How Forrest Gump Exposes the Aesthetic Mistake Objectivists Keep Making

When Bubba Died

I was nine years old when Forrest Gump (1994) came out, and I remember the exact moment it broke something open in me. It wasn’t the famous finale, or the feather, or the bench, or even the “Run, Forrest, run!” scenes that everyone quotes. It was the death of Bubba, simple, quiet, almost gentle in the way the movie handles it, that punched straight into my chest.

I didn’t have a philosophical lens. I didn’t know what symbolism was. I had never heard the words “ideology,” “narrative device,” or “plot-theme.” I was just a kid, sitting in a dark theater, watching Forrest Gump's only friend die. I cried—really cried—for the first time I can remember while watching a movie.

And that moment taught me something long before I had the vocabulary to articulate it: art is something you experience before you understand it. You feel it before you name it.

Even as an adult, that instinct never left me. Ayn Rand wrote in The Romantic Manifesto "The simple truth is that I approach literature as a child does: I write—and I read—for the sake of the story. The complexity lies in the task of translating that attitude into adult terms." I remember reading that line and thinking—yes, exactly. Not childish, but childlike: open, vulnerable, willing to let the story wash over me first, before I begin the work of thinking about it.

Many years later, when I found myself immersed in Objectivist circles, that instinct began to feel almost like a liability. I was surrounded by people who were brilliant, some of the most incisive, clarifying minds I’ve ever encountered. They taught me more about philosophy, literature, and aesthetics than anyone else had up to that point. But something about the way many of them approached art, especially movies, unsettled me.

It wasn’t their intelligence; these were people I admired deeply. It was the tone. They approached films the way botanists might approach a specimen pinned to a board: “What is the theme? What is the moral premise? Does this undermine heroism?” They dissected before they even breathed in the experience of quite literally smelling the roses.

And nowhere was this more bewildering to me than in their passionate hatred of Forrest Gump.

I remember hearing Leonard Peikoff dismiss the film in exactly this way, calling it “really a Russian movie… in the sense of the Russian sense of life,” a criticism grounded in his belief that the story elevates the “holy fool” archetype over the rational, self-directed individual. And he was far from alone. Most Objectivists I talked to said essentially the same thing. The film was a celebration of stupidity, a denigration of intelligence, a glorification of passivity, and a tale about a man who drifts through history without agency.

Beyond Objectivism, a similar interpretive pattern played out across the cultural spectrum. Feminist critics scolded the film for not giving Jenny the ideological arc they thought a woman should embody; New Historicists condemned it as a whitewashing of American history; and postmodern reviewers sneered at its sincerity, treating earnestness itself as a kind of aesthetic crime.

These weren’t stupid arguments. They were tight, sharp, consistent, and in the case of Peikoff, correct!

But they didn’t match anything I had felt when I watched the movie. Not when I was nine, and not years later when I revisited it as an adult and found myself crying not at Bubba’s death this time, but at the ending, when Forrest asks Jenny, in a voice trembling with fear and hope, “Is he… is he smart?” That line hit me in a way no philosophical analysis ever could. And it has consistently resonated with millions to this very day.

It was about love, and responsibility, and the terror of passing your flaws onto the next generation. It was about the fragility of innocence and the heaviness of parenthood.

And for a long time, I couldn’t understand why the intellectual readings of the film felt so alien even wrong to me. Not because the thinkers were wrong in their reasoning, but because they seemed blind to the experience of the thing. They were ignoring or passing over so many of the wonderful experiences I and millions others were feeling.

Something essential was missing. Something about how art actually works—how it moves a person.

The Way of the Romantic

Around the same time I encountered these Objectivist critiques of Forrest Gump, I began reading heavily the Romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth. In his Lyrical Ballads, a revolutionary book of poetry that launched English Romanticism, there is a line that I have always grappled with:

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

The first time I read it, I felt an almost physical jolt, like someone had articulated a truth I had always known but had never consciously formulated. It was aimed, of course, at the scientific reductionism of the Enlightenment, the impulse to break the world into parts in order to understand it. Wordsworth and all the Romantics worried that something essential, something living, was lost in the process.

And although the Romantics often went far too wide in their suspicion of reason (sometimes bordering on anti-thought entirely), in that single line he captured something that felt profoundly true to my own experience with art.

I found myself in the Objectivist movement while I was in film school; I was struck by how both worlds seemed to miss something vital in art. In the Objectivist circle, whenever people talked about a film or a book, the conversation narrowed immediately to theme, “plot-theme”, moral premises, always measured against the Objectivist philosophy. Sometimes, without even being aware the comparison was being made. It could be intelligent and even illuminating, but it also felt as though something living was being carved open purely to see how it worked. And in film school, strangely, the opposite happened: almost no one spoke of meaning at all. Even in courses on film or literature, everything dissolved into other ways of seeing and postmodern gestures that drained the work of substance. I continued to sense a fundamental absence, caught between the realm that dissects art and the one that causes it to vanish.

