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Forrest Gump is more than Robert Zemeckis's movie or Winston Groom's novel; it is a popular culture phenomenon. In the course of becoming one of the top money-making American films of all time, it has garnered praise from some for being a "parable" about the innate worth of the so-called "common man," and blame from others for being merely a celebration of stupidity. Many serious film critics either ignored it, or took delight in making fun of it, yet it swept the major Academy Awards for which it was eligible. It has been widely marketed, praised, and blamed in turn as a lightweight, if moderately amusing, piece of mindless entertainment; yet it refused to fade quietly away the way most lightweight pieces do. It was still, more than three years after its release, being sold and rented with apparently unbridled enthusiasm; some video stores still featured it in their "new arrivals" section, now in "letterbox" format. The Martin-Porter Video Movie Guide enthusiastically calls it "the feelgood movie of 1994" and gives the film its highest possible rating, five stars out of five; other video guides concur with that judgment. It has even contributed words and phrases to the popular lexicon: a "gumpism" is a recognizable kind of expression; "Life is like a box of chocolates" has taken on whole new levels of meaning. In short, as Dave Kehr has written, "Gump, with amazing speed, has become part of America's iconography" (45).
Even if "icon" is overstating the case, Forrest Gump is notable for several reasons. First, and most obviously, it is a miracle of marketing and pop culture. Just as Gump himself notes of the string of marketing successes that he initiates or inspires in the film, Forrest Gump has made "a lot" of money. In one of the more ingenious pieces of its marketing strategy, two Christmases after its initial release, the movie, newly available on video, was packaged together with a box of chocolates: you bought the chocolates and a copy of the film was included. Winston Groom has seen his original novel reissued and selling very well (much better than it did the first time around); Groom's other novels are suddenly available in uniform paper bindings; he has produced a new volume...