He'll Help Anyone

Gump is an all-directional helper, a lone Red Cross. It is simply in his nature, to be open, helpful, nice and trusting. You sometimes get the feeling people used to be like Forrest . That later came the Bosnias, Ruandas, Northern Irelands, Oklahoma Bombing. He hasn't any hate in him.

He learned not to hate from his mother. In childhood he was stigmatized and tortured by nasty people. Yet he did not become a nasty person. His childhood troubles were just there...to be overcome. He has this general niceness to him.

Many of the ones around us are just nice. Nice is natural. That is the way Forrest is. He does not calculate to make more money or to get sex or to be more powerful than another. It seems to me he is like people have always been, trying to get along , making the world a pleasant place.

Forrest is hero to a modern parable that has a sort of profundity. We can better understand modern life after seeing the movie. It is not Aesop and a story about a wolf or a turtle. This is a story about a human, more or less. Sometimes the hero is so weird he seems not believeable as a human, but that is just a twist in the movie. We are left to wonder whether a Gump could ever happen or have happened. Well, sort of, and then we are off on another tangent, where he goes to war or to China to play ping pong. For me, the point is , he tugs at certain human posssibilities we are always alluding to, in modern life. The key one is the need to do good in the face of enormous cynicism and occasional, random, mindless, cruelty. It is a matter of how we can survive as a society, unless we let some of the good out in order to counteract all the bad stuff that seethes around us. We will either have a benign universe or one that is dark and scary and evil. Forrest comes out square for a loving and kind universe that we can raise our kids and grandchildren in. This makes him special in a time when the dark seems in the ascendancy. When the papers are full of drugs, bombs, corruption and killings.

The society we live in is constantly battling the evil it puts onto the big screen at the mall or the little one,the tv screen, in our homes. The latest is Batman. In the new movie, where we will see him and his kin fighting some more evil. Our politics is full of what is bad for us and must be counteracted . Too much government, too zealous an environmental movement, too far right a Christian coalition, to many leftists on the tv and in the paper. And so on. The major parties use disparaging comments and negative polls to discredit others who are on a different side of the fence. The battles are severe. Casualties occur. The abortion crisis, the homosexuals in the military issue, the fight over welfare and its reform. The future of affirmative action. The huge set of problems the savings and loans brought us. Home-grown militias. The issue of prayer in schools. Condoms to be distributed to the young teens.

One looks at all the troubles and fighting done in the nation and begins to think there is no end to it . That it will tear us to pieces and then a piece of fluff comes on the screen and the nation wills it a number of Academy Awards. The people look at this goofy character and think some pretty important ideas. The old ones that churches and synagogues thrive on. Universal love, human goodness, everyday niceness. The movie works when it shouldn't. The character of Forrest is shallow. He is cast adrift in our society, loaded as it is with major conflicts and trouble. Yet he survives and we benefit. Folks love the movie. The way they love Mickey the mouse or Big Bird.

There is the danger that we have left the real world to float in an unreal fairyland, but what else is there? What have we always done, but go to myth to make daily life more tolerable? The movie, "Gump," is a make-believe; there is no doubt of that, but it grabs us with its sincerity and kindness.

The prime image is the passing of sweets. The idea is that food and cheerful food at that, can somehow overcome distances. So the hero passes out chocolates at the bus station and talks to perfect strangers about his strange American life. They don't say much. I wonder if they really believe him, but we do, those of us watching the proceedings. We sort of have to, if we are to have any hope of surviving these hard modern times we are living through. Schools no longer teach much. Doctors don't really care. Our clergy is confused and lacks courage. The cities are dangerous. Old people are neglected by their very own kinfolk. Of this set of troubles I am sure. Channel 7 and the Globe convinced me long ago. Yet I look on the Gump character and have to believe there must be some way out of this morass we live in, on a daily basis. The character offers hope, and I, for one grab onto it. It seems plausible to me that we try to get along with one another. That is the idea that Forrest manifests in his every action.

The poor soldier gets his legs blown off and he goes way down, but Forrest is patient with him. He crashes, our soldier does, on the old tonic of choice, alcohol. Forrest raises him to a level where he has employment, even the status of entrepreneur. That is miraculous. Forrest makes Bubba's family rich; these poor people living out the tragedy of Bubba's death in Viet Nam and, also, living through their own poverty down in Louisiana. Forrest saves their bacon. He rescues the ill-fated Jenny, his love, after she goes through the hippy movement and comes out of it weakened and sick. He will help anyone. He is a dream-maker. Tell him your dream and he will fill in the blanks. Want to win a national championship , Alabama? Get Forrest to run for you and it is a done-deed! Want to beat everyone at ping pong in the whole world? Forrest. He is a primal religious -type healer and miracle maker. The character sits up on this massive screen in the movie theatre and wins over a whole cynical and rather downhearted people, "the American people," as they say. Most interesting. Our own male Mother Teresa. A person who is out of fiction whom we need to believe, whom we respect.

