Forrest Gump And Perks Of Being A Wallflower

Forrest Gump is one of those movies that literally anyone born in or during the time of VHS tapes was exposed to a minimum of 18 times… per year. However, as a kid obviously you couldn’t possibly understand the incredible multitudinous pop references of the time, nor the incredible milestones of American history encapsulated throughout the movie. Even after all these years and multiple viewings people still aren’t able to connect all the little dots here and there. And so, as a child, all Forrest Gump was to me was a nice, wholesome family movie in which the main character sounded eerily like Woody from Toy Story. Yet, as I began to mature and understand more complex emotions, I began to piece together, like many others inevitably decided, …show more content…
I learned how to work with others, how to raise kids, how to live, laugh, and love. The best shows were those that were more realistic and focused on specific aspects of the overall human experience. And so came the connection I made between Forrest Gump and Perks of Being a Wallflower. Both stories contain dark undertones of suicide, physical/emotional damage, sexual abuse, and cases of Stockholm Syndrome. In Forrest Gump it was Jenny that had been molested by her father and caused her to seek her version of love in others, no matter the physical or emotional cost inflicted upon herself during her (many) abusive relationships. And in Perks, not only is there the main character Charlie, who was molested by a beloved aunt whose death he still agonizes over as he blames himself, but also the girl he’s in love in, Sam, who was raped by her father’s boss at a young age. These cases of adolescent sexual abuse completely shattered what they believed love should be. It is for this reason that all the characters’ perspective on love is so skewed and distorted. Which is why they entered all such unwanted and disparaging …show more content…
They believed there was always some condition, or some complexity behind that emotion that needed for them to suffer. And so while a slightly younger version of myself believed Jenny a harlot, I have now come to realize that she was just trying to protect Forrest from herself. Knowing herself to be a fragmented and disheveled individual, she did not consider herself worthy of the simple unconditional love that Forrest constantly attempted to pour upon her. She even convinced herself that Forrest could not even understand the “complexity” of love with his stunted mental capacity. But, as cliché as it may sound, love knows no bounds. As said by another in defense of Jenny, “That's what she struggles with before coming to terms with the fact that she's happy with him, and he's happy with her, and that's what love actually is. It's something simple and unconditional, and even Forrest can understand it.” So in the end, Jenny did love Forrest with all her heart, she just wasn’t able to really comprehend what that feeling was and as a defense mechanism she did what she had always told Forrest to do;