For me, the Romantics were not a turning away from reason. Objectivism taught me how to embrace reason, so I never had the Romantic distrust of the intellect. The Romantics were a reminder that experience and emotions are primary in art. Before you dissect the flower, you have to smell it. Before you interpret the line, you have to hear it. Before you judge the film, you have to let it take you where the author wants you to go.

That became a hierarchy of aesthetics for me:

1. Experience first.

2. Understanding second.

3. Analysis last.

Not because analysis is unimportant, it’s essential. But because analysis without experience is like trying to enjoy a kiss by measuring lip pressure. You can do it, but you’ve missed the point.

I prioritize the experience when analytical thinking clashes with the aesthetic impulse. Every time. Because the experience is the thing that changes you. The analysis is the thing that helps you understand the change.

It wasn’t until I internalized this Romantic insight that I could finally see what had always bothered me about those dismissals of Forrest Gump. The critiques weren’t wrong in their logic; they were wrong in their order. They had skipped the part where you simply feel the story. The architecture of emotion. They had gone straight to the dissection table. Like an autopsy without a eulogy.

And the corpse they were cutting open was not the same living thing that had made me cry at nine years old, or moved me again as an adult.

Beyond the Holy Fool: What Forrest Actually Represents

When Leonard Peikoff criticized Forrest Gump, I understood what he was reacting to. In a Q&A Session for his lecture “A Philosopher Looks at the OJ Verdict” he says of the movie:

“I thought the movie Forrest Gump was ambiguous. It could have been taken in certain respects as a satire on life in America today. But it was, I thought, a very consistent attack on intelligence. They portrayed Forrest Gump as having every good quality: he was faithful and loyal and true and good-hearted and all the rest of that, except he was a dolt. He was mentally retarded. And continuously throughout the movie, he kept behaving in ways that amply bore that out… Everything that he succeeded at, he succeeded by sheer accident… the net result of the movie was the message that the smart people are the enemy, the slick ones who control the system, and the only ones with a good heart are the ones without any brains. It was really a Russian movie. I mean that in the sense of the Russian sense of life… Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot was based on the Russian idea that brains are the enemy of God… they venerate idiots as closer to God. And Forrest Gump was simply medieval Russian sense of life presented as a modern American movie.”

And in one important respect, Peikoff is absolutely right. Dostoevsky does idealize the “holy fool.” In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin repeatedly encounters situations in which any ordinary adult would assert a boundary or intervene in someone else’s self-destruction. Instead, he dissolves into a kind of trembling pity that the novel treats as saintly.

One of the clearest examples is his relationship with Nastasya Filippovna. She is unstable, abused, humiliated, and spiraling. Myshkin loves her, but he does not advise her, challenge her, or attempt to change the trajectory of her self-destruction. Myshkin offers no rebuke or plea for sanity when she publicly humiliates herself at a birthday gathering, which includes taunting the guests, throwing money on the floor, and offering herself to Rogozhin. Instead he responds with a kind of trembling compassion that the novel unmistakably frames as saintly. He offers to marry her on the spot, not out of desire or conviction, but as a kind of moral self-sacrifice meant to “save” her from guilt she does not, in his view, really possess. His refusal to set boundaries, his inability to make a moral demand, his readiness to shoulder emotional burdens that are not his—these traits are treated in the novel as signs of purity. His passivity is not a flaw; it is the ideal.

This is what Peikoff means when he brings up Dostoyevsky’s “venerated idiots.” The holy fool's passivity, a childlike inability to engage with the world, is interpreted as a sign of superior moral goodness.

And Forrest does, at times, embody this pattern. Not in the mystical Russian sense Peikoff fears, but in the structural sense: Forrest’s goodness is expressed through unguarded, unquestioning loyalty rather than through judgment or introspection. One of the clearest examples is the Vietnam protest rally in Washington, D.C. Jenny has been drifting through the darkest years of her life—drugs, abuse, ideological wandering—and reunites with Forrest only to be punched at a Blank Panther event by her dopey, Berkeley-educated boyfriend. Forrest’s response is morally clear and immediate: unlike Myshkin, he fights back. But the holy fool moment comes afterward. Jenny, bruised and shaken, asks, “Why are you so good to me?” Forrest answers with childlike simplicity: “’Cause you’re my girl.” She replies, “I’ll always be your girl,” and then walks right back into the arms of the man who hit her.

To a literal-minded viewer, the scene is bewildering. Why doesn’t Forrest demand better for her? Why doesn’t he protest or plead? Why doesn’t he articulate what anyone can see, that her life is collapsing? But this is exactly how a holy fool functions. Forrest’s love is unwavering, uncalculating. He does not interpret Jenny’s pain. He does not analyze it. He simply remains open to her, without bitterness or pride.

