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When Tom Hanks won his first Oscar for Philadelphia in 1994 — playing the role of a lawyer with AIDS who fights back when his firm unlawfully fires him — the standing ovation was immediate. Even his competitors (Liam Neeson, who’d been nominated for Schindler’s List, and Anthony Hopkins, up for Howards End) stood and hugged him on his way to the podium. Hanks clutched the Oscar, looked up to the balcony, and began a well-practiced speech.
“Here’s what I know,” he declared, before talking about the perfection of his “lover” (Rita Wilson) and the impact of his high school drama teacher and classmate, both of whom are gay. “I wish my babies could have the same sort of teachers, the same sort of friends,” he explained, “and therein lies my dilemma tonight: I know that my work in this case is magnified by the fact that the streets in heaven are too crowded with angels.”
Hanks was referring to the victims of AIDS — and the fact that playing one, in the throes of death, defying discrimination, is what won him the Oscar. He continued by saying he hoped that the grace of the creator “cools their fevers,” “heals their skin,” and “allows their eyes to see the simple self-evident truth, that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all,” one that "was written down on paper, by wise men, tolerant men, in the city of Philadelphia 200 years ago.” The tears welling up in his eyes threatened to spill over, but he finished with a steady gaze: “God bless you all, God have mercy on us all, and God bless America.”
Tom Hanks at the 1994 Academy Awards.
Steven D Starr / Getty Images
Like Philadelphia, the speech was celebrated as a paragon of progressiveness — no matter that he didn’t say the word "AIDS," or that his call wasn’t for others to accept gay people, but for the gay people in heaven to understand that they should have been treated like humans when they were on earth. And while it’s easy to critique the ham-fisted attempts on the part of straight white people, 30 years ago, to figure out how to feel and act about gay people and the disease that was killing them en masse, the speech reflects the altruism and sincerity that has come to reside at the heart of the Tom Hanks image.
It’s that feeling of goodness that gets Hanks repeatedly compared to Jimmy Stewart, and which earned him the designation of Best Hollywood Star in 2015 — his fifth win since 2002. It’s what makes him the apotheosis of the goofy dad, the most inoffensive and unscandalous and overwhelmingly likable star in a business built on assholery.
To call Hanks “a classic Dad” is to speak of a specific, goofy, white middle-class Dad — a trope built on the pillars of white privilege, asexual masculinity, and nostalgia for a straightforward history of great men. It’s a place of spectacular safety, of seeming simplicity and straightforwardness. That Dad is also a Boomer Dad — who, like Hanks, came of age in the ’80s, ruled the ’90s, and who could still do little wrong in the 2000s. And today, that Dad is exhausted: Trying to keep up with multiculturalism and globalism and new understandings of what it means to be a good guy, it’s all so much.
Most Dads — the trope insists again and again — are idealized, if embarrassing: Dadness might have voted for George W. Bush; maybe Dadness even put on blackface for a Sammy Davis Jr. costume in the late ’80s. Dadness stopped saying “the gays” only relatively recently. But Dadness isn’t bigoted — Dadness is nothing if not well-intentioned, though those intentions are often firmly centered on the known parameters of its own existence.
In this way, Hanks’ image, his Dadness, is much like that of whiteness: eliding its own existence as an identity, thereby camouflaging the ways it wields power and steers the status quo. And like whiteness, people seldom question Tom Hanks’ success, his dominance, his choices: It’s just the way it is.
Hanks remains one of our most beloved and successful stars not by representing the new, however, but by embodying the flabby, comforting middle. Which isn’t to condemn him so much as to situate his success — something that his ostensible normalness has largely exempted him from. For one of the most important stars of the last 30 years, he’s astonishingly untheorized; his appeal, much like that of the Dad, has either been chalked up to sheer likability or ignored as benign. But that which doesn’t seem powerful or political is often potently so.
