When I was a kid, my grandparents owned exactly two VHS tapes that were deemed acceptable for me to watch: That Thing You Do! and The Sound of Music. After my mom dropped me off at my grandparents’ apartment on her way to work, I would sit cross-legged on the floor and wear those VHS tapes out, the bowl of instant mac & cheese in my lap neglected and congealed. I can probably trace my penchant for rewatching (and rewatching and rewatching and rewatching) films to those afternoons. I refused to pick a favorite – I watched either The Sound of Music or That Thing You Do! every day, and never the same one two days in a row. My youngest and hippest aunt had gifted both VHS tapes to my grandparents, perhaps in an attempt to help her parents understand some part of the American culture that she, out of four siblings, had assimilated most easily into. Sometimes my grandma would sit behind me on the couch, knitting and laughing when I burst into song along with the characters on screen. I’m not sure how much of the dialogue she understood – there were no Korean subtitles, of course – but she could tell how engrossed I was, and that was good enough for her.
As some of the first narratives I consumed and metabolized, these two films contributed to my early understanding of what a story is – who its narrators, protagonists and villains could be, how it might start and where it should end, what obstacles and resolutions I felt were earned, and the kinds of characters and issues I found compelling.
If you aren’t familiar with either film, here’s a quick synopsis of each: The Sound of Music, set in Austria in 1938, is about a manic pixie dream nun turned governess played by the incomparable Julie Andrews, who manages through the power of sheer pluck and once-in-a-generation vocal talent to charm seven contrary children and marry their stern father (who is also her employer, yikes) before they’re forced to flee from the Nazis by way of the Alps. Every time I describe the plot of this Rodgers & Hammerstein musical I’m struck by how bleak and convoluted it sounds, but it really is fun until the Nazis show up.
That Thing You Do! tells the tale of the rise and fall of a fictional one-hit wonder band, The Wonders, in 1964 America. Starring and written and directed by Tom Hanks, That Thing You Do! is about the fleeting nature of fame, whether being successful on a mainstream scale necessitates being an asshole, the transportive nature of teenage girl fandom, and a thought experiment that asks the question: what if the Beatles, but American? It’s also about how drummers are the hottest and kindest members of the band – at least in Tom Hanks’s moral universe.
At the bare bones plot level, these films don’t seem to have anything in common. And when you dig a little deeper, there admittedly still isn’t much overlap. But here are some themes and ideas present in both:
the impulse to root for the underdog
the power of music to heal, uplift and help you transcend your circumstances
the humbling surprise of finding love in people and places you never expected
a fundamental sweetness and optimism about individual human nature, even as broader structures and systemic forces inflict harm
a celebration of the net good that results from stepping out of your comfort zone and taking a chance on something that is in no way guaranteed
a belief in happy endings and a rejection of the dark, the inscrutable, and the hopelessly complex.
A more specific similarity is that neither film features a person of color in a lead role. Like the Step Up franchise that would premiere exactly a decade after it, That Thing You Do! tells a story about an industry pioneered and profoundly shaped by Black artists yet still manages to make it all about white people. Guy Patterson, the lanky, Tom Hanks look-alike protagonist, is a drummer whose heroes are all Black jazz musicians. He seems to delight in being able to list his influences at the drop of a hat, as if to say, Hey, I’m not some clueless teenybopper – I know who the real artists are. He’s a spiritual forefather of the white boys in beanies who corner you at house parties and proceed to lecture you, unprovoked, about the rappers they like but who you’ve probably never heard of. (Side note: what is it with white guys and jazz? I feel like Damien Chazelle, the director of La La Land, watched That Thing You Do! and said I see your Guy Patterson, Tom Hanks, and raise you a Sebastian Wilder.)
In the final act of That Thing You Do!, Guy finally gets to meet and improvise a duet in the studio with his idol, Del Paxton. It’s a bittersweet moment. The band’s five minutes of fame are up, the glossy sheen of show business is starting to fade, and Guy’s future as a musician hangs in the balance. But in walks Del Paxton – the Del Paxton, as Guy would say – telling Guy that he might have what it takes. Suddenly, we’re reassured that Guy is the genuine article, that we weren’t wrong to root for him more than we did for any other member of the band. It’s such a satisfying, cozy place to be as a viewer (things are going to end well, even if it won’t look like what we initially imagined), that it’s tempting to overlook the implications of Del Paxton being deployed as a guidepost, signaling Guy Patterson towards musical enlightenment and self fulfillment.
The other Black character in That Thing You Do! with speaking lines is a charismatic bellhop, Lamarr. In the film’s original ending, Lamarr broke the fourth wall to tell the audience what became of the band. Although this final reveal was eventually cut, the idea of Lamarr’s character as an omniscient narrator and puppet master remains. He’s the one to usher the band over the threshold of the hotel where their united front will soon crumble, like Charon leading doomed souls across the river Styx. He holds control of the mechanisms by which they come and go, hailing and directing fateful cabs that send some members out of the story for good and take Guy to the jazz club where he meets Del Paxton for the first time. He hints at Guy and Faye’s eventual romance with a twinkle in his eye, despite little to no evidence of its existence up to that point. Most importantly, he (like Del Paxton) shows up more than halfway into the film, when the cracks in the band’s dynamic are starting to show. As the main characters flounder and find themselves at a loss for direction and purpose, Lamarr and Del Paxton materialize out of thin air to propel the emotional journeys of the white protagonists forward. They provide wisdom at crucial narrative turning points before fading into the background, remaining stubbornly one-dimensional all the while. A film that wants you to know how much it reveres the genius of Black jazz musicians also sidelines them in favor of white characters that require guidance from a mystical Black bellhop who sees and knows all. In the final exchange of the film, Guy asks “Would you mind watching our things?” to which Lamarr responds, “Oh, that’s what I do,” before looking directly into the lens.
