Word: forrestic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...does media parodies too, and good ones. Nick Bakay has nailed the sensitive-macho posturing of NYPD Blue's David Caruso, and the show has lampooned everything from Forrest Gump to a dippy model turned TV host named Bagitta. But She TV's horizons are broader. That became clear its first week, in an inspired sketch called "What Do Women Want?" Ostensibly a parody of a game show, it turned into a sly satire of the gulf between the sexes; a lone male contestant is trapped in a world where the rules are fuzzy and he's the only...
...Stevens (Associate Picture Editor); Kevin J. McVea (Operations); Renee Mancini (Syndication); Sarah Buffum, Gary Roberts, Cristina T. Scalet, Nancy Smith-Alam, Marie Tobias, Mary Worrell-Bousquette (Assistant Editors) Bureaus: Martha Bardach, Sahm Doherty, Leny Heinen, Stanley Kayne, Glenn Mack, Barbara Nagelsmith, Anni Rubinger, Mary Thompson, Simonetta Toraldo Photographers: Forrest Anderson, Terry Ashe, P.F. Bentley, William Campbell, Greg Davis, Dirck Halstead, Barry Iverson, Kenneth Jarecke, Cynthia Johnson, Shelly Katz, Steve Liss, Peter Magubane, Christopher Morris, Robin Moyer, Carl Mydans, James Nachtwey, Robert Nickelsberg, Chris Niedenthal, David Rubinger, Anthony Suau, Ted Thai, Diana Walker...
Well, fine for Gump. In fact, although Forrest is a good man, he is not a good man to know. The lieutenant (whose injury remains a focus of fascination, if only because Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas' special-effects house, did such a great job "erasing" his legs in subsequent scenes) actually gets off easy. Gump walks between the bombs: everyone else, whether famous (John Lennon, George Wallace) or intimate (Jenny), gets hit. Assassination, cancer, AIDS: surely Forrest would not have wanted it scripted that way. But he's not the screenwriter. As it is, after each death Tom Hanks...
...Forrest is hardly the first idiot hero to ride through a fiction, bodies dropping all around him. The Czechs celebrate the apparently obtuse Good Soldier Schweik, whereas in terms of plot Voltaire's Candide might have been a Gump pilot. Yet Schweik is not so much a defense of dumb optimism as an argument against militarism and a celebration of sly peasant smarts. And Candide may be literature's most ferocious send-up of cheeriness in the face of the world's cruelties. By its end, its battered hero has abandoned his opening premise that everything happens for the best...
Much as it cheered Ronald Reagan, who, more than Schweik or Candide, is the real proto-Gump. Reagan too was relentlessly upbeat. Reagan too was extraordinarily lucky. And his luck, like Gump's, was often built on the backs of people who suffered off-screen. Forrest had bankrupt shrimpers, martyred Vietnam buddies, and his wife, whose death was remarkably demure, considering her ailment. Reagan scored points off America's poor; somehow managed to cloak himself in heroism while apologizing for a needless screw-up that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut; and avoided tarnishing his reputation for optimism by spending...