Forrest is the most compassionate person I have ever met. What is compassion? It is simply the idea that all life is important and humans are charged with acting on that fact. Now what is it I am saying? The rock has life. The tree and the bird certainly do. Things made by humans have life. Containers, cars and clothes. The way the theory goes is, if all things have life, they deserve respect. The way you pick up a shirt, the way you handle food. The way you maintain your car, your body. The way you respond to your mate, your home, your children. The way you pick up a stray piece of paper on the ground and deposit it in a container for waste. The way you talk to everyone, old and young,, of your group or another. I think you get the picture I am drawing. Forrest is simply playing out one very old religion , if you will . Maybe it is at the base of all religion, I don't really know. The religion is, to treat all life as sacred and then trust in .... I am tempted to say god, but prefer to say, the spirit. Because for some humans who have been here on earth, god has taken non-human type form. I mean she or he does not look like a person but appears as a stone object, or as a beaver. or as a tree, or as a cow. So as to be inclusive and meaning no harm to anthropocentric, human centered god figures and religions, I say the word, spirit to refer to what drives poor Forrest to do his life in such a nice way. For Forrest is first nice and then good. The two seem to go together. If you are nice, then you do good and the spirit world that moves inside you, is satisfied.

The movie is profoundly religious to me. I think a lot of things, in America's media, point to the supernatural. Great art, and Gump is that, always relates to our relationship with the spirit and the spirit-world. Gump is about death. People are always getting shot. National figures like Lennon and King and Kennedy and Wallace. It seems our culture is about killing with guns. We kill innocent humans who walk on Main Street as well as innocents who occupy national stages. Someone comes along and determines they are not innocent and need to be rendered dead. Against all this killing is Gump with his primal message that to love is but human and let's cut out the other stuff. Let us begin to heal our families, nations, and communities, world wide. Solve our South Africas, and our Northern Irelands, as we are in the process of doing. This movie, "Forrest Gump," is leagues better than the potboilers which have to do with the murder of many, for fun and pleasure. Such a movie as "True Lies," and others of that ilk which glorify violence, as a kind of aerobic exercise, which see the female form as something to get momentary pleasure from, in one aggressive semihostile act. The world becomes jab and parry, shoot and kill, penetrate and retreat. No-one but Gump sticks around to pass out chocolates. Our heroes and heroines are busy shooting and careening about in cars that crash into one another or blow up. Forrest runs to people, not away. He heals when the others do damage. He is our saint figure in a fool's dress.

What is miraculous is he is believable, to, us at least. Someone from another planet seeing him on the screen would surely say, come on, this is ridiculous! But we are believers. Just ask people what they like about him and they say he is just nice. That says something about what we can be. Nice people who inhabit nice villages in nice countries. I don't mean idiot-nice, but down-deep nice, just like so many Americans I have known over the vast experience in my life. I mean the kinds of people who if you left a hundred dollars on the table , it would never not be there the next day. The kinds of people who do daily help without receiving money. Who look for the old, the sick, the ones in jail among them. Who don't tell a lot of lies. Who aren't always out for just money. Who look after nature, who want to keep it whole. Who still cook meals from scratch. Who try to raise children the right way , with compassion and discipline both. Who are funny and make us all laugh. Who create drama and action on the basketball court and the theatre. Who try to govern us with care and wisdom. It seems to me the nation we live in is full of people who want the right thing for us all. Bad ones here of course, but a lot of good ones who worry over our future, our freedoms, our rights, our responsibilities.

Gump wishes to satisfies everybody's dreams. He is a miracle-machine who recognizes how fragile the human is. When you shatter human dreams, you might just as well say the person is dead. So many go about with their dreams shattered. Gump recognizes that there is death in life and goes about resurrecting dreams. That is where to start at the point of recreating the delicate fantasies that keep us going. Most humans just want to live well. They want health, family and community. Some sense they matter and will go to heaven when they die.

Look at our movies for answers. Just as we look at the greek tragedies for answers. The needs are always the same and our movies today deal with these issues. Such as how to be free as a person amid all the conformity society demands. How to take care of one's family when the members of the family are destroying one, the other. How to deal with the scourges of drugs, alcohol, stress, aids, violence both verbal and physical. One looks at poverty of the material sort. The harm it carries with it to the poor. The lousy training of the young in the family and in the school and what it means to the rest of us when the kids grow to be monsters at worst, or just plain selfish and unpleasant people, at best.

The movie gets at all this at some level in our psyches. Forrest's niceness is suspect. He must want something. He is trying to convert us all to his religious belief so we will give money to his church. He passes out a candy because he is gonna hit you up for a two dollar loan. Well, no, he is just nice because to be nice is to be a Gump and to be a Gump means there is still some hope in the world. Still some goodness and a pleasant surrounding in which to have kids to populate the world. I mean he is not selling Wheaties or gatorade. He is not pushing a political or racial or ethnic angle. He is of no known religious faith.

He is a hollywood. A fantasy, but for a change, not a Stallone or a Swartenegger or a gangster, or a Wall Street thug. Not an evil political, not a grasping marital partner, not an immoral priest, not a bad cop, not a polluting businessman. Not a this or a that. Just a nice person who's agenda is niceness and nothing more. Nice people will inherit the world , he says, and a whole nation nods, Ya, and then goes about the daily life of fighting and arguing. We look at Gump on the screen and go back to the bickering on Crossfire, the verbal battleground on the tv. To the soaps and the guns and the naked bodies perspiring as they search for bodily nirvana. A deliverance that we can understand as we sit, bored on the couch, waiting for the tv to titilate us out of our torpor.

But Gump sticks somewhere, like a wad of gum under the seat. He occupies and peoples a place in the collective psyche where good things reign forever. So let us praise Gump and Tom Hanks and the people who did the movie for just this dream- thing. Giving us a little hope and a positive vibration. A reminder that there are all sorts of good people out there who help anyone if they can, and do it, on a daily basis, to boot. Bravo.