That’s not subtext – it’s just text. Lamarr exists in the film solely to observe and facilitate Guy and Faye’s happy ending, and this final knowing look invites the viewer to share in his satisfaction on a job well done.
As for The Sound of Music, I don’t think a single non-white person is shown on screen throughout the course of the entire film. For the most part, the impending crisis of World War II is nothing more than an aesthetic backdrop for von Trapp family antics. The film’s conclusion takes a disorienting turn for the grim as the family escapes from the Nazis, but even then the stakes are more about ideology and honor than they are about survival. Captain von Trapp’s options are to join or run – having the option of victimization is a vastly privileged place to operate from. So yes, there are Nazis, but the film is not really about Nazism’s racist ideology. The cartoonish rendering of Hans Zeller could be a stand-in for any antagonist in a Hollywood action movie, delivering vague threats and sporting unflattering mustaches that scream I’m the bad guy. Uncomplicated, broad emotional strokes of good vs. evil are all The Sound of Music is capable of, so it’s not a surprise (and I’m of the mind that it’s kind of a relief) that the film chooses not to engage with race.
Racial or ethnic diversity in a film isn’t necessarily a value judgement, and I’m in no way calling for beat-for-beat remakes of these films with people of color cast as the leads (seriously, please do not do this) – but the fact that two films fundamental to my love for pop culture also center whiteness so unequivocally is something I feel ambivalent about.
This is true for most media I devoted myself to as a child, whether it was Anne of Green Gables, Hannah Montana, or any Meg Cabot novel. Sometimes I think that it made me a more empathetic and imaginative viewer and reader, to root for and find parts of myself in white heroines and heroes. Other times I just wish I didn’t have to work quite so hard to feel connected to the characters and stories I loved or to imagine myself as the protagonist. In an essay entitled Pure Heroines, Jia Tolentino writes about feeling an increasing sense of alienation from beloved childhood characters as an Asian American woman: “My hesitation, as an adult, to find myself within the heroine universe has been rooted in a suspicion that that identification would never truly be reciprocal: I would see myself in Jo March, but the world’s Jo Marches would rarely, if ever, be expected or able to see themselves in me.”
There is the oft-bemoaned lack of Asian American representation in cinema plus the obstacle of fate to consider as well. Before 2000, you could count on two hands the number of Hollywood productions featuring Asian actors and still have fingers left to spare. If part of my aunt’s motivation in gifting That Thing You Do! and The Sound of Music to my grandparents was to give them a crash course in American pop culture, then it almost feels inevitable that they would both be about white people. What if, out of all the VHS tapes possible, my aunt had chosen to give my grandparents Mulan and The Joy Luck Club instead? Or Flower Drum Song and Enter the Dragon? Would I have been altered in some obscure way, on a molecular level? How much of who we become as adults is dependent on what we’re exposed to when we’re still mostly blank canvases? If you could remove the experience of a piece of media during your formative years, what else would get taken away?
Lest it sound like I’m renouncing The Sound of Music and That Thing You Do! and washing my hands of them for good, I want to be clear that I still have immense fondness for both and rewatch them every few years. My older sister and I like to reminisce over the sounds and scenes that populated so much screen time in our shared childhood, synchronized in our delight at specific music cues, story beats, and triumphant character moments. It’s hard to deny the euphoric rush when the boys in the band hear the titular song “That Thing You Do” played on the radio for the first time or the pleasure of seeing Captain von Trapp get so flustered at having his authority challenged that he accidentally calls Maria “captain.” These films are obviously far from perfect, but they’re rollicking and shameless and they sound so good and they feel like they’re mine, in a way. Each time I return to them I feel a simultaneous kinship with my childhood self and a reassuring distance from a time when my storytelling world was so limited.
Over the course of my life, I’ve thought a lot about this weird, specific pop culture ecosystem that I grew up in and have tried to make the roots of my pop culture sensibilities legible and logical. Attempts at distilling its meaning have remained mostly murky and unsatisfying, but I have this sense that understanding the shape and reach of its echoes will help illuminate something elemental about myself. Iris, you may say, it’s not that deep – you watched two films with alarming regularity when you were a kid and then you grew up to be a person who likes to rewatch things more times than most people find useful or interesting. And you’d probably be right! But what else would you expect from a deeply self-involved former English major now armed with a newsletter?
I would love to hear about any formative pop culture experiences (films, TV shows, books, celebrity moments, fandom initiations, etc.) from you guys, so feel free to comment or reach out with your own anecdotes.