Entertainment
How A Movie Ruined The 1990s By Making Everyone Obey
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
The 1990s are now, in the minds of many, supplanting the 1950s as humanity’s golden age. The internet was still in its earliest form, the economy was booming, and so was American innovation and culture.
In 1994, at the very center of that era was one blockbuster movie that the entire world rushed to fawn over. A supposed tale of optimism and high hopes, a recontextualizing of the path America had taken to reach a bright and shining future, as told through the lens of one very stupid man.
Or that’s what the film seemed to be. In reality, it may have been the first big step towards decline. Whether you knew it or not, while watching Forrest Gump, you were being screenwashed.
Forrest Gump’s Philosophy Of Total Obedience
Forrest Gump begins with a feather floating on the breeze. It has no weight, no impact, and no agency. The feather goes wherever the wind blows it, without complaint, confident that it’ll all work out in the end.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’ll get out. Life is like a feather floating on the air. There’s no way of knowing which way the wind is blowing; all you can do is let it move you.
There’s no way of knowing what you’re putting in your mouth, so just keep eating and accept whatever touches your tongue next.
It’s a philosophy of total obedience and an abandonment of agency, a rejection of responsibility, and it’s something no normal human would ever agree to. Which is why it’s easy to dismiss Forrest Gump as just a movie.
To make that kind of insane message stick, you’d need to go far beyond a speech about a box of chocolates into a world of secret, weapons-grade psychological persuasion. So that’s exactly what Forrest Gump did.
Let’s start this by saying Jenny is at the center of everything, but it’s not because she’s a secret villain, which is the standard edgy Forrest Gump take. She’s not a secret villain at all, she’s an open villain, but a villain made to serve a secret purpose.
Before I explain that, you need to understand the movie itself.
Forrest Gump Triggers Emotional Reactions To Make The Audience Suggestible
Forrest Gump is beautifully made and sold as a feel-good fable about kindness and decency. It’s so good at being emotional and at making the audience feel that it’s almost impossible to see what it’s doing through the tears. And that’s exactly why it works.
While training to be a hypnotist, most of my earliest lessons revolved around how to trigger someone into a suggestive state. One of the best and most effective ways is by creating an emotional reaction. Psychologists sometimes call this emotional priming. Emotional priming takes advantage of the fact that strong emotion impairs critical thinking and increases suggestibility.
One of the most unique things about Forrest Gump is its structure. It’s not one, continuous narrative. Instead, it’s a series of short vignettes, set at different times in the life of Gump.
Each Vignette starts a story, and then ends with a swelling emotional scene. It’s timed so that as each new segment begins, the audience is in a strong emotional state created by the last one.
We feel Forrest’s shame as he’s mocked for being dumb. Fear in the jungles of Vietnam. Unbearable grief at the death of his mother. With the audience constantly primed, Forrest Gump then uses that to deliver something insidious: a morality play where obedience is rewarded and independent thought is punished.
All of that is then wrapped in nostalgia and empathy so thick you’re not supposed to notice.
Forrest Gump As A Compliance Exercise
From the start, Forrest Gump is a rule follower, no matter how bad the rules are around him. The movie starts with Forrest relaying things his mother told him and explaining how he followed her instructions.
The entire movie becomes a compliance exercise for Forrest Gump, a man who never questions anything, and a script that makes that work for the audience by portraying him as a person of limited intelligence.
Of course, Forrest just complies; he’s not smart enough to do anything else. But why Forrest complies isn’t as important from a persuasion perspective as the fact that he does comply, and the movie gets viewers to cheer for his compliance.
Forrest succeeds because he does exactly what he’s told. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Run, Forrest. He runs.
Join the army. He joins.
Play ping-pong. He plays.
Invest in shrimp. He invests.
Forrest never questions instructions from anyone. He never resists authority. He never evaluates outcomes. He doesn’t even really choose. He complies, and the universe showers him with rewards. Wealth. Fame. Love. Respect. A charmed life delivered one order at a time.
The film frames this as innocence. But structurally, it’s perfect obedience.
Obedience to his mother and Jenny. Obedience to the state that sends him to die in the jungle and then to play ping pong. Obedience is Forrest Gump’s entire life. He has no agency, and it’s celebrated.
One of the only moments where Forrest shows any agency is in a failed attempt to rescue Jenny, who he sees making out with a boy in a car and mistakenly thinks she’s being harmed. She yells at him, tells him he’s wrong.
