Forrest Gump in its list of the "Best 100 Conservative Movies" of all time. Then, in 2009, the magazine ranked the film number four on its 25 Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years list. "Tom Hanks plays the title character, an amiable dunce who is far too smart to embrace the lethal values of the 1960s. The love of his life, wonderfully played by Robin Wright Penn, chooses a different path; she becomes a drug-addled hippie, with disastrous results." James Burton, a communication arts professor at Salisbury University, argued that conservatives claimed "Forrest Gump" as their own due less to
Forrest Gump of the 1960s. Thomas Byers, in a "Modern Fiction Studies" article, called the film "an aggressively conservative film". It has been noted that while Gump follows a very conservative lifestyle, Jenny's life is full of countercultural embrace, complete with drug usage, promiscuity, and antiwar rallies, and that their eventual marriage might be a kind of reconciliation. Jennifer Hyland Wang argued in a "Cinema Journal" article that Jenny's death to an unnamed virus "...symbolizes the death of liberal America and the death of the protests that defined a decade [1960s]." She also notes the film's screenwriter, Eric Roth, when developing the