Got Gump?

I don't think I've written about Forrest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis, yet so here it goes.

I'm going to focus on an aspect to it that I noticed it last time I watched it. This movie is highly adaptive to its audience. By this I mean that the same person, depending on their mood can get different meanings out of it every time they watch it.

Last night I watched it in a slightly darker mood than I normally watch it. And scenes meanings changed for me. For example in the scene where he says his last words to Bubba. Forrest Gump narrates "If I'd have known this was going to be the last time me and Bubba was gonna talk, I'd of thought of something better to say." Bubba asks Forrest why did that happen. And Forrest replies "you got shot." And then Bubba dies in Forrest's arms. In the past I had laughed because it was a funny line since he states the obvious, like always. But last night it had weight behind it, it wasn't funny. It was actually a very sad scene. He tried to save his best friends life, willing to lose his own, and he failed. 

There are many other aspects that were different too. Story changing too. Normally when watching this, pardon the french, but Jenny is a bitch and Forrest is the helpless victim to her acidic lifestyle. Last night though I was sympathetic towards Jenny and Forrest was more of her savior. It was more of Jenny's story and Forrest was just a tool used to explain it. I was drawn a lot more to her and her problems. Almost all of the references to birds, being free, and running came through.

It wasn't so much the story of Gump anymore, not the American Dream, but probably the human dream. The contrast between Forrest and jenny really showed this. Jenny, trapped by her past, drug addiction, not satisfied with her life and always trying to escape it. Forrest while "constrained" by his intelligence, "broke out" of it as a kid in the scene where he breaks his leg braces. He never lets anything hold him back and just lives life freely. He went with the flow, without too much thought as to what the consequences could be. He is completely free. Which is where Jenny wants to be, she even says she wishes she was like a bird. And birds typically and in this case as well are symbols of freedom. By the end she gets there right before her death.

There were many other examples of these new meanings depending on the mood. But I'll let you figure out the meanings for yourself. 

The Critical Mass

The Voice of Reason

Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha and Mahmudiyah, and on and on.

It was Goya, who living in the convulsive time of the Spanish Independence War, tried to give us a feeling for the monsters created by what he called the Sleep of Reason. His images, terrible as they are, pale in comparison to our daily diet of the atrocities committed against humanity, not by savage tribes, but by well fed and trained soldiers and mercenaries that follow the orders of those whose reason is not asleep but simply denied.

Last night, out of the darkness of our time, millions of hearts and minds were lit up by the hope that perhaps this once we can overcome the tide of fear that war, imposed on our brothers and sisters across the world by the weapon merchants and their servants, voted into power by people like you and me, who decide that our own comfort and way of life is more important than the life of others, that become obese while others starve because of our refusal to share the "wealth" that we assume belongs to us, the conquistadores.

"I am only following orders..."

To awaken from the nightmare where we have been trapped for so long requires an effort that seems beyond our strength, or so we are constantly told, and now that we are half awake we must, like the previous writer says, fight, but we must choose our fight guided by our reason and recognizing that fighting some times requires sacrificing that which in our dream state seemed like worthy of living the lie.