Where Peikoff and many Objectivists go wrong is in stopping the analysis too early. They recognize the holy-fool pattern and assume the film must be making the same philosophical claim Dostoevsky makes: that innocence is virtue, intellect is corrupt, and the “idiot” reveals a higher truth. Peikoff's interpretation would be entirely correct if Forrest Gump's sole purpose were to argue that stupidity is morally superior and that "the slick ones" are the villains.

But that is not what the film is doing. The holy fool in Forrest Gump is the beginning of the device, not the end of it. Once transplanted into an American mythic structure, the archetype shifts meaning. The film is not theological, not mystical, not Russian, and certainly not a sermon about the sanctity of unreason. Forrest is not a moral ideal. He is a narrative lens.

This is where the Objectivist reading veers off course. For decades, both leading intellectuals and eager students have made the same error: forcing every piece of art into Ayn Rand's aesthetic framework. This tendency leads to evaluation based almost exclusively on whether the work possesses a clear plot-theme, features a Randian hero, or explicitly dramatizes volitional agency. The impulse is understandable. The Romantic Manifesto is one of the most clarifying books on art ever written, but it is a manifesto for Rand’s school of art, and not every artist need see things as she did. Peikoff delivered a fantastic lecture addresing this issue: The Value of Great (Though Philosophically False) Art.

Cinema in particular cannot be analyzed this way. Movies are not literature. A 2 hour cinematic film is primarily a mythic medium, closer to oral storytelling and cultural legend than to Rand’s psychological or philosophical drama. 

To clarify what I mean when I call Forrest Gump a mythic film, I turn to the cultural historian Richard Slotkin. Slotkin defines myths as

stories drawn from a society's history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society's ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain.

This definition is crucial because it reframes myth not as childish fantasy or a relic of pre-rational cultures, but as a cultural language. A myth is a society narrating itself. It reveals what a people fear, what they hope for, what they believe about their own destiny, and what they cannot yet articulate in abstract terms.

In The Romantic Manifesto Ayn Rand observed that “every religion has a mythology—a dramatized concretization of its moral code.” One may extend this beyond religion. Nations have mythologies. Civilizations have mythologies. Any community with a shared identity eventually creates a body of stories that communicate, not arguments, but perspectives. Myth is the dramatic form through which a culture gives imaginative shape to its values.

Art, in this sense, serves the consciousness of a conceptual being. It selects, emphasizes, and stylizes reality so that the mind can grasp it in an immediate, perceptual way. And when art becomes mythic, it performs an added function. It unifies individual minds into a common symbolic world. It takes the scattered and often contradictory experiences of a people and renders them into a coherent emotional language.

This is what Slotkin is pointing to when he says myths dramatize a society’s moral consciousness. Myths are neither lies nor literal histories. They are symbolic structures that compress the vast and often chaotic sweep of lived experience into stories and images that carry the weight of memory. They take a nation’s triumphs and wounds, its ideals and betrayals, and refract them through characters rather than treatises. In the American context, Slotkin shows how certain narrative patterns recur again and again: the frontier wanderer, the redeemed outsider, the ordeal that grants belonging, the constant movement between innocence and experience. These survive not because they flatter us, but because they dramatize the tensions inherent in American life.

When I say that film is a mythic medium, I mean that cinema draws on a culture’s historical memory and condenses it into emotionally resonant imagery. A film is not primarily an instrument of argument or philosophical exposition. It is a sensory and symbolic experience that shapes how a society feels about itself. Movies have a unique ability to weave the historical, the archetypal, and the emotional into a single rhythmic flow. This is why many of the most enduring American films—from Stagecoach to The Searchers to Star Wars and The Dark Knight—are not about their plots. They are artworks that create and speak in America’s symbolic language, offering shared figures and narrative movements that unite countless individual experiences into a common imaginative world.

And Forrest Gump, more than perhaps any other modern American film, functions in precisely this Slotkinian sense. It is not a philosophical argument about intelligence or agency. It is a mythic, even fantastical, retelling of late-20th-century America—the civil rights era, Vietnam, the counterculture, Watergate, the rise of technology—woven into a single narrative through a symbolic figure who stands outside the swirl of modern and postmodern American ideologies.

But this is exactly what so many critiques of the film fail to see. The Objectivist criticisms I encountered treated the movie as though it were making a literal claim about Forrest: that he is an ideal, or worse, that his limitations are morally significant. The symbolic was collapsed into history; the poetic was taken as polemic. The assumption was that because Forrest is simple, the film must be praising simplicity; because his successes are accidental, the film must be attacking intelligence. But this is a misreading of how cinema operates and what Forrest Gump is attempting. The film uses mythic structure, not philosophical assertion. It is not a diagnosis of America’s intellect; it is a story about re-imagining America’s memory.

