Jenny Curran Becomes A Genius in the Forrest Gump Book (movie and book spoilers)
Jenny Curran is Forrest Gump’s love interest in the book of the same name by Winston Groom from 1986, as well as the movie adaptation in 1994. Forrest met Jenny when they were kids and as they grew up, they split apart and came back together many times. While the book and movie take very different paths and have different messages, both managed to be excellent in their own right and shows the world views of Forrest Gump, an individual with an unusually low IQ. Forrest inadvertently excels at the many activities he tries out throughout his life but doesn’t understand context behind what people say.
In the book, Forrest goes through much more wild experiences than in the movie, and the same could be said about Jenny. Jenny's character has a lot more depth and influence in the book. In the movie, Jenny is shown to have an abusive father who sexually assaulted her as a child. Jenny and Forrest quickly become best friends when they meet as kids on the school bus. As they grow up, Jenny falls into a life of disrepair, and she is... sexually adventurous, a free bird, travelling across the country and encountering very colorful characters after getting thrown out of college. Throughout their lives, Jenny and Forrest drift apart and then find themselves together again. The same relationship occurs in the book. Jenny and Forrest meet on the school bus and their lives become one and separated multiple times. However, Jenny is not shown to be as supportive as in the movie. She doesn't say, "Run, Forrest, run!" in the book, or swing from trees with him. Jenny's childhood is also not explored much in the book if I recall correctly. Jenny in the book is much more manipulative, and she takes advantage of Forrest, even landing him in jail after convincing him to join a protest and throw his medal from the U.S. Army with the public at watch.
Furthermore, the book is vastly different from the movie because Jenny ends up marrying Forrest in the movie. Combined with her rough childhood, Jenny's character is written to be understood and forgiven by the audience as she transitions and understands what love is by the time her death is around the corner. Another big difference between the book and movie is that the movie is also centered around Forrest's relationship with his mother. In the book, this relationship is not well explored. His mother did not die in the book, but she got fired from a job and Forrest hired her to work for Bubba Gump Shrimp. The movie is constructed so that the audience can have a greater emotional relationship with Forrest and to show that he holds those close to him in very high regard despite him not understanding a lot with his intelligence. The book takes an entirely different turn and does not give Forrest as much of a positive light, and this leads to what turns Jenny Curran into a genius, despite her early backstabbing tendencies.
Forrest is discovered to be a good candidate for wrestling long after his Army career. He meets with Lt. Dan in his wheelchair (or cart) who becomes his mentor. The wrestling is all staged, and sometimes Forrest's manager wants him to win, but sometimes not. When Forrest tries to win when he isn't supposed to, the other guy outsmarts him, and Forrest gets hurt. They meet with Jenny and the three of them share an apartment. This is where the story begins to take a turn. Before wrestling, when Forrest was in college, the Army, and various other activities after his deployment came to an end, Jenny was adventurous, just like in the movie. However, now over 30 years old, Jenny realizes she loves Forrest, and she tells him she wants to settle down with him for real. Jenny hates seeing Forrest get so beat up from wrestling and wants him to quit. Forrest does not know how to communicate with Jenny. Lt. Dan and Forrest are addicted to the business. Lt. Dan has an idea to escape the business by betting on a win when Forrest is supposed to lose, because they lost trust in Forrest’s manager. However, they lose all their money, and the three of them sell the apartment and part ways. Lt. Dan tells Forrest something along the lines of how his decisions negatively affect Forrest when they're together, so they should split up. This is a very significant scene because it shows that Jenny has changed and it villainizes Forrest because his low intelligence means he does not understand how to build a relationship with Jenny, who he loves, and how to escape greed and other people's influence. So, Jenny runs away again.
The next most significant scene in the book is at the end, when Forrest finally reunites with Jenny again. Like the movie, Jenny had Forrest's son and was raising him without Forrest seeing him. They meet by the park bench and Forrest sees his son with Jenny. At first it looks like it will end like the movie, but it doesn't. Jenny says she is with another man, and they have a place together. She cannot be with Forrest because Forrest is not intelligent. In the book, Forrest would not be able to understand Forrest Jr.'s needs if he couldn't understand Jenny's back when he was wrestling. Forrest describes Jenny's last words to him at the end of their conversation:
"Idiots," Jenny says, an her lips is tremblin. "Who ain't a idiot?" An then she is gone.
This is significant because this shows that Jenny realizes how messed up she was, just like in the movie. Jenny realizes and is acknowledging that everyone is an idiot, not just Forrest. Jenny is calling herself an idiot and yes she was. Lt. Dan is an idiot for gambling their money away on a win and destroying Forrest's relationships associated with his wrestling career. Forrest is an idiot because even after everything he succeeded in and made lots of money with, at the end of the book he continues to just keep strolling along with Lt. Dan by his side and chasing different experiences... The ending is very bleak and not a pleasant wrap up for Forrest because he keeps strolling along when he doesn't know how to make the rightest decisions that doomed all his experiences before. Forrest is also an idiot because he doesn't understand the needs of other people and how to communicate on a personal level with Jenny to maintain a relationship. Jenny is the only one who learns to clean herself up and improve her life. Jenny turns into a genius because she develops a much greater understanding of the world from her idiocy. Jenny also does not use her knowledge to think she is better than Forrest because she realizes that she is still an idiot, everyone is, and everyone in life is just learning one bit at a time. Jenny has singlehandedly discovered a great meaning of life, an idea of idiocy that Lt. Dan and Forrest keep falling back into with no sign of climbing out of it.
Jenny Curran learns important life lessons that show that she has become the genius of the Forrest Gump book. Both the book and movie justify Jenny's transition to settling down in different ways. The book justifies the transition by showing that Jenny made the first move on Forrest by talking to him about settling down as lovers, but Forrest does not have enough plot armor to understand how to communicate with her. The movie justifies the transition by showing the audience how rough Jenny's childhood is and also uses Forrest's loving relationship with his mother to increase the impact of his relationship with Jenny. Forrest may understand what love is, but in the book, he still isn't smart enough to understand communication on a human level and how to maintain a relationship. Jenny's transition in the book is a much more grown up and impactful transition because she makes the decision to talk to Forrest and she learns to change on her own terms with time, despite how much more manipulative she was early on compared to her movie character. The book's events potentially show that Jenny is stronger than in the movie even without showing her childhood, and Jenny is not as villainized in the book as many people may think about her movie character. Jenny's genius is her acknowledging her idiocy and her journey to amend her past to raise her son with a respectable man who can address their needs. The book takes a more realistic and more involved spin on the events and makes you cry that Jenny and Forrest can't be together, while the movie is meant to be more emotional and show that Forrest is a much more respectable man that Jenny never deserved, but he still forgives everything she went through because he is a gentleman underneath his low intelligence and he knows what love is.
Dare I say, Jenny may just be a real hero because now she can pass her life knowledge to the next generation and make the world a better place. Forrest and Lt. Dan will continue to roll down the street looking for their next adventure, as the book shows that Forrest is not capable of making the right decisions even though he tells us he tries to do the right thing. The book is just a big heartbreak because of Forrest's bleak outcome, Forrest not actually being a gentleman, and that he and Jenny never end up together, but it is a great read, and I think both the book and movie are amazing at what they portray. The movie excels with showing Forrest and Lt. Dan finding honor and happiness again when life screws them up. In the end, when Forrest looks up at the stars, and sees the whole sky just laid out there, he remembers everything and thinks about how things could've been, as opposed to the movie when he thinks about Jenny in the big ol' fat rain in Vietnam. In the book, Forrest just exists as a lesson to turn Jenny good, and that’s all there is to say about that.
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