Forrest Gump

The opening—and closing—shots of the film Forrest Gump, the image of a feather drifting on the breeze, are clearly intended to be read on a symbolic

level. But, like the film itself, the feather carries complicated and conflicted symbolic meanings, one meaning (attributed to the director by Tom Hanks in an interview in Us, August, 1994) being that the feather on the breeze is an image of human destiny: We may believe that we are choosing and making decisions, but in fact we are being nudged this way and that by forces beyond our control or comprehension. Working alongside this symbolic level of meaning there is also a clearly allegorical dimension to the film, especially visible in the figure of Gump. Tom Hanks, who, as an actor, has often been said to represent the Ordinary Joe, plays Forrest Gump, who in the film, even more than in the novel by Winston Groom on which it was based, represents late twentieth century Everyman, who lives through, witnesses, and participates in, almost all of the major events and issues that we have lived through in our own lives: the Vietnam War, Elvis, presidential assassinations, child abuse, jogging, the Black Panthers, bumper stickers, the Civil Rights Movement, the Happy Face, drug abuse, and even AIDS.

At first the film looks like yet another attempt to come to terms with these events and to work through their emotional impact. But instead of working through, the film actually rewrites our common history for us in important ways. One visual aspect of that rewriting is represented by the use of sophisticated computer-assisted technology to insert the image of Gump into documentary footage, so that he appears to be actually interacting with various presidents and other historical figures. This computer technology to alter images — whose use is becoming more and more common in film and advertising — can have many meanings depending upon its context. But here, aside from its (probably unintentional) effect of imaging the constructe