One of the focal moments of the 1994 box-office sensation Forrest Gump is when the eponymous, low-IQ hero is asked to address an anti-war rally in the centre of Washington, DC on the subject of the Vietnam War. Just as Gump (Tom Hanks) begins to speak, the sound system is disabled and neither the onscreen nor the film audience hears what he has to say. When the sound is restored, all that is heard is ‘and that's all I’ve got to say about that’. As we argued in our first chapter, Forrest Gump constructs American identity through the tropes of heterosexual romance and marriage, thereby suppressing the representation of histories of feminism, African American civil rights and gay liberation. Its marginalisation of these narratives and identities, like this speech, cannot be heard by the film's audience. Forrest Gump thus seems to have nothing to say about Vietnam, nor feminism, nor ethnicity, nor civil rights, nor sexuality. But of course, Forrest Gump actually has much to say about these things, concentrating 1960s counterculture in the characters of Gump's wife Jenny and his best friend and comrade in arms, Bubba. The death of both of these characters, the white hippie girl and the African American soldier, allows the film to strategically elide or to demonise representations of American identity that challenge the centrality of the straight white male.