Leaves

The point of a film is often not sharp enough to stick the conscience of its viewers, but subtle enough to invade the subconscious and have lasting impact. This may, indeed, be the case with ‘Forest Gump.’ While viewers may have learned from Forest that “life is like a box of chocolates “ in that “you never know what you’re going to get,” they learned from the producer of the film that life’s events, no matter how much we try to infuse them with meaning and purpose, are actually meaningless and ultimately purposeless. Forest Gump, though often clueless to the grand scheme of events going on around him, still managed to shape history through a string of seemingly insignificant and unrelated choices and minor details. The proverbial parentheses and moral of the story is that history is a farce - a random string of events fabricated and propped up by insignificant minutia with no ultimate purpose behind it. That is, we are just like a leaf floating in the wind with no goal or purpose, driven by the perturbations of our environment…hence, the leaf floating in the breeze at the end of film when Forest asks his penetrating existential question. Interesting, though, that the very leaf used as a symbol of purposelessness and an homage to ultimate meaningless (underscoring the idea that we may live as we please with no ultimate consequence) is actually a testimony to intricate design. Omitting the delicate stem branching and its optimization of volume to surface area ratio, the extraordinary biochemical pathway of the Calvin cycle that takes place in every cell an immeasurable number of times every second. Perhaps more allegorical is the withering of leaves that begins to occur the moment they are separating from the vine. Do not be deceived by their radiant palette of color at this moment – a very grotesque shade of brown swiftly approaches…just the right shade of tinder.