The film is not about elevating a simpleton. Forrest is not the philosophical statement of the movie. You empathize with him you do not emulate him. He has no worldview, no articulated values, no moral program other than loyalty. He is a vantage point through whom the film reframes American history without the interpretive layers that normally define it. His simplicity is not a doctrine; it is an artistic device. It allows the story to remove the bitterness, revisionism, and ideological noise that often cloud the way we recount the 20th century. And this is the core misunderstanding at the heart of the critique: Forrest Gump is not about a man. It is about a nation.

Forrest as the Old South Entering a New America

And this is the crucial shift: the American “simple hero” is not about sanctifying unreason. It is about using innocence to reveal the transformations of America itself.  And it is through this American lens that Forrest’s most important symbolic function emerges: he is the best of the Old South carried into a new world.

The film announces this plainly. His mother names him after Nathan Bedford Forrest: a founder of the Ku Klux Klan, a Confederate general, a figure intertwined with the darkest parts of Southern history. The film roots Forrest’s identity in the deepest and most morally fraught soil of the American South.

Nathan Bedford Forrest 1821-1877

Then it does something remarkable: it strips Gump of all ideological inheritance. His simplicity wipes away racism, tribalism, and inherited hatred. This is not a celebration of stupidity; it is an artistic mechanism that clears the moral field. Forrest becomes a kind of narrative blank slate; a Southerner without the burden of the South’s sins.

I am not defending every philosophical implication here. No movie is a perfect metaphysical statement, and this one certainly isn’t. I am describing the artistic strategy the film is employing. An exploration that is completely stifled when one immediately writes off the story from the start. A film, it is useful to recall, that was one of the most impactful and sizable cinematic successes of the 1990s. One that had real-world impact—not only a successful restaurant franchise, but political, linguistic, and artistic ripples as well. Gary Sinise, who plays Lt. Dan, became and remains an enormous influence and folk hero among America’s warrior class.

The film is not saying the evils of the South didn’t happen. It is not rewriting history. It is offering a mythological fantasy of possible transformation. Forrest represents a transition figure: a South that could be fully integrated into the best of America, not mired in its past.

Tarantino attempted something similar decades later with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). He was not rewriting the Manson murders into a new factual account; he was offering a mythic counter-history, a fantasy that allows the viewer to feel the emotional weight of what might have been. In the film’s universe the murders do not happen, but the point is not to deny reality. It is to create a symbolic space in which the California dream is spared a wound, allowing the audience to confront the tragedy from a different emotional angle. Forrest Gump performs a parallel gesture: it lets the South pass through history without the poison it actually carried, not to erase or correct the past, but to explore the imaginative possibility of a different moral inheritance.

Gump’s friendship with Bubba is not political messaging. It is natural, immediate, unforced. It is the imagined harmony of a region that has always been half black and half white, yet internally divided. Their bond is the South as it might have been; not in denial of history, but in aspiration beyond it.

Perhaps the film’s most direct political gesture is the “reparations” offered to Bubba’s family. “A promise is a promise,” Forrest says as he gives them Bubba’s share of the Gump empire—an empire built on Bubba’s ancestral knowledge of shrimping, knowledge forged during an era when his family were slaves.

Similarly, when Forrest witnesses the desegregation of the University of Alabama, he reacts with neither fear nor ideology. He sees people going to school. Nothing more. His simplicity, in this context, is not ignorance—it is untainted possibility.

Forrest is not a myth of a South that never existed. He is a myth of a South that could exist. A South freed from supremacy, tribalism, and inherited hatred. A South capable of joining America not through nostalgia, nor through erasure, but through transformation.

The film is a moral reset—not an escape from history, but a symbolic doorway into a better identity. Forrest is the Old South reborn, not as innocence, but as potential.

Two Americas: The Wounded Child and the Broken Soldier

Once Forrest is understood not as a hero to emulate but as more of a mirror of his era, and even a mythic fantasy of the Old South carried into a new America, then the other major characters fall into place. The film is not designed around psychological realism; it is not a character study in the literary sense. It is a tapestry of national archetypes, each representing a different American mythology. Forrest is only one thread. Jenny and Lt. Dan supply the rest of the emotional color, the tension, the tragedy, and the historical friction.

Jenny is the wounded American counterculture. She carries the generational trauma that erupted in the 1960s. That is the abuse, the alienation, the desperate longing for an unreal kind of "freedom" that manifested as self-destruction, since ideology at this time meant essentially nihilism. Where Forrest moves through America untouched by ideology, Jenny is consumed by every ideology of her era: the folk revival, feminism, the sexual revolution, anti-war activism, drug culture, the numinous spiritual searching that swept across disillusioned youth. She is America’s raw nerve, exposed to the air.

