Moderately cloudy

[thedeadlyhook]

Arriving late today at my new favorite haunt - about three other laptops in play around me, which makes unsurprising sense, because of the free WiFi. But so far, my theory about a productive workspace is panning out - yesterday's word count was a phenomenal something-over-5,000, no doubt due for rewrites and re-edits as per my usual, but still. Just removing myself from an environment of cushy chairs and distracting books and DVDs and bleeping peeping video games and Toys with his hair sticking up seems to have done a lot of the trick. The muse hasn't been so much hiding, apparently, as... lazy. But I can report that my earlier assessment that there would only be one more chapter of "Does It Have to Mean Something?" was laughably optimistic. I suffer from elephantitis of the conversation.

Other fic-related insights hopefully to come soon from me, as I've been obsessively reading stultiloquentia's Fic Rec List of Bangel for Bangelphobes and other stories on her rec list. I feel like I'm getting very close to understanding something major about 'ships, but I'll have to let those thoughts percolate for a bit. TBC, eventually.

Now for something completely different... The SciFi Channel recently ran one of their X-Files marathons in which they played the Smoking Man's origin episode. In it, we see the Smoking Man humorously parody the speech in Forrest Gump, about the box of chocolates. And that reminded me of a little observation I'd made over Xmas.

Rewind to December: it kind of goes without saying that when you're at the parents' house, you watch what they watch. Toys and I managed to squeak in a viewing of the Nip/Tuck season finale in our guest room while wrapping presents, but in the main TV room, you're inevitably stuck with the popular choice. Which is how we ended up watching a rerun of Forrest Gump.

Now, I don't have too much to say about the movie in general - it's a quality yarn in that stuff happens to characters you're made to care about; I do have a bit of problem with what seems to be its philosophy, that life is best experienced as a feather on the wind (as per the title image), and that true imagination or ambition tends to lead one astray, as in Forrest's great love Jenny, the doomed Bubba, or the crippled-in-action Captain Dan. Thematically, this is a weird sort of update of the ending of The Wizard of Oz (film version), where Dorothy talks about home like it always had all the answers when the whole rest of the movie would seem to be about the fact that it didn't, and she had to leave home to find that out, to find the answers inside herself. Forrest's journey, though, is less of a journeying-changes-you story and more of a journeying-doesn't-change-you story. Forrest is essentially the same person throughout. He's also not a particularly realistic mentally handicapped person - he's a TV-or-movie-style creation, less a character than an embodiment of values. Forrest is innocence personified, devotion to home and family given a mouth and legs.

So the place where I start to have problems with Forrest Gump is where his innocence-devotion - fine values to have, certainly - end up being reassigned as creative forces, as if they were the same thing. Elvis's swivel-hip shake and John Lennon's "Imagine" weren't the products of original talents who liked to shake up the status quo, they were the products of absolute innocence. Um, right. These items are sort of jokes in the movie, but also sort of not. There's an earnestness to the way Forrest is presented which makes me perversely interested to view this movie back to back with Being There, the Peter Sellers movie which, in that dry, British humorist way, makes a point of how people are gullible and foolish for believing that "Chance," the mentally handicapped character of the movie, is a genius. Forrest Gump, in its own way, would have us believe that Forrest is a genius. A poet of simple, homespun country sayings.

But... were it not for the ambitions of other people, Forrest would have never left home at all. And so we end up right back at The Wizard of Oz again - leave home and change, or leave and stay the same?

Long digression; here's the part that really brought me off my chair on this viewing:

There's this scene with Jenny, the girl Forrest loves, who has come home to Alabama to live with him at one point after having been, among other things, a guitar-playing stripper and a Vietnam protest marcher. Out of the blue one night, Forrest asks her to marry him. She doesn't reply, just gets up and walks into the hallway.

He follows her. "Why don't you love me?" he asks. Jenny is half up the stairs; she turns back to look at him.

Forrest says then - and I don't have this exact, but the dialogue is in this ballpark - "I'm not a smart man. But I do know what love is." (This in answer to an earlier point in the movie where she'd yelled just that at him "You don't know what love is!")

Um... this is Buffy and Spike in "The Gift." Like, exactly.

No, seriously. It's even staged the same - Jenny on the stairs, turning back to look; Forrest below, looking up.

Freaked. Me. Out.

Not that I necessarily think it's an intentional parallel - probably not, although you never know with Hollywood and its well-thumbed visual catalog of images-that-hit-the-spot, but still. And it just reminded me again of something I'd written during Angel Season 5, about how Spike came off like some sort of holy fool, the guy who does the right thing without even consciously deciding to do so.

Weeeeird. And strangely thought-provoking.

Comments

[madam-rptr.livejournal.com]

I imagine, if the writers weren't actually thinking of the Forrest Gump scene, they may have (just as maybe the writers/TPB for FG) more set the physicality of the actors to reflect their stations in life in contrast to eachother: Jenny/Buffy at a higher station than Forrest/Spike - though, to look deeper still, both Jenny/Buffy weren't really higher than Forrest/Spike at all, each woman having her very own demons and past to follow her around and make her not able to see (until too late?) that the man at the bottom of the stairs was, indeed, worthy to be at her side.

Whoa...I'm not sure where that came from.

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

The Buffy=higher, Spike=lower thing was definintely a running theme in the show - it's an image you see over and over from that point on (and even as far back as "Lie to Me," oddly enough, although in that situation, they pointedly switch places, with Spike appearing at the top of the stairs leading into the Goth kids' basement, and Buffy jumping up to reposition herself above him) - but that's actually what makes me think this probably couldn't be an intentional reference, due to exactly your point. The higher/lower staging is much more literal in BtVS, despite the way Spike's story eventually turned out. Either way, though, it's sort of ironic, huh?

[toysdream.livejournal.com]

Definitely interesting, but now I'm wondering if both Forrest Gump and Buffy might be hearkening back to some earlier moment in cinema history, consciously or not. It does seem like the kind of dramatic motif that some previous director might have used to memorable effect...

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

Good question. Not being a student of all film, it's entirely possible that there's an earlier reference that's common to both. I'm honestly curious.

[fyrebryhte.livejournal.com]

Always been tempting to me to try and compare those two to Scarlett and Rhett, but that's just me (Buffy and Spike, not Forrest and Jenny)

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

I've actually seen that comparison brought up in a fic or two - that parallel idea of he / she being on different pages even when they're together, because she's still obsessing over Angel while he's obsessing over her... and then by the time she changes her mind, he's already burned out. (Okay, that turned out to be more of a pun sentence than I intended, but you get the idea.) When I write my own fic, I tend to toy with that idea a little, but I don't stick to it exactly, because I'm not happy with the way it makes Buffy look, like the one who can't keep her mind on what's in front of her. The morality issues, I figure, are enough of a wedge to keep B and S apart without even bringing Angel into it (although I do believe that's still somewhat there). Scarlett's own opinion of herself as good girl was, I think, a little more flexible than Buffy's.