TL DR That Forrest loves Jenny makes Jenny look bad, because Forrest is unrealistically good and Jenny is realistically broken. It's kinda beautiful and sad: he could never loose his innocence but Jenny, because she wasn't a retard, could. Philosophically speaking: his mental state enables him to see her for "herself" while he is incapable of really seeing her for the person she is. She wrongs him with everything she does but it's his feelings that put her into that spot. What makes her look bad is that (movie) Forrest has no shred of narcissim in him.įor me the relationship between Jenny and Forrest was never a love story in the conventional sense. But a bit of narcissism doesn't make people bad - we all do it. She does realise the moral responsibility is on her and considering she's been abused and raised in Georgia in the 40s and 50s I'd say it would have been really unrealistic to expect she makes the right call. She shows both personality traits: the egocentric behaviour that hurts Forrest and being conflicted about the lack of equality in their relationship. An important realisation might be that the movie accepts this conflict instead of resolving it. Jenny and Forrest would have always been a morally ambiguous relationship unless Jenny would have been a stupidly good person. We don't generally accept sexual relationships between parties where one is the clearly more mentally capable one, which is why we approve of seventeen year olds having sex but not seventeen year olds fucking sixty year olds. It doesn't help that on a different moral level we should never approve of any kind of sexual relationship with a partner who's ability to consent is questionable. That simply stands out negative next to Forrest who couldn't even be a better person if he had the mental capabilities of a normal adult. Shes about as good or bad as any of us with the additional twist of being a little bit broken. She has a trauma that carries into her adulthood, she has a personality with flaws and in result she makes lots bad and morally questionable life choices. I think the inheritly wrong with both "explanations" is that they are trying to pin a lable on Jenny just because Forrest, by all means, can be labled as a good person. And that isn't the same thing as being an idiot.Īnd lastly, Jenny can be both a tragic character and a bad person. He's mentally retarded, disabled, however you want to call it. Forrest is a lot of things: he sees the good in people, he values human life, he learns technical skills very quickly, he perseveres, he takes responsibility but he is not an idiot. The one time she needs him, she locks him down with marriage.Īnd here's something that pisses me off. Every time he has reached out to her, she ran off. We know this because she doesn't reach out to him until she needs something from him. Nothing changes from the beginning to the end: she is still taking advantage of his unconditional love for her towards the end of the film. Jenny is and always will be a generally mediocre person, and I hate how the movie held those two up as a couple that was meant to be. The Gump story is fundamentally flawed because it rests upon the belief that people have soulmates, which is nonsense. That kid is, I dunno, 4-6 years old and she never told Forrest until now. It isn't until she is dying that she reaches out to Forrest, with all his wealth, to take care of her and her son while she dies. Instead, Jenny treats Forrest the same way any man or woman treats someone who is always willing, always available: as a side bitch, a last resort. I highly doubt all these random people Jenny hitched her wagon to knew about her past, they probably didn't know anything about her history. People who are abused seek out abusive relationships because that is what they know, that is what they expect. Her father treated her like shit, and there was no way in hell others didn't do the same when they found out she was molested. But there is plenty of evidence that she took advantage of him when it suited her. There isn't any evidence that Jenny felt guilty from taking advantage of Forrest. If Jenny was motivated, as he says, by wanting to be with anyone so long as they aren't beating on her, then she would have been in love with Forrest from the start.
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