I was gonna do a writeup but this author sums up my thoughts pretty well. I always hated how the movie portrayed Jenny. It’s like the movie tries to punish her for daring to move against the broader (white, patriarchal, militaristic, conservative) culture. Notice how she only receives redemption when she functionally gives up her counter-cultural ways and accepts her role as a mom. And even then she still gets “punished” for her “sins” by dying of AIDS like it’s some Grimm fairy tale. Feels a bit like incel fan-fiction, in hindsight.
And of course the movie panders to white reactionary notions of the Black Panthers. They were just angry black men who were reverse racists. Gross.
Forrest Gump is incredibly reactionary and it’s terrible. It’s the conservative boomers’ attempt to tell a morality tale in which they are the ultimate victors over their contemporaries who dared for something different.
For the longest time when I was a teen I had a more nihilistic take on this movie: life fucking sucks and you could work hard all day in your life only for some lucky chump to take it all.
Jenny spend her life trying to pursue what she wanted while Forrest just bumbles through his life and got everything going his way. Lieutenant Dan wanted to become a big American warrior hero, something cruelly denied from him while Forrest became one without any intention to do so. Bubba died pointlessly. Then there’s the running sequence where Forrest who were just running for no reason at all came across numerous people struggle with their dreams and solves it for them unknowingly as he passes by.
But yeah, as a leftist now the reactionary subtexts are much more apparent and my reading was the result of my at the time ignorance of American culture at the time, which says a lot that I perceived what was supposed to be a conservative triumph story into a story about how life is cruel and arbitrary.