Abc Photo Archives / Getty Images
Most people understand Hanks through one of his iconic roles. Depending on your age, it might be Big, or Forrest Gump, or Cast Away. But to understand how Hanks arrived on his throne of peak Dadness and all that it represents, you have to go back to the early ’80s, when Hanks himself was just a young Dad. Back then, he was known only for his leading role in the sitcom Bosom Buddies, in which he played Buffy — one of two best friends who spent half their lives dressed as women so as to live in an all-women’s apartment building —and in which cross-dressing was played, as was typical at the time, for laughs. He was a young New Yorker on the take, living it up and hitting on women — he just happened to spend half of his life in dresses. That fraternity masculinity mixed with physical comedy would go on to become the heart of Hanks' ’80s appeal — though at the time he didn’t quite know how to harness it.
In 1988, Newsweek would declare that Hanks “was good from the beginning, and everybody knew it” and that “even people who didn’t like the show liked him.” But Hanks struggled to find work after Bosom Buddies. As producer Brian Grazer recalled, when he came in to audition for Splash, he had “everything at stake [...] They wouldn’t even let him read for Police Academy.” Chevy Chase, Michael Keaton, and John Travolta had already turned down the role. But Hanks walked into the audition in jeans, construction boots, and a work shirt — and amazed Grazer and Ron Howard, who was set to direct: “I’ve seen thousands of actors read for parts,” Grazer said in 1987, “and I’ve never seen anyone who looked as if he felt as comfortable with himself.”
That comfort, and its byproduct, confidence, helped sell the story of man who falls in love with a mermaid, and formed the basis for his image as “normal guy thrust into abnormal situation,” a premise that, at least in the ‘80s, always involved women. He had, as the Washington Post put it, “a slightly harassed, gently sarcastic air” about him; he was a little rude, a little manic, a little bit of a turd.
Hanks' "glib years" in Bachelor Party, Volunteers, and Nothing in Common.
20th Century Fox, Tristar
Hanks rode the $69 million success of Splash to a slew of quick-hit pictures: amplifying his rascality in Bachelor Party, which Hanks would later call “a sloppy rock-and-roll comedy that has tits in it”; The Man With One Shoe, which disappeared after an anemic $8 million gross; the bonkers Money Pit and forgettable Nothing in Common and the easy appeal of Dragnet, a remake of the classic ’60s television show that paired Hanks with Dan Aykroyd. He was making films at a ridiculous pace, in part, as he was later quick to admit, because he said yes to everything — he’d been poor for so long that everything looked great, even the stinkers. Esquire went so far as to call them the “largely inconsequential Glib Years.”
Somewhere in the middle of that glibness Hanks also made 1985’s Volunteers, playing an Ivy League douche who flees his gambling debts by going into the Peace Corps only to fall in love with Beth, played by future wife Rita Wilson. It’s a classic ’80s comedy, which is to say it has a thin, vaguely thought-through premise, and is heavily reliant on racist jokes and tropes of varying degrees of explicitness. But it also put Hanks in three-piece suits — “I play a very cool guy with a Bostonian accent and I’m dressed real nice,” as Hanks put it — which, along with his wise-cracking personality, prompted the widespread comparisons to Cary Grant. “A youthful avatar of romantic comedy,” a Rolling Stone profile declared, “the rightful heir to Cary Grant.”
Hanks on the cover of Esquire in 1987.
Esquire
That idea was solidified by an Esquire cover story that paired a photo of Hanks in white pants, a blue suit coat, and a handkerchief with the promise to teach readers 'How to Look Like a Page Out of Esquire.' Inside, Hanks is dressed in more Waspy outfits, leering at women whose faces are carefully obscured. In the profile, he admits that when he goes to the men’s clothing store, he requests “a suit like Lieutenant Castillo wears on Miami Vice.” It all feels rather lecherous — and the opposite of what we’ve come to associate with Hanks today.
The positioning of Hanks as a sex symbol felt wrong, in part because Hanks-on-the-prowl required accessing the part of the average-looking guy who’s bitter that he doesn’t, in fact, look like Cary Grant. Leering Hanks also wasn’t drawing audiences in nearly the way it used to. Hanks knew that, or at least knew that the Cary Grant comparisons were wrong. As he told People, “I’d most like to be like Jimmy Stewart.” He hated the Esquire photo shoot, the look of which he later described as “sleazy French golf pro.” And he was increasingly sick of playing the sly, the put-upon, the exasperated. He complained that critics had taken to introducing their reviews with “Here’s Tom Hanks being another smart-ass jerk.”
