Heroes and Film
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When we go to the movies, we like to see heroes. Those figures that are literally larger than life we also like to perceive as larger than life in terms of personality. They dare to do the kinds of things that we ourselves lack the courage or the imagination to do. But our heroes on the screen - as is true in other arenas of popular culture from traditional folk ballads to urban legends to political office - are not always straightforward heroes. They are as often the outlaw as the sheriff, the robber as the cop. This desire for heroes who are outside social conventions in part reflects values that are particularly American - as Robert Ray argues - and in part that are nearly ubiquitous. The tradition of the anti-hero in American film - such as we see in Forrest Gump, the subject of this paper - is both a variation on some of the most important and enduring elements of our national character and at the same time a continuation of the trickster character, who has appeared in a number of different guises in literature from the ancient to the modern and from Africa to Polynesia. The kind of hero represented by Forrest Gump is indeed an expression of the conflict of particular kinds of American values. But it also speaks more generally to a standard archetype. Humans from a wide range of cultures have long understood that the hero is the person who does the right thing; for just as long we have understood that doing the right thing by one's own moral standards may well mean break
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farmer, or family man, represented the American belief in collective action, and the objective legal process that superseded private notions of right and wrong. While the outlaw hero found incarnations in the mythic figures of Davy Crockett, Jesse James, Huck Finn, and all of Leslie Fiedler's "Good Bad Boys" and Daniel Boorstin's "ringtailed roarers", the official hero developed around legends associated with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Lee, and other "Good Good Boys" (http://www3.cerritos.edu/fquaas/resources/English102/outlawhero.htm).
Gump is clearly far more outlaw hero than official hero: He holds no official office and his disability places him in an irrefutable way outside of the kinds of formal power structures from which official heroes are chosen and developed. Because of his "slowness", he appears to have little choice about what kind of hero he would be. And yet, and here Zemeckis is playing with the archetype of the American film hero, Gump is not the maverick that so many American outlaw heroes are. Just as his chance to be one of the official heroes is denied by his disability, his opportunity to be a typical outlaw hero is also blunted by his slowness.
The typical outlaw hero - Bonnie and Clyde, for exam
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Approximate Word count = 1261
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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