Forrest Gump’s Jenny Deserved So Much Better
How did I not notice how sexist this classic film really is?
Most of us are, by now, entirely familiar with the plot of Forrest Gump, the 1994 film that earned a second Oscar for Tom Hanks. Gump is an all-American Everyman, a man with limited academic intelligence who nevertheless manages to sail through his life on a tide of happy coincidences and virtuously deserved good fortune.
An accidental millionaire and inadvertent philanthropist before he’s even thirty, his apparently charmed existence is blighted only by the untimely deaths firstly of his good friend Bubba and then of his mother. And, of course, by the fact that his beloved childhood friend Jenny does not reciprocate the sort of affection that he holds for her. He is never any more than a friend in her eyes.
Jenny’s life story forms an enduring counterpoint to Forrest’s. She is beautiful and highly intelligent and on paper, her life ought to be more successful than that of her bullied, lame, overly credulous classmate; but after a childhood during which her mother dies, her father abuses her and she has to live in a trailer with her grandmother, just down the road from Forrest’s luxurious home, he ends up sailing through college on a football scholarship while she is sent down without a degree for posing for Playboy…
