Next to Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory‘s Grandpa Joe, there are few characters in cinema netizens like to dunk on more than Forrest Gump’s Jenny Curran, played by Robin Wright. The character escapes abject poverty and an abusive father to live a revolutionary life, fighting for female and Black liberation, before succumbing to substance abuse, AIDS, and death. Still, viewers have long treated her as a drag on Forrest’s charmed life. Despite his unending devotion to Jenny, Forrest overcomes childhood disability to run full speed toward a life of athletic and financial achievement. As Jenny, a victim of childhood abuse who elicits little sympathy from the film’s audience, spirals the drain, Forrest adds to his birthright. Jenny is a character who, along with Bubba, has led many to read Forrest Gump as a regressive and conservative movie. That’s not how Robin Wright sees it, though. Speaking to The New York Times, Wright shot back against the charge that Jenny was “punished for her choices” and that the role was “anti-feminist.”
“No! It’s not about that,” Wright argues. “People have said she’s a Voldemort to Forrest. I wouldn’t choose that as a reference, but she was kind of selfish.” That’s a fair point: Jenny is not Voledmort because Forrest has no problem saying her name. “I don’t think it’s a punishment that she gets AIDS,” she continues. “She was so promiscuous — that was the selfishness that she did to Forrest. He was in love with her from Day 1.” It’s not a moral failing to get sick, and in Wright’s eyes, her death isn’t comeuppance for not being immediately sexually or romantically attracted to her childhood friend. Still, it was, apparently, selfish to not immediately engage in a romantic relationship with him, and her desire to find other sexual partners was a selfishness that doesn’t exactly fight the charge of anti-feminism.
“She was just flighty and running and doing coke and hooking up with a Black Panther,” she continued. “And then she gets sick and says, ‘This is your child. But I’m dying.’ And he still takes her: ‘I’ll take care of you at Mama’s house.’ I mean, it’s the sweetest love story.”
Is it promiscuity that kept her from Forrest, or was it his ruining her strip club rendition of “Blowing In The Wind” that turned her off? Is it her obligation to be with Forrest simply because they prayed to turn into birds while they were kids? In the eyes of many, the answer is yes. The character suffers abuse from most of the men in her life. She certainly wouldn’t be the first survivor of childhood trauma to escape their trauma only to find themselves in similarly precarious situations later in life. We guess that makes her a bad person.
Jenny is a complicated, if underwritten, character who mainly exists in the narrative to show the bad things that happen to Baby Boomers who aren’t fortunate enough to be born white, male, and wealthy. Does that make her anti-feminist? Perhaps. However, that reflects more on the film and filmmakers than Wright, whose job is to understand and empathize with Jenny. Life is like a box of chocolates, but why must all of Jenny’s chocolates be coconut-filled? The world may never know.
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