What Jenny wants is escape, transcendence, connection. Her yearning comes from a place of authentic pain. But she is also destroyed by it. Her trauma hollows her out, and the counterculture cannot save her because the counterculture, for all its rhetoric of authenticity and rebellion, has nothing solid to stand on. It is truly nihilistic. Jenny’s arc is the story of an America that rejected its past without knowing what to do with its future. 

(To fully understand this, read the hundreds of articles written over the past 30 years from intellectuals who lambast this film because it does not showcase the positive lights of post-modern philosophy).

Jenny is not “healed” by post-modernism, or hippie politics, or music and drugs, and she is not healed by Forrest either. Her wounds run too deep, and her death is the inevitable consequence of the path she’s been walking since childhood. But Forrest’s unwavering, unconditional love gives her something none of those movements could: a place to land before the end. And what Forrest loves about her is not who she became, but the little girl she was. This was the pre-traumatized angel who offered him a seat when no one else would. He loves her like one loves a bird. His simplicity precludes him from grasping the wider complexities of her choices such as chasing movements and ideologies and aimless forms of escape in the hope of repairing herself. His innocence becomes the refuge her sophistication could never provide. And the real thematic weight of her final return is not a redemption arc, but what she brings into the world: a child. Forrest Jr. is the future neither Forrest nor Jenny could reach, the life that grows out of their suffering and experience. The counterculture child doesn’t find salvation, but she creates someone who can.

Lt. Dan, on the other hand, is America’s warrior tradition incarnate. He is the inheritor of a violent destiny, a man whose ancestors have died in every American war. He sees his life as a destiny of sacrifice for his country. Vietnam shatters him not simply because of the physical loss of his legs, but because it breaks the myth of noble sacrifice. He is a soldier without a war he can believe in. His bitterness, his rage, his despair are not personal flaws; they are the psychic wounds of a country that began to doubt the moral meaning needed to conduct a just war.

Dan’s fight is not with the war. It is with God, or fate, or whatever force he believes has betrayed him. His real conflict is metaphysical. And Forrest’s simplicity once again becomes the counterpoint. Forrest does not understand destiny, or fate, or honor. “Gump, have you found Jesus yet?” Dan asks him sardonically. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be looking for him,” Gump responds. He saves Lt Dan’s life in Vietnam because he was wounded, because Dan is his officer, because Jenny told him to. Dan is part of his world and he couldn’t just leave him there. To Dan, Forrest represents a rupture to his destiny. The destiny that he was supposed to die with his men.

And Dan, slowly and reluctantly, is softened by Gump. Not converted, not redeemed in some doctrinal sense, but relieved of the crushing metaphysical resentment that defined his life after the war.

Jenny and Dan, taken together, are the American century in conflict: the rebellious, traumatized child of cultural upheaval on one side, and the wounded, honor-bound warrior tradition on the other.

This is why the film isn’t truly character-driven. Its narrative engine isn’t psychology but myth. Forrest, Jenny, and Dan are not characters in the literary sense; they are archetypes, walking through history, each carrying a different piece of the American story. Vietnam, civil rights, hippie culture, Watergate; these events aren’t backdrops for character development. They are the landscape through which these archetypes move, collide, and refract meaning..

The film isn’t asking us to admire Forrest or emulate him or interpret him as a philosophical statement. It is asking us to see something about the country itself, something you can only grasp by watching these three mythologies brush against each other as they are carried through history’s currents.

The Main Character Is Not Forrest — It’s America

Once you stop trying to watch Forrest Gump as a conventional story about a conventional hero, the film opens up like a map. The central insight is that Forrest is far less a protagonist than he is a narrator. Or more precisely: a witness. an embodied, empathetic, even satirical heartbeat moving through the storm of American history, much like the feather floating on the wind and turned into a bookmark for Forrests favorite book, Curious George.

Forrest doesn’t drive the action. He doesn’t make pivotal choices. He doesn’t transform the world around him in the way an Aristotelian or Randian hero would. Instead, history flows around him like a river, sweeping him from one cultural moment to the next. If his character were removed from the narrative, the events of the film would still happen.

This is not a mistake in the storytelling; it is the primary artistic choice.

Because the true main character of Forrest Gump; the entity with an arc, a direction, a crisis, and a resolution is America.

