The feather that falls from the bench at the Savannah station completes the gentlest subversion of twentieth-century American history. When Forrest Gump picks up the feather with chocolate-stained fingers, the narrator with an IQ of 75 has become a deconstructor of history. Forrest Gump is not a simple inspirational fable, but a sugar-coated postmodernist manifesto that rewrites the spiritual code of modern American history between the red bus and the White House dome.
The Runner’s Folds in Time and Space
The moment the metal brace on Forrest Gump’s leg crumbles is not only the release of physical bondage, but also the fracture of linear time. The pair of running shoes that crossed the Alabama interstate highway, in three years, two months, fourteen days and sixteen hours of running, will be the United States of America geography written as a cycle of the Möbius ring. When asked by a reporter about the significance of running, the answer “I just want to run” completely dissolves the historical narrative of purpose – just as he did not need medals to save lives in the jungles of the Vietnam War, the beard he left behind on his transcontinental trek becomes a more authentic footnote of the times.
Director Zemeckis exposes the absurdity of history writing when he digitally embeds Forrest Gump in historical images. A scene in which Forrest Gump teaches Elvis Presley to twerk suggests that the origins of pop culture came from the improvisation of the mentally challenged, and a composite image of a handshake with JFK allows the president’s authority to crumble in fictionalization. This collage of time and space reaches its peak in the scene of the anti-war rally in Washington: when Forrest Gump’s microphone is unplugged, the rebel cries of the sixties are suddenly silenced, and only the fluttering flag reveals the cracks of the ideology in the silence.
The Entropy of History in a Chocolate Box
The famous metaphor of “life is like chocolate” is in fact a cultural translation of the second law of thermodynamics. When Forrest Gump’s mother utters this aphorism, the chocolate box in her hand is undergoing a process of entropy increase – each uncertain sandwich of candy beans is a mockery of rationalism. The existential struggle of Lieutenant Dan, who leaves his fate to God’s roll of the dice and then curses the gods in the storm, reaches its dramatic climax on the mast of the shrimp boat Jenny: struck by lightning, a mechanical séance and the wrath of a mortal combine to compose a variation on the fate of the New World.
Bubba’s encyclopedic ramblings about shrimp are lost in the bloodstained waters of the Vietnamese river. The black soldier obsessed with shrimp cuisine ends up inscribed on a historical monument as an entrepreneur – a model shrimp boat next to the tombstone forming a brutal intertext with a Burger King dinner plate. The plot of Forrest Gump breaking the ice of the Cold War with ping-pong diplomacy reduces geopolitics to the mechanical movement of paddle impact, and Red China reveals its ideological resilience in the spinning celluloid blob.
The Dual Play of Deconstruction and Reconstruction
Jenny’s constant trajectory of escape and return outlines the Beat Generation’s spiritual parabola. Her strumming of “Answers Floating in the Wind” on the folk guitar is a sharp counterpoint to the protest songs in the nude clubs. When she tore up the New York Times under the Empire State Building, yellowed newsprint scraps floated down at the foot of the Washington Monument along with Vietnam medals, constituting the most bitter tribute to the American dream. This woman, who is always searching for herself, finally anchors her life in the cotton field where she ran in her childhood, completing the ultimate irony of liberalism.
Forrest Gump’s ping-pong paddle has the symbolism of the Holy Grail in the movie. This Chinese-produced sporting instrument is both a cultural Trojan horse of the Cold War and a mysterious instrument for deconstructing the body politic. As he mechanically repeats his strokes on a nationwide tour, what the audience sees is not a sports competition but a Zen-like performance art – the ping-pong balls going back and forth between the two sides of the webbing is a metaphor for the dilemma of dialogue between Eastern and Western civilizations.
The feather at the end of the film floats again, this time over the canopy of Savannah’s oak trees and into the digitized sky. This continuous loop of imagery reminds us that the so-called historical truth is nothing more than a web of meaning carefully woven by the narrator. The scene of Forrest Gump sitting on a bench waiting for the school bus forms a perfect closed loop with the opening credits, exposing the falsehood of a linear view of progressive history. When Forrest Gump steps onto the school bus, we finally understand the director’s black humor – the wheel of history is always repeating itself, and the one who holds the steering wheel is always an “imbecile”. In this post-modern epic, the really smart ones are those “fools” who see through the contingency of history.