That Thing You Do! (1996)

directed by Tom Hanks

Susannah Clark

When I was a child, I was terrified of going to the movie theater. Specifically, I was terrified of the first 15 minutes of the experience: the trailers, studio plugs, and opening credits. I could relax once I had a narrative to ground me, but the context-less sounds and logos at the beginning rocked my childhood grasp of reality. Who is this woman with a torch? Where did those stars circling the mountain come from? Why is this lion so angry? I would cower in my mother’s lap, and on several occasions, I made a run for the theater exit. My mom says she would chase me down the aisle after I slipped out of her arms “like a greased pig.”

Twenty-five years and a coronavirus outbreak later, going to the movies is one of the things I miss most from the Before Times. No longer afraid (though I’d be lying if I told you that I don’t shudder at the memory of the THX sound blaster), I have found solace in the dark cavern full of strangers, the screen in front of us promising communal respite. 

Thanks to streaming platforms and a locked down New York City, I may have seen more movies in the past six months than I have in the last six years. I’ve been watching to distract myself from the pandemic, but it was COVID headlines that inspired me to rewatch a pre-teen favorite: That Thing You Do! (1994), the directorial debut of Tom Hanks. In March 2020, Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson (who has a memorable cameo in That Thing You Do!) were the first celebrities to share that they’d been diagnosed with COVID-19. Two weeks later, Adam Schlesinger—who wrote the titular song from That Thing You Do!, along with countless other perfect songs—died from complications of the virus. I watched in tribute.

Set in 1964, That Thing You Do! traces the rise and fall of a scrappy rock band from Erie, Pennsylvania, resulting in what Jillian Mapes recently deemed “the best Beatles movie not about the Beatles.” True to their name, the Wonders end up charting only one hit. “That Thing You Do!,” the song, is swingin’—artfully vague and aggressively catchy. The earworm burrows deeply.

You spend so much of That Thing You Do! watching and listening to other people watching and listening—at the local dive bar, on a beach party movie set, and from the point of view of a living room television set. Like any media featuring more than two people in a room together, That Thing You Do! hits differently in quarantine. But the scene that I keep replaying in my mind is not one of the many crowded concert shots. When the various members of the band hear their song on the radio for the first time, they sprint down the streets of downtown Erie and convene at Patterson’s Appliances, the literal mom and pop store where the drummer works. Everyone is jumping up and down, screaming and bursting. We first hear the opening drum fill through a pair of headphones, and it eventually makes its way onto every one of the speakers on display at Patterson’s, in a crescendo of delight. Even though the band goes on to much greater success, the elation of this moment is never matched.

The appliance store celebration is one of the two times we hear the titular song in its entirety, a signal that we are experiencing it in real time with the characters, as opposed to the snippeted montages in the rest of the film. You can hear the music on both sides of the Fourth Wall. The songs that score a movie exist in our own universe; we assume that Richie and Margot Tenenbaum can’t hear Nico singing “These Days.” But the songs written into a movie’s plot exist in another universe, one we only get to see a glimpse of.

The universe in That Thing You Do! is one where the Vietnam War is a punchline, and ultimately inconsequential. The band’s unnamed bass player has his sights on joining the U.S. Marine Corps, ensuing in multiple gags throughout the film, including Tom Hanks deadpanning “Semper Fi.” This is in contrast to the quintessential nostalgia film set in the early 1960s: American Graffiti (1973). The films were made two decades apart, but “That Thing You Do!” was written to sound like it could have been on the American Graffiti soundtrack, another bop for cruising around. My father had been trying to get me to watch American Graffiti since I got my learner’s permit at age 15. Reminiscing, he always described the influential teen romp as “an anti-Vietnam War movie.” This confused me until I got to the film’s gut-punch epilogue, where we learn the fates of our protagonists. 

The epilogue for That Thing You Do! is much rosier: omniscient text informs us that our bass player returned home safely with two Purple Hearts. This comes immediately after the final shot of the film: a cringey freeze frame of a Black man winking at us, rounding out the number of magical negro stereotypes in this movie to two. Fourth Wall breaks unsettle me. When someone on screen looks directly into the camera and addresses the audience, I feel like that little girl cowering in my mother’s lap again. I don’t like being reminded of my own existence while watching a movie. My inner monologue erodes that wall enough, there’s no need for a wrecking ball.

It didn’t crack the top 10, but the theme from That Thing You Do! did become a minor hit in our universe. The song showed up on a number of mix CDs I made for friends and crushes in high school. (More often than not, I opted for New Found Glory’s pithy pop punk cover.) We sang along while driving aimlessly around suburbia, parking lot hopping until we emptied our parents’ gas tanks, not unlike the kids in American Graffiti. I already had memories associated with “That Thing You Do!” that have nothing to do with the movie it was written for, and now I can’t listen to it without thinking about the way Adam Schlesinger died. The universes have collided.

As I write this, the number of U.S. deaths attributed to COVID-19 is about to triple that of the Vietnam War. Twenty years from now, when nostalgia movies will be set in the early 2020s, will I consider them all “pandemic films,” regardless of the tone or plotline? In quarantine, I’ve found myself judging movies based on how much they distract me from the current state of the world. (As such, I’ve avoided films like Contagion or 28 Days Later.) Whether I’m taken to a different decade or a different planet or even a universe that looks a lot like ours, I hope to get a little lost along the way. The Fourth Wall stays intact, but if the movie has done that thing a good story can do, I won’t be scared to look out the window.

Susannah Clark is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Her work has been published in Inside Higher Ed, PopMatters, under the gum tree, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize, and has a Notable essay listed in the 2016 Best American Essays anthology.