Each chapter of the film is a vignette in the nation’s late-twentieth-century saga:

• the Civil Rights Movement

• the desegregation battles in the South

• the Vietnam War and the collapse of national confidence

• the hippie movement and the implosion of post-modernism

• Watergate and institutional shame

• the birth of modern technology and the optimism of a new economic frontier

These episodes aren’t backdrops for Forrest’s development; they are the story. Forrest is simply the mirror through which we see them, and this is why his simplicity is essential. Because he does not interpret or theorize, American history arrives to us unfiltered, without the ideological noise we normally attach to these eras. Take Vietnam: most films load the war with political commentary, moral despair, or accusations: "Baby-killers," "imperialism." Forrest describes it with literal clarity—“It started raining, and it didn’t stop for four months”—a line that captures both the horror and the absurdity without assigning them to a thesis. Even moments like the desegregation of the University of Alabama, which he remembers only as “people going to school,” take on symbolic force precisely because he refuses to read them as statements. His innocence becomes a narrative solvent, dissolving the hardened layers of cultural interpretation so the audience can feel the events directly, rather than through the filters of guilt, rage, nostalgia, or modern ideology.

The movie is not just a reset for the South. It is a reset for America. A symbolic clean slate, not because the past is denied but because the viewer is allowed to confront it without inherited bitterness, ideological rigidity, or cultural defensiveness.

This is not naïve patriotism. Nor is it cynical critique. It is a fantasy: a retelling of the American century from a vantage point untouched by ideology. It invites viewers into a perspective they no longer have in their adult lives, which is a perspective stripped of political identity, tribal allegiance, or cultural defensiveness.

Forrest Gump allows America to view itself with a child's honest, unfiltered clarity, free from preconceived notions. And in that clarity, something profound happens. We see, not the sanitized version of history, nor the bitter version, but the raw emotional truth; its horrors, its humor, its heartbreak, and its improbable grace.

The movie asks us to consider something few films attempt: What might America look like if we could see it again for the first time? Not as partisans, not as judges, but as witnesses.

That is why Forrest is not the protagonist. America is.

Why Forrest Must Be Simple

To understand why Forrest Gump works and why it had to be this story and not another, then you must understand why Forrest is simple. His low IQ, just “below average,” is not a philosophical claim about virtue; it is the narrative engine. His simplicity is what makes the film journey possible.

There is, first, the literal reason: Forrest has a low IQ because the film needs a character who cannot impose meaning on the events he encounters. Forrest does not interpret America; he reflects it. He is not a messenger but a mirror. When a young black woman drops her book on the steps of the University of Alabama, Forrest simply picks it up and hands it to her, unaware he is walking into a defining moment of the Civil Rights Movement. When he innocently apologizes to the Black Panthers as they tap their guns to their chest—“Sorry I had a fight in the middle of yer Black Panther party”—the moment is both absurd and revealing. Forrest does not understand the ideological charge in the room, which allows the audience to see it nakedly. For instance, a Black Panther leader is screaming about black rights to a simple minded army private whose black best friend had recently died in his arms.

Then there is the storytelling reason; that is, the literary lineage Forrest belongs to. Yes, there is a resemblance to the “holy fool” tradition: Prince Myshkin, Alyosha, Sancho Panza, Shakespeare’s fools, even Queequeg from Moby-Dick. These figures possess moral clarity because they lack the rationalizations of the grand new ideologies of their era. But Forrest is not a Russian saint; He belongs to the lineage of characters who drift through American history in a haze of innocence and blunt observation: Huck Finn's childish ignorance, Uncle Tom’s simplicity, or Rip Van Winkle waking up to a world transformed after a twenty-year nap, and even the narrators of early American tall tales. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, the omniscient narrator wanders through the Custom House uncovering relics of America’s Puritan past; in Gump, the wandering is literal and the relics are the events of the 20th century. Forrest’s narrative innocence is part of an established American way of telling national stories.

Psychologically, Forrest’s simplicity prevents him from collapsing under trauma the way Jenny and Lt. Dan do. Jenny is destroyed by her past; Dan is shattered by the failure of destiny. Forrest is not. He does not ruminate; he does not spiral. Pain touches him and moves on. “Stupid is as stupid does” is his mother’s half-true maxim. This means that actions matter but words and appearance do not. In Forrest’s case, the deeper psychological truth is that simplicity shields him from the looping, self-destructive introspection that destroys more complicated minds. 

(Now apply this to the over-psychologized current generations, where everyone has a diagnosis).

Symbolically, Forrest’s ignorance is not only useful; it is essential. He inherits the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most terrifying symbols of the Old South, and yet he is completely unaware of the weight of that inheritance. His own retelling of this, “They dressed up in their bed sheets like a bunch of ghosts or spooks or something,” is comically innocent. What was, in reality, the terrifying uniform of racial terror becomes, in Forrest’s mind, children playing Halloween. That misunderstanding is not a joke at the South’s expense; it is the film’s symbolic pivot. Forrest carries the name of America’s darkest Southern legacy but none of its ideology.

Finally, there is the moral proposition of the film. Forrest is not the man you are meant to emulate. He has no philosophical convictions, no chosen purpose, no conscious values beyond loyalty and love. He is not the ideal man. He is the hinge between eras. His role is not to live a profoundly self-directed life, but to allow something new to emerge. This is why the line at the end of the film, “Is he… is he smart?” carries such devastating weight. Forrest is not asking whether his son is good or kind or loving; he is asking whether his son is free from the limitations that shaped his own life. And the answer that his son is “the smartest in his class” is the narrative’s quiet triumph. Forrest and Jenny are the past; their son is the future. 

