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10 May 2001
Posted in
Writing -
Essays
Never underestimate the entertainment value of retards. In real life, the mentally disabled are marginalized, rarely rising beyond the societal functions of enthusiastic fast food clerk or giddy grocery bagger. Nevertheless, these peripheral rubes are central to a prestigious literary history, lionized as noble fools, wise beyond — in fact, because of — their severe cognitive limitations.
Throughout the works of Western man, from Dosteyevsky to Shakespeare, the simpleton is depicted as pure good, unfettered by the complications of knowledge, his moral sight unimpaired by ambiguity. At times the chucklehead is merely an unheralded seer, and at others he is used as an allegory for a Christ-like savior.
Cinema is no exception. One need hardly intermingle the terms "retard" and "movie" in the same thought for more than a few millisecond before images of a slack-jawed Tom Hanks sprinting in highwaters loops mercilessly through the gate of the mind's projector. Never was there a more celebrated, beloved and idolized cretin than Forrest Gump.
Half-wit Gump won America's collective heart by sleepwalking through history — running when times got tough — buoyed simply by a good mother's love and a few memorized platitudes repeated ad nauseum. As this dunderhead unwittingly prospered while those around him perished, he became somehow exalted as a paragon of morality.
While this speaks well of the shrewd marketing executives at Paramount Studios circa the early 1990s, it does not well compliment the moral compass of the American moviegoer.
For it is not difficult to conjure another infamous filmic lummox of arguably superior moral character than the favored Gump. The two figures actually share much in common: both were raised in rural surroundings, dutifully obeying the instruction of attentive parents. Yet one is the object of mass affection; the other reviled as a monster.
Regardless, in the cinematic retard continuum, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface is a more moral character than Forrest Gump.
First, it is important to understand that the measure of morality is not simply a mathematical aggregate of positive deeds over the negative. Leatherface, with his numerous murders (accomplished while adorning a mask of stitched human skin) would lose that contest, easily. Nor is it determined by good done in fear of punishment for having done otherwise, as the prominent political parties and religious organizations frequently infer.
No. Morality is choice. An individual moral act is one in which a person decides of their own free will to choose a specific path in spite of personal consequences because they believe it is the right thing to do by others. It is a greater moral good, in fact, to make such a choice when the dire nature of the personal consequences is known and feared and yet faced anyway.
By this pure definition, Forrest Gump is strictly amoral. Simply obeying one's mother may lead one to perform good deeds, but even so in such a case it is then the mother carrying the weight of moral decision and not the congenitally lobotomized offspring. After all, does not Leatherface as simply obey his father's moral guidance and in doing so carve up teenagers with a chainsaw for the purpose of award-wining sweet meats and chili? Looking at the two individuals' choices, one must agree that their actions are equitable in their divorce from personal responsibility and morality. Further, to grade on a scale, it is fair to say that Leatherface is the more compelled of the two to shed personal whims and follow parental orders, for given the nature of his family business, it can reasonably be assumed that the murderer's disobedience will draw harsher punishment than a displeased frown from saccharine Sally Field.
If we look closely at key moments in the fine second film in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series*, in fact, it can be truthfully asserted that Leatherface is indeed a character of greater moral fiber than Gump. At the end of the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2's first act, Leatherface is charged with the assignment of hunting down and carving designs in the supple torso of Texan radio DJ Stretch. Although his intended victim gives good chase, when our muttonheaded anti-hero finally catches her, he delays. His eyes dart wildly behind the natty, crudely stitched dermis hiding his face. Will Leatherface obey father's immoral orders? After some intense deliberation, during which Leatherface violently thrusts his grinding saw in phallic frustration, he leaves her unharmed, if a little shaken.
What is this choice that Leatherface has made? Did he sense that killing her would be wrong, or did her bare, beer-covered legs simply arouse in him a sublimated sexual urge? In either case, the choice he made to disobey father's orders was a profoundly moral one. Some might argue that choosing not to murder for reasons of lust does not justify a choice as moral, but this response is shallow. For what is more moral than choosing a creative urge over a destructive one? And besides, for one who often behaves crudely and outside the law as Leatherface does, there is nothing to stop one so sexually aroused from simply raping the helpless object of fancy; nothing that is except moral choice, which is what Leatherface exerts when he turns away from Stretch, leaving her uninvaded and totally intact.
Even though this incident does not reform Leatherface from his brutal learned ways, he does again show another moment of moral decision in the face of certain dire consequence when he encounters Stretch yet again, this time in the innards of his family's labyrinthine, decadent home. He discovers Stretch as an intruder, but instead of turning her over to his ruthless father or wacked-out brother, Leatherface in fact saves her life, hiding her behind the freshly-shorn flesh of her radio station engineer L.G., recently skinned and moaning nearby.
Would not one say that a Nazi officer who disobeyed orders to protect endangered Jews is of a greater relative morality than his fellow officers who blindly follow orders without equivocation? That is the moral difference between Leatherface and Forrest Gump, and yet the world's affection is generously showered on the latter but not the former. What does this say about those who regard Gump as an icon of dribbling goodness?
Unfortunately the celebration of the cult of Gump has little to do with actually goodness and more to do with society's simpering need to feel good about themselves without earning it. It is Gump's unconscious profiting that appeals so to the masses; the idea that one can succeed in life without engaging one's capacity for critical thinking. If you look at Gump's provenant encounters with the important historical figures of his time — Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Governor George Wallace, Elvis, Chairman Mao, and Dick Cavett — and consider that he makes nothing of these encounters, one could even argue that if he weren't so mentally adrift his inaction would seem offensive, if not immoral. But, sadly, this represents how most Americans regard such influential public figures: rarely do they recognize them, and if they do it's either as celebrities or objects of ridicule.
Gump, who fails to challenge a single idea in his providential life, is crowned King Doofus, a golden icon of benevolent idiocy for highbrows and hod-carriers alike. Meanwhile, looby Leatherface, whose gruesome demise cut short his burgeoning moral development, did at least in his time attempt to thwart the status quo in favor of moral choice, but yet his worshippers are limited to only a few middle-aged virginal Fangoria-readers in Krokus T-shirts, who, unwittingly, have thus become the unlikely moral guardians of our troubled time.
2004 UPDATE: You can also omit the dreadful 2003 TCM remake from any relevance to this thesis. And, for fun, to read my review of that film, go here
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