So it’s right back to doing what he’s told. In that moment, after he apologizes and returns to compliance, Jenny rewards him by taking off her top.
Forrest Enters A Holding Pattern When There’s No One To Obey
When Forrest’s mother dies, and he runs out of people to obey, Forrest spends his time mowing lawns. Back and forth, back and forth, locked in a holding pattern while he waits for his next command.
When Jenny leaves him, that pattern repeats. Forrest starts running. Back and forth, back and forth, awaiting his next instructions. Like a feather being blown about by the wind.
Moral Laundering And Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump’s character is a textbook example of a persuasion technic call Moral Laundering. In Moral Laundering, an unpopular or contested idea is made more acceptable by attaching it to a trusted, heroic, or morally admired figure, allowing the figure’s perceived virtue to transfer onto the message.
Moral laundering alone wouldn’t be enough to screenwash an audience into viewing total compliance as optimal. So the film provides a contrast to our obedient hero, using our old friend, Poisoning the Well.
Poisoning the Well is a concept we’ve talked a lot about on Screenwashed, and it’s the polar opposite of Moral Laundering.
In Poisoning the Well, you have a villain say something good, to make people think that the good thing is as villainous as the person saying it.
Both Moral Laundering and Poisoning the Well take advantage of moral asymmetry.
Moral asymmetry is the tendency of humans to judge the same behavior as morally acceptable or unacceptable depending on who commits it, rather than on the behavior itself.
Forrest Gump is used to launder the idea that total obedience is an optimal behavior pattern, while another character poisons the well against thinking for yourself. Who’s the ultimate free thinker in Forrest Gump? Jenny.
Jenny’s Refusal To Follow Rules Unlocks Forrest Gump’s True Intention
From the moment we meet Jenny, she refuses to obey and follow the crowd. Forrest is getting picked on by the kids around him. Jenny has none of it; she defies the bullies’ authority and befriends him.
Throughout the movie, Jenny questions. Jenny rebels. Jenny does the unexpected. When she faces abuse from an authority figure, she gets away from it. She rejects traditional paths. She challenges authority. She experiments with politics, sex, and culture.
For that, the movie destroys her. It destroys her narratively by making her life a disaster, but it also destroys her in the eyes of the audience by making her a villain. It does that by having her express her independence through actions and ideas that most of the audience will find intolerable, and then turning her relationship with Forrest into one where she takes advantage of him.
The movie makes Jenny a villain on purpose, not accidentally, as some commentators seem to assume. Every time Jenny exercises agency, the film punishes her with escalating consequences: abuse, addiction, illness, and isolation. Her curiosity is framed as recklessness. Her defiance is reframed as self-harm. Her independence becomes pathology.
This is not subtle storytelling. It’s conditioning.
Jenny’s Suffering Only Ends When She Complies
The movie pretends Jenny’s suffering is the result of “bad choices,” but it carefully rigs the game so every choice outside obedience leads to pain. There is no version of Jenny’s life where thinking for herself works out. The audience is trained, scene by scene, to associate her autonomy with disaster.
Worst of all, Jenny is redeemed only when she stops rebelling.
She returns home. She settles down. She becomes quiet. Sick. Dependent. Her independence is stripped away, and only then is she allowed happiness. Only briefly, before she dies.
The message is unmistakable: a person who thinks for themselves must be broken before they can be accepted.
Forrest, meanwhile, never changes. He doesn’t grow. He doesn’t learn. He is rewarded precisely because he remains unchanged and never exercises any agency. He never thinks for himself. He always obeys.
This isn’t an accident. It’s a narrative machine built to make submission feel virtuous and independence feel dangerous.
Forrest Gump Wants You To Think You Have No Agency
In the movie’s final moments, Forrest tells the audience that there are only two possibilities to life: that everything is destiny or everything is random. Either possibility has the same commonality: you have no agency, you have no say in anything that happens to you. By the time the feather floats away, the audience has been trained to believe those two realities are the only possibilities, and that the best way through life is to follow orders, trust the system, and never ask why.
Life is a box of chocolates, and Forrest Gump teaches you to sit back and let life put whatever it wants in your mouth. So you cheer for the person who never questions. You mourn the person who does. You walk away thinking that’s just how the world works and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Congratulations, obedient slaves, you’ve been screenwashed.