Hanks knew he didn’t look like a traditional movie star. He said he had a “bizarre body,” with “a big ass and fat thighs,” “a goofy-looking nose, ears that hang down, eyes that look like I’m part Chinese and are a funny color,” “really small hands and feet, long limbs, narrow shoulders, and a gut I’ve got to keep watching,” and hair that “makes me look like a Talmudic scholar.” Not looking the part, however, gave Hanks an air of reliability, of what film scholars have termed the “Average Joe” — a role that he had periodically leaned into while saying yes to every film in sight, but never so deeply, so perfectly, as in 1988’s Big.
In playing a boy who finds himself in a man’s body, Hanks matured as well. The goofy boyness didn’t go away — there he was munching on mini-corn, gargling chocolate sauce, and calling top bunk when Elizabeth Perkins asked if they were going to have a sleepover — but all the lechery was stripped away. There were no more attempts to capture the knowingness of Grant; instead, Hanks settled into the moonfaced wonder of Stewart. And it helped make Big one of the biggest hits of the year, grossing a massive $151 million worldwide.
Big rebooted Hanks' career and turned him into a bona fide movie star. But he was anxious that his image was becoming overdetermined with niceness: When he made the cover of Newsweek, he hated that the cover image was one of him smirking. “There are some really nice, handsome photographs of me,” he said, “and they used the one where I’ve got this goofy look on my face.” The Newsweek profile — like a gig hosting Saturday Night Live that also riffed heavily on his nice-guy-ness — was ostensibly promoting Punchline, a difficult film about a med student turned aspiring stand-up comedian. But audiences wanted Big Hanks, and the movie, despite winning positive reviews, proved a disappointment at the box office.
Sitting for a Playboy interview in March 1989, Hanks comes off as both frustrated with and resigned to his image. “I think they confused my not caring about a lot of things with being nice. I just show up for these things — photo shoots and stuff — and say ‘Hi, what do you want me to do?’ They get to do whatever they want and I don’t care about whatever they want and I don’t care what clothes they put on me or anything like that. But it’s not like I’m being a nice guy — I simply don’t care. Life’s too short to worry about that.” When asked why the word “vulnerable” comes up in articles about him, he replied, “Fine, great. Vulnerable. Also: ‘He appears so crushable.’ Yeah, fine. I don’t know anybody who isn’t.”
Hanks knew how other people wanted to see him, but he didn’t know if he liked it himself: thus the half-assery of Turner & Hooch, a massive hit in which he’s paired with a slobbering dog, but for which, he recalled thinking, “We just worked ourselves into the grave, and in the end, I thought, ‘Did I really work this hard and invest all this care for a movie called Turner & Hooch?'”
There was The Burbs, in which Hanks faces off against suburbia — with a poster that proclaimed, "A comedy about one nice guy who got pushed too far" — and Joe Versus the Volcano, which is essentially the same idea filtered through something like a film student’s senior thesis. Volcano somehow grossed $39 million and has, today, become a cult classic in its badness. But at the time, it was sign of Hanks’ potential slowly seeping from him. That idea was ratified in what Hanks and others agree to be the nadir of his career: Bonfire of the Vanities.
Hanks in Joe Versus the Volcano, Turner & Hooch, and Bonfire of the Vanities.
Warner Bros, Touchstone, Warner Bros
A newsletter all about cats? Yes, please.
We know, it's a lot to take in.
TLC
*Jesus does the cup song at the Last Supper* You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.
Instead of an organist your church had a dude with a guitar.
No hymnbooks for you, just tonnes of custom animations and bad WordArt.
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Or if you were unlucky, terrible Microsoft Word nightmares.
Because your church only sang super modern songs.
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Or if you were really fancy, a whole band!
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Because dogs are the best. And pizza is also the best.
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Don’t mess with our bodega cats.
