“I’m not running today”-our column that brings you alternatives to running (and sports, why not?) today hosts a dear friend of Runlovers: Andrea Martina. We had already talked about him and his wonderful work as a writer and author of a wonderful podcast on Gino Bartali, but today Andrea writes about one of the most famous movies in history, which also contains a wonderful and very famous (and long) sequence about running: Forrest Gump.
Martina gives a very original and distinctive interpretation of it, also revealing lesser-known details of the film’s production.
Happy reading and welcome (and welcome back) to Andrea!
Simple ideas are the best, but they are also the hardest to come by. For example, there is this one: un man sitting on a bench begins telling his incredible story to casual listeners waiting for the bus.
This is the starting point of Forrest Gump, one of the most significant films of the 1990s (and beyond), born from Winston Groom’s novel of the same name and brought to the big screen by Robert Zemeckis. But beware: the Forrest Gump played by Tom Hanks is not really the one in the book.
The basic idea, in fact, is similar: a boy with a low IQ who finds himself accomplishing great feats because of qualities of which he himself is unaware. There is, however, one major absentee in the pages of Groom that is introduced by the film adaptation and that is race.
What is the race for Forrest Gump?
Forrest runs, he runs like no one else, he runs so hard that sometimes it is just impossible to stop him. A quality that has allowed this character to be considered a true symbol of running, certainly more pop than the philippides (or Pheidippides) of Greek memory, the protagonist of the myth that spawned the marathon.
In Forrest’s run he spends his exceptional life punctuated by feats as extraordinary as they are absurd: he was the one who taught Elvis Presley the proper steps to dance rock ‘n’ roll, successes at football led him to meet Kennedy and discover a mysterious dedication from Marilyn Monroe addressed to the president, then he went to fight in Vietnam and received the Medal of Honor for military valor, discovered he was a champion at ping pong and successfully challenged the Chinese at the height of the Cold War, unwittingly provoked the Watergate scandal that framed Nixon, became a successful entrepreneur through a shrimp boat, and by investing in the shares of a young company called Apple became a billionaire. A hallucinatory life that finds some truly meaningful moments in the few (but powerful) affections that accompany Forrest throughout these events: his love for his childhood friend Jenny, his mother’s pearls of wisdom, and the two friends, “Bubba” and Lieutenant Dan, whom he met during the Vietnam War.
And then lots and lots of running.
So the question remains at the end of the story: what is the race for Forrest Gump?
Stories start from their beginning
Let’s rewind the tape, start from the first scene (which is also the last one): Forrest is sitting on a bench, he just wants to tell his story, no matter who the interlocutor will be, also because at the bus stop you can meet anyone. He does not worry about the reaction of the listener, does not worry about not being taken seriously. He is still, sitting. He wants to go back with words because he realized that he of life knew nothing and only by running learned what he needed, as by his own admission, “I am not a smart man, but love I know what it means.” And he got there, Forrest: day after day, mile after mile. That’s why he can now remain comfortable on a bench eating chocolates and chatting with whoever happens to be there.
Also because Forrest has come a long way.
For example, one morning Forrest discovers that his Jenny is no longer at home; she has left. Almost dictated by an instinctive reaction, he begins to run. The viewer might think that running is dictated by a desire to find a loved one. But no. Forrest just wants to get to the end of the road, then he goes to the end of the city, then he goes to the end of the county and gets to run for over three years crossing the length and breadth of the United States.
It is the top moment of the film, the passage that turns Forrest Gump into a symbol. The sequence in question, by the way, also brings with it a fascinating behind-the-scenes story told in the excellent docuseries The films of our childhood (Brian Volk-Weiss, 2019, Netflix): because of a budget that had been steadily reduced by the production, Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis, who had already revised their fees downward, were forced to pay five hundred thousand dollars out of their own pockets in order to finish the sequence in Monument Valley and save the film’s most important scene. Forrest gets there after more than three years of running and he is not the same Forrest as when he left: he has a very long beard and hair and is surrounded by a group of followers who try to keep up with him and show deep disappointment when he suddenly realizes that he is tired and that it is time to go home. The world had accompanied that journey wondering about the reasons why this man never stopped, being captivated by the exceptional feat to be told.
But Forrest runs because he feels like it, because his mother often told him that “you can tell a man by the shoes he wears,” by how worn they are, by how far he has come. He runs to understand, to know himself. And here the race is shown in its greatest and most powerful content: the mark it leaves within us, the passage between a before and an after.
Running for change
Those who run go through a change; they never return home in the same condition as they left, whether it is a journey, a training session or anything else. Forrest does not need a particular cause or motivation to get into running, he just wants to do it because he needs to feel the marks on him, to know the limits, to discover the living body that has accompanied his life. It is one of the freest moments in the history of cinema, one capable of generating belonging with the viewer, able to extend off the screen and become daily teaching, inspiration.
Running to run.
Then there will always be a bench to stop, talk to someone. And it doesn’t matter whether others will believe our story or not. Also because some stories are so good that they have to be true.
Andrea Martina