Noticing interesting parallels between FORREST GUMP and 1982’s THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP with Robin Williams. They’re both episodic, life-spanning stories about men born during WWII into chaotic and unknowable universes, and raised by single mothers. At a fundamental level both ask, how do we redefine masculinity in the wake of women’s liberation? But their answers, and the way in which they pose the question, are almost perfectly inverted.
Gump is a slow-witted Southern boy whose mother sacrifices herself to a man for her son’s education. He learns of women’s lib indirectly through his friend Jenny, who he wants to domesticate. He doesn’t try to make sense of the changing world, however. He just passively fumbles through.
Garp is an overeducated New Englander whose mother rapes a dying WWII vet in order to conceive of her only son without the need of a male partner. Garp learns of women’s lib through his mother, a pioneer of the movement (also named Jenny), thus has no choice but to grapple with the changing world. But he does so with a hypervigilance and futile attempts to gain a sense of control over the chaos.
Gump finds strength in traits historically tantamount to male weakness. When fleeing from bullies chasing him in a truck, he discovers his running super power. He's further rewarded for his running skills with a purple heart for bravery in Vietnam. By contrast, when Garp attacks a bully the man retaliates by climbing into his truck and almost steamrolling him. The closest Garp comes to being a brave war hero pilot like the father he never knew is when a plane crashes into his house.
In a bygone era, Gump might have been judged as effeminate for abstaining from sex with the prostitute, but here he’s rewarded by not dying from an STD like Jenny does. Meanwhile Garp’s extramarital sexual conquests result indirectly in the death of his son.
The fates of Gump and Garp put their stories into the starkest contrast. After Lieutenant Dan’s sacrifice for his fellow man leaves him bitter and crippled, Gump offers friendship to the isolated man. Once the 60s and first half of the 70s have passed, Gump’s gesture of kindness becomes manifest when "Hurricane Carmen" (see: women's lib) destroys all of the boats surrounding Forrest’s but leaves his floating. Together, Forrest and Dan begin their journey toward riches by embracing their "shrimp" (see: compromised post-60s manhoods).
Meanwhile in GARP, when feminist extremists’ act of sacrificing their own tongues in solidarity with a mutilated rape victim results in warring factions of women versus men, instead of reaching out to these isolationists, Garp writes a book criticizing them and is shot to death for it.
GUMP is about a man who despite a conservative upbringing learns to thrive amid changing tides and a failing patriarchy. The key to his success, though, is by remaining a boy — by following his mother’s advice and never growing up or thinking about problems in the world greater than his own. Unfettered by a social conscience, it seems to say, the world is his (white male) shrimp. (Maybe this is why Gump’s waxing philosophical about whether or not we have a destiny rings hollow — that Gump never grows wise only further proves the story’s point.)
GARP is about a man who, despite a liberal upbringing, clings to outmoded ideas about what a man should be and pays the price for it. Unlike Gump, Garp does make attempts to individuate from his mother — by defying her advice to practice abstinence, for example -- each of which ends in disaster. Its fatalistic message seems to be that for men to maintain a sense of identity in a post-feminist world they must continue to inhabit the more harmful traits of the human race that women stereotypically don’t share. The alternative — being better human beings — would require men to sacrifice their manhood.
Pauline Kael said GARP amounts to nothing more than a castration fantasy. By extension, GUMP’s message might be that being good means never growing a proverbial pair to begin with.
(Side note: yet another similarity is in both movies the women portraying the heroes’ mothers— Glenn Close and Sally Field— are only 4 and 10 years older, respectively, than the actors playing grownup Garp and Gump.)