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In case you haven't been as interested in Mel Gibson's hoping-for-a-comeback press tour as I have, I'll let you in on a little secret: he's been rocking a spectacular beard. Not just any beard, either. It's so enchanting that you could get lost in its mystical looks for hours on end. Don't believe me? Take a look at the following moments from the interviews about his latest film Hacksaw Ridge and just try to tell me otherwise.
France 24 / youtube.com
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France 24 / youtube.com
Don’t fuck it up.
Logo TV
It was weirdly the most emotional part of the show. (This post contains spoilers).
BBC / Love Productions
BBC / Love Productions
“Or just simply don’t sleep.”
Isaac Maciel Rodriguez
Everyone has a good fake ID story.
After a long night of being at the bars, my friends and I went to one last bar. In my drunken stupor I didn’t realize that the doorman was actually a police officer. He asked for my zip code and I said “I have no idea." He said “you can’t remember your zip code?” I responded with “I’m drunk!" He let me in.
My best friend had left her ID at home, so she attempted to use a burger to get into the bar. She then sat in the middle of the road and refused to get up. Alcohol may have been involved.
Fox
“Where do you draw the line with offensive costumes?”
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BuzzFeed Video
BuzzFeed Video
It was an emotional rollercoaster. This post contains spoilers for the last Bake Off episode.
Roasted, baked and stuffed.
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Creamy squash sage and thyme sauce, topped with crispy bacon. YES. PLEASE. Get the recipe.
They're made with squash, so that basically means they're healthy right? Right. Get the recipe.
So simple and so comforting. Get the recipe.
Live happily ever caffeinated.
Life is a constant battle between your immune system and your desire to hug all the cats.
A question to end all questions.
A world tour of the morbid and fascinating, presented by Getty Images.
WARNING: Some viewers may find the following pictures disturbing.
Patrick Kovarik / AFP / Getty Images
The Mummies of Guanajuato are a number of naturally mummified bodies interred during a cholera outbreak around Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1833. These mummies were discovered in a cemetery located in Guanajuato, which has made the city one of the biggest tourist attractions in Mexico.
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1. "I went to bed with a tampon in and I woke up and it was gone. I still, to this day, don’t know where it went. I have a feeling I sleep walked and pulled it out while I was sleeping." – Submitted by 80398140
2. "I share a small office with one other person. Last month I had been sitting at my desk for a while then had to get up. I took two steps and totally period-queefed because it was so heavy. I died." – Submitted by TroubleC
3. "On my first date with my boyfriend, I decided to wear a really sexy mini dress and go commando. Things were going really well, we were both a little tipsy when he leaned in over the table to whisper in my ear 'There’s blood trickling down your thigh'. Still makes me squirm to think about it." – Submitted by Bijli
Flo Karr / Unsplash / Via unsplash.com
4. "I broke both my arms in a bike accident and started my period a week after. I couldn’t even scratch my own nose much less use a pad or tampon. My biggest fear occurred: My boyfriend (whom I live with) had to remove and insert my tampons. Needless to say he was trooper and we are still together." – Submitted by Mvdailey0213
5. "I was having a heavy period. So in the shower, I pass a large clot, like golf ball size clot. I panicked and removed the shower drain cover and watched it go down the drain. Placed the cover back and forgot it. A few days later…I decided to get a bath. The shower drain cover came off while I was in the bath and guess what? The clot came back up in the bath water! I have never, ever been so disgusted in all my life." – Submitted by danahodges
6. "I got my first period when I was 13 and at the time I was doing a lot of extras work on movies and TV shows. The day Aunt Flow decided to visit for the first time I was on the set for the Hannah Montana movie. I was so excited. I thought my rumbling tummy must’ve just been nerves so I ignored it. I remember at one point thinking I must have just really, really needed to poo but I knew I had to hold it. (You don’t get a lot of bathroom breaks once you're on set). The cramps got so intense I thought I was going to poop myself but when I finally made it to the port-a-potty I realized I had blood all over the crotch of my pants. Obviously mortified I went out to my mom crying and we left right away. I will never forget that the first time I menstruated through my clothes I was in a scene with Miley Cyrus." – Submitted by courtneyt411cbf1f3
