Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters? That liberated women can't get AIDS? That in the late 70's prostitutes were guaranteed ways of getting this disease that wasn't widespread yet?
Forrest Gump had very real characters. Jenny had a shitty life, which continued to be shitty by her choices. This really happens to people from shitty backgrounds because they don't recognize shitty situations as shitty, but as normal. Had she stayed with Forrest, her life wouldn't have been that way, but she still could have been the strong woman that was part of her personality. She just didn't recognize when a good thing came her way.
Lots of people did heroin and hookers before AIDS was everywhere, not all of them contracted HIV. That's the nature of a mystery disease. Lt. Dan also fell into a depression that Forrest helped pull him out of, just by being a good influence. Lt. Dan had the life Jenny could have, Forrest made the lives of people around him better by being a good person. Between that and the rapid changes the world went through from 1950 to ~1985 is what the movie is about.
It's not a propaganda film, despite your strongest wishes that it were.
"Are you saying anti-war protesters can't be women beaters?"
can you really not see the argument being made? the original post was not saying no women got aids, or that no anti-war protesters are wife-beaters. it was arguing that there is a systematic bias.
i don't know if that's true or not, but wilfully misunderstanding or misrepresenting the argument doesn't help anyone.
It's a non sequitur. It does not follow that because the anti-war protester that Jenny hooks up with beats her that the movie is trying to portray anti-war protesters as woman beaters. It can only be a shocking bias if it's so shocking for it to occur.
It also doesn't fit the actual movie. The movie has Jenny making the same poor decisions over and over because that's what her background leads her to. Her personality leads her to protest the injustice of Vietnam, her view of normal gravitates her to the worst of the other protesters. Her personality leads her to being a liberated woman of the 70's, while at the same time drawing her into the culture of abuse and self-abuse that put her in the position to be one of the early contractors of HIV.
There is no bias, this really happens. Jenny was a complex character that was controlled by her demons.
The major characters of Forrest Gump are really portrayed quite realistically.
Propaganda or no, our brains do have a tendency to mix up correlation and causation (most notably because many times, correlation does come from causation), and a tendency to draw conclusions from fiction as well as from reality.
Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other.
(Now, I do see her as a prisoner of her shitty situation, and not as a "liberated" woman.)
> Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other.
So just because some people are woolly headed, artistic endeavours should show only one-dimensional characters? Reality is filled with Syrian rebels who eat hearts, rapists who were nice to their mothers and computer programmers who pray to god.
To some extent, everyone is "woolly headed" as you put it (did you mean holly headed?). While it's not a good reason to limit artistic endeavours to one-dimensional characters, it is a good reason to pay a little attention to it. I mean, a story full of weak cute girls whose sole purpose is to be saved by strong, muscular, male heroes does kinda sends the wrong message. I mean, girls often can and should defend themselves. Let's not teach them otherwise.
On the other hand, the fact that we tend to see correlations everywhere also mean we should be more forgiving when one happen to irk us. For instance, I once noticed in a season of 24 that "proprietary" was mentioned twice as an excuse for being harder to crack. The Stalman in me translated that by "proprietary -> better", and wondered if there was some kind of agenda behind that. Then, in season 8, I noticed that "proprietary" was used as an excuse for being harder to get used to. Which gives "proprietary -> worse". So much for the agenda. (By the way, 24 features much stronger and much more objectionable correlations. Noticed how human rights stop where Jack Bauer begins? —though again, season 8 doesn't seem to endorse torture any more.)
I'm afraid that if you think PG will continue to tell you to stop after this time, you are wrong. The next step is probably you being hellbanned by one of the admins, or by software.
