies are the best. That is fact. We are a talented people. From all over the world, we have come here to create, to lead and to pioneer. I am serious when I say this. I mean it. That our function is to be out front... of the action that takes place on earth. We do that and pay a profound price. We lose our quietness, our cuddlyness, our sense of security in a world that is known. We give up virginity, innocence, security.
Why Gump? Why use this precious idiot to make a point on aloneness? Because he phrases the dilemma eloquently. He stands alone against the known world. Gets battered incessantly and wins in the end. He comes out whole and lone. He prevails. Survives. He is a Michael Jordan. He comes back and comes back, to charm and amaze us. It is amazing how much people can be, when they try. When they have faith in themselves. We love the lone hero, the lone heroine. See "Blue Sky, " with actress, Jessica Tandy. Alone. Magnificent. Wacky. Disruptive of the army routine she and her husband live. Or take Johnny Depp in "What's eating Gilbert Grape?" Always lone figures against the world. We lose ourselves in the machine to find who we are and why we are lonely. And the act of going in the machine for meaning, further isolates us from the world of real life . Funny isn't it? We put imaginary characters in our mind. Name them Forest or Grape and they seem more real than the anonymous person who totes up the vegetables and the cans at the anonymous supermarket. Or they seem more real to us than the person in front of us in the traffic jam or in the line at the bank. Life becomes waiting in line for Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds takeout . What ever happened to village living or to the family? Gump tells us.
Forest is to me special. The actor, Tom Hanks, has the ability to do the body motions that illustrate the dilemma of aloneness in America over the years the film depicts.
It is a history of America through body motions. Hanks is a competent contortionist in a body of an idiot. The truth is the idiot is the only one who speaks the truth. He or she is the only one that knows. The rest of the people are busy, too educated in things that don't matter, too looped into their machines to know what is going on. I guess I have stated my case. At this point, I will just begin repeating myself. I believe that movies are the one pipeline that shows us who we are and how we feel. That the directors in Hollywood are our conscience, our spirit, our hope. That they are more honest than we deserve them to be. That their genius will allow us safe passage to the next millenium on this earth. They phrase our issues, in this case, aloneness, so we may solve our existential dilemmas, so we may come to grips with our collective history. All this so we can live better. We used to have authors do this for us... light the way, but now the movie and the tv directors do this and they do a damn fine job.
Forest Gump is a joy of a movie. Its love washes over us and love triumphs. We need that so badly. We get it because that cynical machine we call Hollywood gives it to us. Not so cynical as all that , as I see it. The Hollywood machine believes in love. Love seems to sell. I am thankful to them for furnishing my dreams. The Disnification of my life is important to me as I go about shopping and doing my life. I don't know why, except that the village life has seemingly past and something must fill the void. If villages and tradition die, we fall back on machine -generated myths to survive. I do this but cling to the notion that someday I will find my village to live in again and a tradition to go with it. Until then I will use Forest and others on the screen like him to remind me of life as it should be.
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