This is an enormous responsibility, because, since humanity has no essence, each of us is literally responsible for creating our humanity. Our common predicament means that we must give moral shape to our lives through our free choices. Thus our condition limits us in various ways, but it does not compel us to behave in particular ways. While these necessities are fixed and universal, Sartre stresses that there is nothing about this condition that determines the kind of life we must lead, either as individuals or as groups. We find ourselves thrown into the world, and we share the necessities of having to labour and die here. Nevertheless, he argued that we share a universality of condition. Sartre rejected the idea that we possess a generic nature, in the sense of an essence that can be found in each and every human being. In Existentialism and Humanism (1946) Jean-Paul Sartre distinguishes between human nature and the human condition (p.45 ff). Thus in many ways the film’s message is existentialist. While we can’t decide what happens to us, we each have important choices to make in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. But the film’s emphasis is not on fate itself, but on our responses to what fate deals us. ![]() These two symbols, the feather and the chocolates, illustrate the film’s true key theme: Fate – the uncontrollable events that make each of us what we are. Gump is sitting on a park bench in Savannah, Georgia, a box of chocolates perched on his lap. Forrest Gump deserves to be rediscovered.Īs the film opens we see a white feather fluttering on the wind as it gradually floats down, eventually landing next to Forrest Gump’s dirty-tennis-shoe-clad foot. ![]() Yet the film never suggests that making the cover of Fortune magazine (as Forrest does) is where our human aspirations ought to lie. By contrast, Forrest wore his country’s uniform, invested wisely, went to church, and made a mint. And in typically literalist fashion, right-wingers in America lauded the film as a thinly-veiled assault on the counterculture, arriving at an astonishingly simplistic interpretation of the film: Jenny, Forrest’s sweetheart, took drugs, hung out with anti-Vietnam types, and was rewarded with AIDS. The liberal elite delivered the resounding verdict that there was no serious moral to the story, or else there was a highly suspicious one. In 1994, when Robert Zemekis’ cinematic sensation Forrest Gump topped the box office and waltzed away with six Oscar nominations, the critics were firmly in two camps: either the film was unworthy escapism, or it was an ultraconservative conspiracy to communicate an outdated message of traditional values such as patriotism, capitalism and the family. “Hell, the studio bought the sequel and paid me a ton of dough even before it came out, and they then owned it, as they still do, and can make it a movie anytime they damn well please.”įor more film and TV coverage, please visit the Film & TV section.SUBSCRIBE NOW Films Forrest Gump Terri Murray reviews a classic satire. If Robert Zemeckis and Paramount Pictures ever decide to move forward with a Forrest Gump sequel, Winston Groom has given his (reluctant) blessing: Now time has obviously passed, but maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are.” ![]() And we sat down, Tom and Bob and I, looked at each other and said, we don’t think this is relevant anymore. But I turned in the script the night before 9/11. “I to start the movie literally two minutes after the end of the last one, with him on the bus bench waiting for his son to get home from school. Roth explained to /Film how said conversation went down: However, following the events that transpired the following morning, the creative team behind the film had a change of heart. ![]() He completed and submitted the script on Sept. These include events like the launch of New Coke, the Black Monday stock market crash and the Gulf War.Įric Roth, who wrote the original film, was tasked with writing the sequel adaptation. It is structured similarly to the original, with Forrest inserted into many historical United States events of the 1980s and 90s. Following the film’s success, Groom released a sequel to his book titled Gump & Co. Forrest Gump was based on a 1984 novel of the same name by Winston Groom.
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