Forrest Gump rebuttal: Jake Melzer hates America

The purpose of this post is twofold: to reestablish Forrest Gump in the canon of great American movies, and to prove unequivocally that Jake Melzer hates America.

Melzer makes, or should I say compiles, some good points in his review. The plot of the movie is clearly far-fetched and appears to reward stupidity. It’s easy to see why someone such as Melzer might think this makes Forrest Gump a bad movie. But beneath the cool, critical façade of a Forrest Gump hater lies a seditious authoritarian philosophy.

On the first point, I’m going to call out Melzer on his recent applause of the Academy’s decision to name Slumdog Millionaire as Best Picture of 2008. One minute Melzer pretends to hate illogical movies, and the next he’s proclaiming a fairy tale the best picture of the year. On sheer inconsistency, this argument holds no water.

The second point is a little trickier to deal with. Is Forrest Gump a demonstrable idiot who succeeds at everything in life? Yes. Does Jenny, the curious, sexually liberated love interest find anything but misery and squalor in her explorations? No. According to Melzer, this means that the writer of the film and everyone who enjoys it believes that no ability is required to succeed in life and that curiosity and intellectualism should be rewarded with death by STD.

This is too simplistic an argument. Let’s consider two works by the master novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In The Idiot, the pure-hearted Prince Myshkin lives a life of blameless honesty, only to watch his life and that of those around him wind up in hopeless tragedy. In Crime & Punishment, the protagonist murders and robs his landlady and her servant, but eventually finds a kind of redemption in his relationship with a former prostitute. Were we to apply Melzer’s reasoning to these novels, we would have to conclude that Dostoevsky believed that the true path to happiness was not humble service but murder, thievery, and prostitution. Anyone who has read a work by this supremely ethical novelist would have to agree that the idea is preposterous.

If Forrest Gump does not reward stupidity, what is the message of the movie? Since Melzer possessives a subversive ulterior motive in his critique--which will soon become clear—he is deliberately reading too literally what is meant to be viewed as allegory.

The crucial first step in understanding the allegory is to reconsider the definition of “intelligence,” after which Melzer’s criticism of Forrest Gump suddenly becomes callous and elitist. If intelligence can only be measured by standardized testing, then yes, Chairman Mel, Forrest Gump is a certifiable idiot. But by that measure, black Americans and children from low-income homes are less intelligent on the whole than white, middle-class Americans. Are you a racist, too, Melzer?? Possibly, but that’s a separate discussion. What is clear is that Melzer is betraying a clear bias towards only one kind of intelligence: book smarts.

Forrest Gump can put together a gun faster than anyone else in his platoon. Do we call the rest of his platoon idiots in comparison to his mechanical genius? He plays Olympic table tennis. Are athletes idiots, Melzer, simply because their intelligence lies in their coordination as opposed to their capacity for pointless philosophical exercises? Additionally, Forrest is obedient, helpful, and humble. If the SAT could measure such a thing as “moral intelligence,” Jake Melzer would be a chowderhead by comparison.

The point of the allegory is that anyone can succeed in America. In other countries, biases toward book smarts bar the average person from breaking into the good life. Success is meted out from a rigidly meritocratic ivory tower. In America, success—like power—comes from the bottom up. It is not institutional eggheads that decide who succeeds and who fails, but the common person. This means that all sorts of intelligence are recognized and rewarded, not just the ability to perform well on standardized tests.

Who would be unhappy with such a country? If you follow the money, you can see that ivory tower academicians might be a little miffed at sharing their power with the common man.

FACT: Jacob Melzer was once employed by Brigham Young University, an accredited university, where he had frequent contact with professors.

FACT: Jacob Melzer cites a professor in his review of Forrest Gump.

Clearly, Jake Melzer prefers a country where one can only succeed with the right skin color and test scores. He is bitter, like most academics, with his failure to gain popularity and money through natural talent and a foundation of solid morals. When he sees others succeed, he cannot resist trying to bring them down. What he and other communists (“Chairman Mel?” Could he be more flagrant about his authoritarian sympathies?) don’t understand is that bringing Forrest Gump down won’t raise him up.

But what about Jenny, you say? What does her failure mean in this allegory? As you’ll recall, Jenny’s father sexually abused her. This locked her into a psychological patriarchal dependence, causing her to seek in vain for approval from abusive father figures. The brave Forrest, in contrast, was able to break free from the generational pattern of subservience in the same way that our Founding Fathers declared independence from tyranny.

Similar to Jenny, Melzer is emotionally stunted, needing validation from above in the form of good grades—grades which mean nothing in the real world. Having failed to break into middle management in corporate Korea, Melzer will soon run off to lick his wounds in Panama, where he will try to impress the natives into regarding him as a leader with his theories of commodity fetishism and the labor theory of value.

As you can see, critics of Forrest Gump hate the free enterprise system and would rather hoard authority for themselves. Also, Melzer misused the word “disingenuous” in his review.