This is why Forrest must be simple. His simplicity is the dramatic device, the mythic mechanism, the emotional conduit through which the film builds its world. It is not a philosophical principle. It is the artistic architecture of a movie.

Experience Before Meaning

Art must be felt before it is judged. 

You cannot understand the meaning of a work you have never actually experienced. You cannot analyze an emotion you have refused to feel. When you approach art with a pre-digested judgment, you destroy your ability to experience the work of art. In other words, when you turn on your logical/analytic brain while watching or reading a work of literary art, you have stymied the very process necessary to fully apprehend it.

This is why analysis without experience is autopsy. Worse than autopsy, it is carving for the sake of carving. The work becomes a corpse on the table, and you can dissect its structure, its symbolism, its moral premises, but you cannot understand. You end up knowing about the art without knowing anything of the art itself.

When you watch Forrest Gump ideologically prepared, cocked and loaded with theories of the “holy fool,” with judgments about passivity, with expectations of Randian heroism, then you will certainly notice elements that confirm your suspicion. Forrest’s simplicity. His drifting. The redemption of other characters through his affection. If these are the categories you bring, they will be the categories you find. 

But the moment you let go of that suspicious posture; the moment you allow yourself to watch the film as a story rather than as a thesis; the emotional architecture can emerge. And this architecture is the real content of the film.

In the 1990s, Forrest Gump was not just a movie it was a massive cultural touchstone, because:

It gives you the 1960s through the eyes of someone who cannot editorialize them, to a generation who has been indoctrinated into post-modernism;

It gives you the trauma of the Vietnam war without the ideological lens most at that time grew up with;

It gives you the counterculture’s collapse without scorning all those who participated;

It gives you the brokenness of Jenny and the rage of Lt. Dan not as morality plays but as human wounds that so many experienced.

And through this emotional scaffolding, the film accomplishes something rare: it lets you experience a century of American history stripped of the filters that normally govern how we frame these decades. No right-wing nostalgia. No left-wing critique. No academic rhetoric. No philosophical treatise. Just a human being—simple, bewildered, decent—floating through the firestorm of American life.

When viewed without prejudice, the film reveals the tragedy in how a phrase initially used to mock Forrest, "stupid is as stupid does," transforms into a profound existential reminder: our actions ultimately define us more than any labels or categories. Only then do you feel the anguish in Forrest’s question—“Is he smart?”—and the answering relief that his son carries the promise of a world beyond his limitations. A new world in a new myth.

This is why most critique of Forrest Gump fails, not just the Objectivist kind, but all of it. The mistake is not philosophical disagreement but philosophical sequence. If you approach a work with analysis before experience, you smuggle your conclusions into the premises. You do not discover the meaning; you impose it. Samuel Johnson warned against this centuries ago when he insisted that we must clear away cant; the jargon, the prefabricated categories, the ready-made theories, before we can encounter a work of art honestly. Only then are we in a position to understand and then analyze it. And because Gump has so rarely been met without cant, there has never been a truly adequate analysis of it. The film has been misjudged not because it is shallow, but because so few people have allowed themselves to feel what it is actually doing. Sometimes, as with Forrest Gump, the meaning has nothing to do with what you expected, and everything to do with what you never let yourself feel.

And this is why the movie has been a global phenomenon for over 30 years, and yet intellectuals at all levels still don’t get it.

How This Changed the Way I Engage With Art

To say that Objectivism shaped my understanding of art is an understatement. Leonard Peikoff did not only teach me a philosophy for living on earth; he opened doors in literature, drama, and poetry. His course “Poems I Like and Why” opened the doorway to poetry. His analysis of Eight Great Plays transformed how I experienced theatre. Even today, I think his general approach to art is fundamentally correct: clarity of theme, inspection of plot-theme, and commitment to the life-serving values of art.

But over the years I noticed a habit. One I see in many Objectivists, and one I now see everywhere. I call it theme hunting. The moment a work of art appears before our eyes, intellectual types rush to ask: What is the theme? What is the moral? What is the statement? (Notably they almost always imply something along the lines of: Why doesn’t it say what I want it to say?) And the danger is that if the theme isn’t obvious, or if it doesn’t immediately align with one’s philosophical framework, the work is dismissed. This method is used on movies, on books, even on paintings. It is not unique to Objectivists, but Objectivists tend to be very good at it; so good, in fact, that they can talk themselves out of experiencing the art before the experience ever begins. 

(Most intellectual types do this with romantic love too).

