The film Forrest Gump contemplates the meaning of life; is there a purpose to our struggles, or do we just float along as things happen to us life a feather in the wind. I think that evidence from the film points to a combination of both theories of thought. Gump throughout his narration mentions the famous people who he had met, such as JFK and John Lennon, and how “somebody shot him for some reason”. Repeatedly, assassinations and assassination attempts are used not only to show the passage of time but also as a metaphor for the complex relationship of destiny and randomness in life. Assassinations are unique events as the assassin spends hours or days preparing what he or she will do, creating detailed plans, and essentially creating a destiny for the victim. However, at the same time these assassinations seem random and senseless, the murder of John Lennon has no logic behind it. The assassins are often paranoid or believe in grand conspiracy theories which lack any shred of reason. Assassinations are a paradox in which an event shares a well calculated identity with a random quality. In an odd, and perhaps macabre way, assassinations are prime examples of the film maker’s claim that our lives can be both entirely random, yet also planned out for destiny.