Forrest Gump's America
And why he couldn't bring himself to say 'a bunch of shit'
For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting about some of the biggest events, themes, and developments that have spurred polarization in the United States. These will include race relations, class conflict, religiosity, and gender disputes.
These will be broader focused than the content which will follow, and in future I’ll look in more detail at some of the events/developments mentioned.
Today’s post is all about the Vietnam War (1964-1973), a conflict which (not coincidentally) took place when American society began its long polarization journey that has led us to 2024.
Forrest Gump remains unashamedly one of my favourite films. It’s moved around my top three as the years have waxed and waned, but it’s held steady as others have fallen overboard (sorry Cool Runnings).
I’ll watch it every year or two, and I think I’m on a roughly 20% success rate at not crying when Jenny dies - something which perplexes my wife who’s almost never seen me shed tears at similarly sad developments in real life.
I first watched it when I was kid and knew nothing about American history. And then the next few times, I felt increasingly smug as I knowingly nodded along as a deep sage who now understood relevant people and events in the film (congratulations 20-year old Mark, for now knowing who Elvis is!).
Now, I simply enjoy it as a piece of Tom Hanks-inspired Hollywood magic, with an evocative soundtrack and an even better score.
Released in 1994, Forrest Gump is fundamentally a nostalgia trip through American history for baby boomers (b.1946-1964).
The rose-tinted shades are everywhere as, through Forrest’s innocent eyes, we meet MLK, JFK, Nixon, and Chairman Mao, to name a few. We see the University of Alabama racially integrated, the moon landing, and the beautiful American landscape from coast-to-coast.
At no point does the film indicate a clear opinion on any of these events.
Indeed, it goes out its way not to offend anyone. Which is why I find it unconvincing when liberals claim the film is secretly conservative.
Today, I want to use the film to help us better understand American polarization and the legacy of the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Vietnam War ripped American society apart.
58,000 Americans died. The US lost its first ever war.
It was a national trauma that left a lasting scar in the American body politic and spurred a mass cultural output of music, films, and literature (among others) as Americans sought to come to terms with what had happened.
America’s Vietnam War, which the US escalated in 1965 and withdrew from in 1973, was part of a longer conflict that enveloped Vietnam in thirty years of fighting at the cost of millions of Southeast Asian lives (the reasons for which are beyond the scope of this post).
The Americans were in Vietnam as part of the Cold War (c.1947-1991). The American war aim was to establish a non-communist, US-aligned government in South Vietnam and prevent the communist North Vietnamese government from uniting the country under Red rule, and aligning with the Soviet Union and China (think North/South Korea).
It did not go well.
Bogged down in guerrilla warfare in the Vietnamese jungle, US leaders slowly came to believe that they had engaged themselves in an unwinnable war (although they were careful not to tell the American people their true feelings).
The war also coincided with the decade in which television became the number one source of news for Americans.
In 1968, at the war’s height, Americans watched in horror as the enemy launched an audacious attack on American strongholds in Saigon. The coverage included street-by-street combat and jarring footage of a South Vietnamese officer (and thus American ally) executing an enemy espionage agent at point blank range.
Meanwhile, footage of intense bombing raids on a small, poor country like Vietnam - which exceeded the tonnage dropped on Japan during World War II - made the United States look like an evil Goliath to a watching world.
The War At Home
Back home, millions of Americans came to view the war as immoral, spurring the establishment of widespread anti-war movement.
A pro-war backlash, driven by disgust at those protesting the war, soon followed.
Both sides believed that they were the patriotic Americans, while the other side were betraying American values.
In 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting the recent expansion of the war into Cambodia. Four were killed, one was paralysed.
Rather than an outpouring of national sympathy, polling revealed that a majority felt the shootings had been justified.
Five days later, the Hard Hat Riots took place in New York City, in which construction workers, provoked by the City Hall flag being flown at half-mast in tribute to the Kent State students, used their tools to attack anti-war protestors.
When the war finally ended (and the US impotently watched on as Vietnam was united under communist rule in 1975), the wounds that had been opened by Vietnam were never sufficiently sutured.
The Vietnam War’s main legacies were a loss of trust in the American government (which had lied frequently about the war) and a lasting division over whether the war should ever have been fought, and whether anti-war protestors and a not-sufficiently-patriotic media were to blame for US defeat.
The Sound of Silence
The Vietnam War cannot explain all of US polarization but it was present at the birth of many trends that have only worsened, including racial division and class conflict.
And to get back to Gump, nowhere is the film’s desire not to offend anyone more blatant than in its Vietnam storyline.
The most telling scene in the whole movie is when Forrest finds himself accidentally included in an anti-war protest and is led up to the microphone to speak to thousands lining the Lincoln Memorial Pool.
In the scene, the famous anti-war protestor Abbie Hoffman asks Forrest, recently returned from Vietnam having lost his best friend Bubba in the conflict, to tell the crowd what he thinks about ‘the war in Viet-fucking-NAM!’
As Forrest begins his reply, a dastardly military officer sabotages the microphone cables and we only get to hear Forrest speak again as he says ‘and that’s all I have to say about [the war in Vietnam]’.
It’s a comedic moment, but it’s also a massive cop out and revealing of the fears that the writers had of alienating one half of their potential viewing audience.
In the book that the movie was based on, Forrest Gump has a clear view on Vietnam: calling it ‘a bunch of shit’ on numerous occasions.
By the mid-1990s, however, the Vietnam War - despite being over 20 years in the rear view mirror - remained polarizing, and instead the sound of silence was chosen.
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