My own view has been shaped by voices far beyond Objectivism: Wordsworth’s romanticism and individualism; Coleridge’s insistence on the suspension of disbelief; Samuel Johnson’s grounded sanity about reading widely and without prejudice; Mortimer Adler’s life-changing distinction between expository and imaginative literature; Harold Bloom’s defense of aesthetic experience as the core of reading. And teachers like Richard Mitchell, J. Rufus Fears and Elizabeth Vandiver, who showed me how great books open the inner life.

But it was Adler who gave me the conceptual understanding I needed. He taught me that the primary purpose of expository works (i.e., non-fiction) is to convey knowledge, while the primary purpose of imaginative works (i., fiction) is to directly communicate an experience. An imaginative work is not about something: it is something. This was transformative for me. It clarified what I had always felt instinctively but had never articulated. Namely, the purpose of art is to create an experience in consciousness, and that this experience is primary. Only afterward can meaning arise.

In an essay I once wrote for my Literary Canon Club, I put it this way:

Don’t try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you. Trust that it is great. Leap into its arms. Put away your ideological presuppositions. Enter the world of the author naked, and let the experience happen to you. Expository books give you knowledge; imaginative books give you an experience you can have only by reading. If you read The Aeneid properly, the immediate spark of love betwen Dido and Aeneas becomes something you can experience vicariously as if it happened to you. That is the power of imaginative literature. It enlarges your life beyond the boundaries of your own biography.

It clarified something essential: art is the best training for consciousness. Rand said that art serves the function of bringing our deepest values into perceptual awareness. But I have discovered that this requires that we feel before we come to final judgements. In fact, feeling is a mode of judgment, properly understood. To analyze without feeling is to sever the artistic process in half. It creates critics who know how to evaluate a work but do not know how to live in it.

The better questions immediately after seeing a movie is not: What is it about? And not even: Did I like it? The right questions are: Why did I like it or not? What scenes did I like or hate? What character did I love or hate? What did I feel, and why did I feel it? What part of my soul responded—or refused to respond? 

Art is the most direct and revealing exploration of the self.

And of course, not every work of art deserves this kind of reflection. We live in a world drenched in content; not every horror flick or guilty-pleasure romcom requires a spiritual excavation. Sometimes we need entertainment. Sometimes we need a break. But when something strikes you, when a story moves you or unsettles you or lingers in your consciousness, then it is essential to explore that. To ignore that response is a terrible form of evasion: Repression.

American Dream

What moves me most about the film isn’t the feather or the war or the speeches. It’s the bench. It’s the strange little congregation of Americans who sit beside Forrest—a gathering that could never happen anywhere else, and certainly not for long. A hard-working black waitress with tired feet and good shoes sits next to a simple-minded Southern white man named after a founder of the KKK. And instead of history rising up between them like a wall, they talk about shoes. They talk about where life takes you. For a moment, race and legacy and pain all step aside, and two strangers share a human conversation neither of them could have planned.

A young mother settles in next, bouncing her baby on her knee. She remembers the day Kennedy was shot with the clarity of a national wound, but Gump recounts it with wide-eyed simplicity, as if the tragedy happened on a different planet. She listens anyway. She doesn’t correct him. For a brief, impossible second, her grief and his incomprehension occupy the same small space without conflict.

Then a Vietnam veteran appears—the one demographic you’d expect to stop the story cold. He hears about Bubba’s death, that staggering loss, but bypasses the tragedy entirely to talk about Gump’s “million-dollar wound,” the absurd bullet lodged in his buttocks. It should be offensive. Instead, somehow, it isn’t. In Forrest’s presence, every pain becomes survivable.

And then the motherly Southern lady who doesn’t want the story to end—who smiles so warmly at Forrest’s rambling that she decides, with absolute cheer, to miss her bus and catch the next one. She lets the story take her somewhere. She doesn’t pre-judge it. And because she doesn’t, the story rewards her.

Yet none of these people are the audience Forrest is truly speaking to. The real listener is Jenny, the girl who first told him to sit, the woman he forever loved, the one he will sprint five blocks to reach when he learns she has something to tell him. And what she reveals is the quiet destiny of the entire film: a child. A new life born into a new world. A boy who does not inherit the pain of his parents or the traumas of the past forty years. A fresh future in a country trying to remember how to be whole.

What a pleasant thought, especially as we look at our fractured world in 2025. A film asking us to imagine that strangers might still listen to each other, that wounds might be spoken of without bitterness, that history might bend—not erase itself, but bend—toward gentleness. But we know the truth: the movie failed to inspire a new approach. Not because it was wrong, but because what it asks of us is nearly impossible. It’s a quaint dream, a little wish upon a drifting feather, here for a moment, then gone on the next breeze.

Ah, but what a dream. And for two hours, if you let it, the film invites you to sit on that bench and dream it too—before you decide what it all means.