Gabor Monori / Unsplash / Via unsplash.com
7. "When I was younger my cramps were so bad that I would throw up from the pain. One time all my friends and I were getting ready to go out of town to see a show and I realized I was getting cramps. I didn't have anything to take except a pot brownie and for some reason I thought that would help with the pain. It didn't. So instead of going with everyone for a fun night I went home and barely made it to the bathroom where I had to decide which would get the toilet first, diarrhea or vomit. I chose to vomit and throw out the bathroom rug. Both ends had exploded at once. Then I spent hours half-tripping, with painful, disgusting cramps." – Submitted by Emily Waterpony, Facebook
8. "One word: appendectomy. I went in to hospital for side pain and it ended up being my appendix. Worst part was, to figure it out, they needed to rule out other things, like an Ovarian Cyst which they rule out by sticking a camera up your vagina... so on your period it was the worst. Then having to wear horrible fake hospital versions of pads and not being allowed to go to the bathroom so you soak through your tampon. Literally the worst day of my life so far. The pain meds were nice though. Took away the cramps." – Submitted by Kari Cook, Facebook
9. "I was riding my horse when my period not only decided to arrive, it arrived with vengeance. Not only did it leak through my breeches, it leaked all over my saddle!! I looked down and was a horrified. Worst of all I had to walk back into the barn and untack my horse (which isn’t the quickest thing in the world to do) in front of people with blood all over my ass and saddle. It was a soggy mess." – Submitted by piperw4aebe64c1
Greta Schölderle Møller / Unsplash / Via unsplash.com
10. "I was about 14 when this happened. My periods were serious hell the first year. I remember waking up one night and feeling extreme pain in my stomach, really dizzy and nauseous. I stood up and walked to the bathroom, found out I got my period. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t sit up straight. I remember falling off the toilet on the ground. Our bathroom floor is made out of marble, so it’s really cold. The coldness was great against he extreme pain I had in my lower stomach. So guess what? I literally passed out on the floor, pants down my knees and a puddle of blood on the ground. My mom found me the next morning and was really terrified. She woke me up vigorously because she thought I died." – Submitted by Tesselbevan
11. "When I was younger my periods would come and go as they pleased with no prior warning. One day my boyfriend at the time was going down on me, he popped his head up looking so proud of himself and went to kiss me when I realised that I had started my period all over his face. My blood was everywhere, like something out of the zombie apocalypse. When I pointed it out he proceeded to gag and then throw up. Thanks Mother Nature." – Submitted by charmilner1
Marcus Goral / Flickr / Via Flickr: zeitmacher
12. "Right, so I work in a small shop that doesn’t have a sanitary woman bin thing that all female toilets should have. So when I was in work I was on day two which is the day with the heaviest flow and just makes me so emotional and depressed. I went to the only toilet in the shop which DOESN’T FLUSH PROPERLY, and began to change my pad which was genuinely drenched. The toilet paper I put in the toilet after wiping all my blood off my vagina never flushed so I had to FISH IT OUT WITH MY HAND and keep it in my bag in the cloakroom for the rest of my six hour shift and along with my dirty pad." – Submitted by olas4631fa694
13. "One month I was having an especially bad period and I went to the bathroom at Starbucks and when I pulled my tampon out it literally came out with such force and suction that I somehow accidentally slung a huge blood clot on the wall! I did my best to clean everything but I’ve never looked at bathrooms the same since…too much can happen, also I’m very sorry Starbucks." – Submitted by caitlynm4937f7b9a
Amy / Flickr / Via Flickr: 81237992@N00
14. "I’m a competitive gymnast so one day I was about 13 years old, and I had a gymnastics competition. I had only had my period about 3 times before so I had never used a tampon up until today. I apparently didn’t have it all the way in so as I was in the middle of a bar routine I felt my tampon I guess slide out into the bottom of my leo, I went to do my dismount and as I landed my bloody tampon landed right beside me and left a streak of blood down my leg." – Submitted by jsb2
15. "My period started while I was cage diving with Great White sharks." – Submitted by meghang44f1a00d1
Note: Submissions have been edited for length/clarity
