Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the long, hot summers of ghetto riots are missing. The plight of the urban underclass, for whom Martin and Malcolm called for racial justice and economic redress decades ago, is as blissfully invisible in this movie as it is for most mainstream politicians today whose repressive corrective is more police, more prisons and welfare restrictions. Forrest Gump is a superficial and self-indulgent cultural fantasy. Through the Academy Awards, Hollywood honors itself as the arbiter of collective memory. Themes of grief and uplift, sin and absolution, healing and harmony provide a vicarious catharsis from the serious problems of the day.
History merely happens, just as the floating feather fatefully begins and ends the film.
Personal preoccupation, not social engagement, is its norm, part of a national malaise that the movie encourages. This modern fable with its myth of an earlier golden age mirrors the conservative political appeal of Ronald Reagan during the 1980s and the continued attraction for his successors during the 1990s. Burdened with personal debt, frustrated with a decline in real earnings, frightened of job layoffs, fearful of crime in the streets, alarmed at black rage, confused about cultural change, cynical about politics, and confounded about the Vietnam War, many white voters have turned rightward. In their evocation of national innocence and individual salvation, Forrest Gump and Ronald Reagan share a common mentality, one of escape and delusion.