I was flipping through the channels on TV the other day and came across “Forrest Gump”. Naturally, that pretty well ruined all my other plans for the next three hours. I love “Forrest Gump”. It’s like a hillbilly retard “Zelig”. It’s “Being There” without the unhelpful distraction of subtlety. Sure, it’s right-wing, jingoistic hokum, but if you don’t get a rush when Forrest tackles the hippie who punched Jenny and then beats the living shit out of him, then you are simply dead inside. Also, if you are sick of masturbating to “The Princess Bride” and want some more Robin Wright material, it does the trick.

Still, when I was watching the movie the other day, I was struck by a horribly disturbing revelation. I am sure that this so-called original idea of mine has been floating around for years and has been thought of a billions time before, but fuck you. It’s new to me. Hear me out for a minute.

Rather than spend time summarizing the end of the movie’s plot (thinking about Robin Wright has made me want to finish this thing quickly), I’ll go with the Wikipedia summary:

One day, while Forrest is mowing the lawn, Jenny returns to visit him, and he proposes marriage to her. She declines, though feels obliged to prove her love to him by sleeping with him, then she leaves early the next morning. On a whim, Forrest elects to go for a run. Seemingly capriciously, he decides to keep running across the country several times for over three years, becoming famous in the process. During his run, Forrest unwittingly inspires two separate entrepreneurs to create Smiley Face/”Have a Nice Day” T-shirts and “Shit Happens” bumper stickers.

In 1981, Forrest reveals that he is waiting at the bus stop because he had received a letter from Jenny, who, having seen him run on television, had asked him to visit her. Once he is reunited with Jenny, Forrest discovers that she has a young son, of whom Forrest is the father and who is exceptionally intelligent. Jenny tells Forrest she is suffering from an unknown illness (thought to be the AIDS virus). Forrest convinces Jenny to move back to Greenbow with her son and live with him, and Jenny decides to accept Forrest’s marriage proposal from several years prior. Jenny and Forrest finally marry, with a completely changed Dan arriving for the wedding, with his fiance, and now able to walk with the use of prosthetic limbs made of titanium alloy. However, Jenny dies soon afterwards.

The film ends with father and son waiting for the school bus on little Forrest’s first day of school. Opening the book his son is taking to school, the white feather from the beginning of the movie is seen to fall from within the pages. As the bus pulls away, the white feather is caught on a breeze and drifts skyward.

Let’s run this down:

Jenny has unprotected sex with Forrest. She leaves Forrest. Forrest runs around the country for a couple of years. Jenny gets in touch with Forrest, who visits her. Forrest finds out that Jenny bore his child (a young Haley Joel Osment). Jenny also tells him that she is dying of what is likely AIDS. Jenny and Forrest marry. Jenny dies. Forrest raises the kid.

You know what this means: Forrest Gump had AIDS.

It only makes sense. Jenny must have had HIV before she slept with Forrest. There are scenes of her whoring it up at a coke party, etc. She had unprotected sex with him and got pregnant. She left, found out she was pregnant, and straightened up. She had little Forrest, raised him, then called Forrest.

Forrest had unprotected sex with her. Are we to assume that he is somehow HIV-proof? Also, are we to assume that they had protected sex after they were married? Bullshit. It was 1981. The disease wasn’t recognized until 1981. People didn’t know that condoms could prevent the spread of HiV at that time, particularly in Savannah, Georgia and Fuckwit, Alabama. There’s no way that they didn’t consummate their marriage, and there is no way they were using protection.

Enjoy your Kaposi’s Sarcoma, Mr. Gump.

You know how he said “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” Isn’t that a little more poignant now that you definitely know what he was going to get? Full-blown AIDS.

Also, don’t try to tell me Jenny didn’t have AIDS. As the book clearly espoused, sexually-promiscuous hippies and drug-user are incapable of happiness and have to be punished in the worst possible way. Only pure-hearted simpletons walk between the raindrops.

When you start thinking about this, it gets even worse. How do we know that little Forrest wasn’t born HIV-positive? This could be really awkward. How could Forrest even explain that to his son? If only he had someone to help him out with that…