“The ‘wow’ moment”: The song that changed Tom Hanks’ life
It’s a scene that has played out in every classroom in the capitalist world: ‘But when am I ever going to need to know algebra?’ This question is always met with an insistence that you need to know about it. Meanwhile, the arts are frequently kiboshed as optional pursuits. That is a travesty. Because art, more so than theories about triangles put forward by long-dead Greeks, is a vehicle for change. No matter your background, it opens the world up for you. It might even help you understand why algebra is important. This revelation transformed Tom Hanks‘ life.
Childhood had been tough for him. Born in 1956, his youth coincided with the rise of rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, Hanks abseiled down his umbilical cord into this world mere months after Elvis Presley’s first appearance on TV. However, as is often the case in working-class households, there wasn’t much free time to expose him to the happening culture liberating many others at the time. Hanks’ family were too busy moving around in search of the next paycheque. By the age of ten, he had lived in ten different houses.
So, he often found himself isolated and in need of an outlet. He was a shy kid with his head down. Fortunately, when his family eventually settled in the Bay Area, he wandered into a movie theatre in 1968 and felt the transformative power of culture first-hand. It walloped him towards a new life. A future that looked tough was suddenly filled with possibilities. His place in the world went from menial uncertainty to great potential and strides towards social mobility—and we wonder why the arts are presently so underfunded and unsupported by the powers that be.
This culture wallop was something he has remembered fondly forevermore, reflecting on the very moment his life changed during a BBC interview. Tom Hanks was moved to tears when discussing the watershed cinematic moment that he had while watching the title sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey backed by the iconic orchestral overture of Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’. Hank’s childhood was nomadic and unsettled, and the cinema offered a chance for spiritual stability.
All of a sudden, Strauss’ music roared in a new horizon, both literally on-screen and in the landscape of Hanks’ revivified future. “This was the ‘wow’ moment of my life going from a kid trying to figure out what’s interesting in this life to a young man yearning to be an artist”. He left the theatre changed, and, in a way that only music can, ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ has remained a movement that can instantly transport him back to that fateful red seat where he fortuitously plonked himself in ’68.
He was high on this new whirlwind of culture whizzing around his mind like the sprightly strings in Strauss’ masterwork. He wanted more of this novel buzz and hunted it down with renewed purpose: “I started asking myself: ‘How do I find the vocabulary for what’s rattling around in my head?’. Not long after I started going to the American Conservatory theatre by myself to see plays I had no idea even existed”.
He suddenly went from shy to a born performer. At age 14, the soon-to-be legendary actor would write a very frank and very forward letter to Oscar award-winning director George Roy Hill, proclaiming himself to be a star in the making. “My looks are not stunning,” penned the teen, “I am not built like a Greek God, and I can’t even grow a moustache, but I figure if people will pay to see certain films … they will pay to see me.”
He began flunking algebra and, instead, hunting for vinyl by bands who dug Strauss. He started reading about Stanley Kubrick. He picked up culture magazines. He sought odd jobs to fund his theatre tickets. He changed his life. So, it is because of art that he has since paid back tenfold in taxes than he would’ve with algebra, and his emotive tale of how this moment quite clearly changed his life is one worth remembering the next time an arts cut is announced by another bastard kiboshing the joyous social mobility of culture.
