Probably Unanswerable Questions
Why didn't Forrest go pro? Why didn't Forrest catch Jenny's illness? Did Jenny die of AIDS or hepatitis? How many sexual partners did Jenny and Forrest have? Where did the followers go when Forrest stopped running? What does the feather mean?
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:56:41Read transcript
- Why didn't Forrest Gump go pro? Out of college around 1964 as an all-American kick returner with both the NFL and AFL in business, he got no offer, and he sounds like the perfect Jet a year after they signed Joe Namath. Maybe he was not a good teammate, selfish without knowing better; a scene of teammates taping him to the goalpost is wished for; the leg braces give him a checkered injury history like Michael Porter Jr.; and he joined the military because it sounded like a good idea, so going pro may never have occurred to him.
- Why didn't Forrest catch whatever Jenny had? Maybe they had no sex life when they got back together; the hosts assume she contracted HIV.
- Did Jenny die of AIDS or hepatitis B or C? One host had answered this years ago as a mailbag question: she died in March 1982, nine months after the first recorded AIDS case in the United States, so she would have caught it around 1980 or 1981 while raising her son as a cocktail waitress and presumably off drugs; the film never approaches how.
- A controversial take: she did not have AIDS, she was just sick, probably hepatitis leading to liver cancer; the other buys it, noting she only says 'I'm sick, Forrest' and uses the word virus. Or the filmmakers botched the timeline and should have had her die in 1984. The implied message that drug use and promiscuity lead to AIDS is a weirdly moralizing note in a film that is not otherwise moralizing; the hosts assume an AIDS death is what we are meant to believe and joke about calling Winston Groom.
- How many sexual partners did Jenny Gump have? One host will not put a number on it. Forrest had one, since Jenny was his girl, even as an all-American at Alabama.
- Where did everyone go after Forrest stopped running in Montana or Utah with 150 people behind him, far from a Greyhound station? One thing to respect is that when interviewed he does not invent a reason, he just felt like running, and people follow anyway; LeBron would have played up the narrative.
- Feather interpretations found online: the unbearable lightness of being, which is overreading; Forrest's impaired intellect; the randomness of experience, which one host subscribes to; Hanks interpreted it as destiny defined by how we deal with the chance elements of life, the thing that can land anywhere landing at your feet, with theological implications and the question of planned versus chance. Both hosts settle on that reading.
- Earlier, while listing the American touchstones Forrest brushes against, AIDS is included with the caveat that it cannot be confirmed and is an unanswerable question.