Picking Nits
How long Forrest waited at a bus stop six blocks from his destination; what he did from 1970 to 1974 beyond ping pong; the running scene; why Jenny never found a decent man; why Jenny leaves the morning after sleeping with Forrest
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:48:13Read transcript
- How long was Forrest at that bus stop? It is plausible he sat there nine hours missing every bus or waiting for one that did not exist, and he cannot read a map because his destination was six blocks away; he had a 70 IQ, so it is not offensive to call him a dummy.
- What did Forrest do from 1970 to 1974? After the rally and Jenny leaving there is ping pong for the service and travel, then Watergate and Nixon's resignation in late 1974, so the hosts conclude he played ping pong for the United States for years; one would have added another job, but the film is already two hours twenty-five minutes. Forrest throws away the seventies on five years of ping pong and three and a half years of running.
- Asked to defend the running scene, one host reads it as a moment when you do not know what to do after a breakup and need to physically vent, a micro-metaphor inside the film's bigger metaphor; the jokey parts, the Have a Nice Day shirt and the 'shit happens' bumper sticker, feel like an SNL sketch. The other still calls it terrible with ridiculously on-the-nose music.
- Why did Jenny never find the right guy at all those protests, say a Georgetown law student who became enamored with her? The armchair-psychologist answer is that her past means she does not know how to make good choices and what she values in a man is not good for her.
- The biggest nit in the movie: why Jenny leaves the next morning after finally sleeping with Forrest, which is never discussed. It was listed under unanswerable questions but moved here; in a silly, absurd movie it was the one part that did not make sense.
- Possibilities offered: the night was a disappointment, as she might have expected from their college encounter; or it was a great night and her tendency when happy is to sabotage it; or it is simply poorly written, which is probably the real reason. Forrest's sex life is weird in the film, with the New Year's Eve prostitute and little else, something a sequel might have addressed.
- Leaving the Medal of Honor on the table right after 'I'm not a smart man but I know what love is' is the meanest thing you could do to the guy, compared to floating a terrified dog, Olivia, the least favorite of three, out into the middle of a pool on a raft, which the other calls the craziest metaphor ever for this movie. It was calculated: she packed, left the medal on the nightstand and called a cab that would take forty minutes in the middle of nowhere in Alabama.
- Two more theories: she knows Forrest is a dumb loser and tough hang she cannot be around any more, having known him all her life, though Robin Wright is too sympathetic for that to read; or she knows she is pregnant and cannot have a family with him, though then you would leave a month later. There was no protection, probably not Jenny's first time, and Forrest would not have been in control; an extra scene of her being sick two months later before leaving would have made more sense.