Forrest Gump: Tom Hanks

Narrating the curiously interesting story of an inordinately congenial Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks), is Robert Zemeckis’s masterpiece of the same name that promises “The world will never be the same once you’ve seen it through the eyes of Forrest Gump”. Literally!

The feature is home to several classic episodes, but none embodies the true ‘accidentally-dragged-into-the-situation’ spirit of Gump like this does. Namesake of the Grand Wizard of Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest,Gump thus gets naturally handcuffed to the American past as we find him digitally morphed into the Confederate cavalry genius’s face in an excerpt from D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in the beginning on the film, riding a horse in the Klan regalia. But the high point of the scene remains his inability to comprehend its potential consequences. Peculiarly, the ‘mildly retarded’ Gump’s only knowledge on the connection was, “He started up a club and liked to dress up in white sheets and act like a bunch of ghosts or spooks or something”. As the film progresses, the history of racial conflict, and more, that Gump evokes in this scene continues with his growing involvement in the most critical events in American history, from the 1950s till early 1980s, including Vietnam war, anti-Vietnam war protest movements, even the computer revolution.

Explaining his curious christening that the scene invokes, Gump’s mother (Sally Field) claims that he was named after the Grand Wizard to remind him that “sometimes we all do things that don’t make no sense”. It might not have any immediate effect in context to Forrest’s then-life, but sparks much debate and draws varied explanations. Some suggested that she was perhaps referring to the American legends of Forrest’s time, with whom he later oddly got involved. Ideologically contradicting his namesake, Gump serves the exemplary function of “redeeming the past, rescuing the real, and even rescuing that which was never real” in an idiosyncratic way, typical to Gump.