Vietnam is just one nightmare in Forrest’s odd odyssey. Bart Edwards, a Gainsville, Florida, psychiatrist who worked in a veterans’ hospital and sees the film as a salve for Vietnam survivors.

“It makes you look at things in a better way than you used to,” says W. Then they run back to the theater to relive the experience. They snap up copies of Winston Groom’s 1986 novel, on which the film was based, and copies of Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump, a pocket-size book of aphorisms from the novel.

They storm music stores for the two-CD album, featuring 32 songs from the rock era. Gump has warmed the collective heart of moviegoers they spread the word, command their friends to go. This past weekend it reached the $100 million mark an industry savant predicts, quite conservatively, that it will finally earn $165 million. In its second week of release, when ticket sales for even the most robust hits drop perhaps 20%, Gump held even. As the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit), says, Gump has “no typical storytelling devices: no villain, no ticking clock, no burning fuse.” Yet it has exploded at the North American box office. Forrest Gump, a romantic epic starring Tom Hanks as a slow but sweet-souled Alabama boy who lucks into nearly every headline event of the past 40 years, is the summer sensation: a popular hit and an instant cultural touchstone.

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