Thoughts on “500 Days of Summer”

1. Rewatching 500 Days of Summer for the first time in years, I was quite struck by how normal the movie actually is. Little gimmicks aside, an uncritical viewer would probably not see anything that special or socially subversive in the text; the light humor and optimistic heart of 500 Days makes it feel a lot more mainstream than even Garden State. It’s very interesting to see how time has turned its reputation sterling, because if you’ve never watched the movie and simply read 8 years of theses on it, you are probably imagining a very different animal.

2. That being said, I would definitely call 500 Days of Summer a legitimate classic. It might not be considered “canon” quite yet, but it meets all the marks: its successful, beloved, good and, as anyone who’s ever seen a late ‘aughts student film will tell you, extremely influential. To the casual movie viewer, 500 Days probably has more “classic” scenes than When Harry Met Sally (“this is a story of boy meets girl”, The Smiths in the elevator, post-sex Hall & Oates, “expectations vs. reality”, to name a few), and the popularity of the soundtrack makes every scene with a song in it feel oddly familiar, even if you’ve mostly forgotten the content. When you watch it today, no matter how many times you’ve actually seen it, it feels like a movie that you might have seen a million times, which I guess is pretty high praise.

Outside of the purely filmic elements, the rep of 500 Days has also been majorly aided by a culture of analyses around it that seems to grow stronger and more certain as the years pass.

3. There are, I would say, two major thematic elements in 500 Days of Summer that get brought up most commonly and have done the most to make the movie seem retrospectively brilliant to a certain type of viewer.

The first is the idea that Tom, the main character, is actually the least sympathetic character in the film. If you follow this logic, 500 Days is a misleading movie that makes you think that you’re supposed to sympathize with the hopeless romantic at its center only to realize that he is ultimately in the wrong because his actions are clouded by a perverse attachment to an outwardly uninterested woman. Tom is the nerd hero we all know and love, only this time, we’re supposed to examine his impulses more critically, and see how his seemingly innocent motivations are actually toxic and unfair. This reading has been majorly helped along by Joseph Gordon Levitt himself, who says of Tom:

“He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning because he doesn’t care about much else going on in his life. A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.”

Ouch

This leads into the second major thematic commentary on the movie: it’s supposedly a quiet deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl. On the surface, 500 Days is just like Garden State: sad-boy occupies bland existence, meets quirky, perfect cute girl, discovers new zest for life, indie soundtrack ensues. But unlike shitty Garden State and Elizabethtown, 500 Days wisely grants its MPDG actual independence, and lets the sad-boy find himself only after their relationship is terminated. Ergo, this surface-level basic indie rom-com is actually a smart commentary on indie rom-coms, and has all sorts of feminist, progressive meanings hidden beneath the plucky surface.

4. Now, are these ideas valid? I would say mostly yes, but perhaps not in as obvious a way as people think. One of the genius things about 500 Days of Summer is that it legitimately avoids an easy reading, and can be appreciated in a myriad of different ways by a myriad of different people. Certainly you could view Tom as a flawed hero and 500 Days as a feminist deconstruction of the MPDG; that reading works perfectly well. But you could also view it thinking of Tom as unimpeachably in the right and thinking of Summer as a manipulative jerk. It’s hard to recall another movie that can appeal equally to bitter male nerds and feminist critics without either one having a totally ignorant perspective on it. Where you stand on the Tom/Summer debate has a good amount of political implications if you want to read it that way, or simply helps you define how you feel personally on an ultimately ambiguous but pretty archetypal male/female conflict.

5. Where do I stand on the issue? I would say that both characters seem pretty flawed and neither one is particularly in the right, but Tom is definitely less in the wrong than most people think.

The biggest flaw of Tom is that he’s crazy. He has no chill about the events in his life, evidenced by his temporarily becoming an alcoholic after breaking up with Summer and making that poor blind-date girl watch him rant and rave at the karaoke bar. It’s also pretty nuts how hard he fell for Summer when we’re led to believe that a good portion of the time spent with her was slow and chilly. But is Tom totally deluded in falling for Summer simply because she said she wasn’t looking for anything serious? Not completely. The thing that people forget is that even though Summer tells Tom she’s not looking for a relationship, they certainly end up as more than casual sex partners. They spend a lot of time together, reveal personal secrets to each other, and, from what the movie implies, don’t sleep with other people. Plus, Tom is outwardly and obviously a very non-casual guy, constantly pushing the relationship forward and extolling on the importance of true love. If Summer has a flaw in her dealings in the relationship, it’s being kind of ignorant of Tom’s emotions. She should have terminated the situation earlier because she should have seen that the whole foundation of Tom’s personality is compulsive attachment, and that’s hardly compatible with her desired lifestyle. This isn’t to say that any drama is fully her fault, but more to say that the whole relationship was fundamentally kind of a bad idea, and Summer was ultimately the most aware of that fact.

6. Outside of the thematic analysis of 500 Days of Summer, I was also struck rewatching that movie at how different things have become in the short few years since its release. One of the cool things about 500 Days is its early documentation of a nascent hipster culture that is now way too ingrained in the mainstream (because of movies like this) to be as explicit as it is here any longer.

I really don’t think that the famous “you like The Smiths?” scene could be written today without being clouded by some heavy wink-winking. The sincere idea that you could fall for someone just because they like a sensitive/obscure band is no more; parody and the general deconstruction of surface hipsterdom has totally eroded the kind of “Shins will save your life” fantasy that arose from the post-90’s smart-twee era. What makes 500 Days of Summer so good is that it both enforces that aesthetic while also criticizing it enough to keep the film from dating.

Not to just keep shitting on Garden State, but that movie does not have a single trace of irony, and as a result, its indie-pop dressings now look kind of ridiculous. But in 500 Days, Chloe Grace Moretz telling JGL that he shouldn’t fall for Summer just because “she likes the same bizarro crap you do”, makes the movie seem smarter than its own culture, even though sweater-clad JGL and pre-New Girl Zooey look sharp and hip enough together that you can still indulge in the guilty earnestness of the whole pageant.

The massively successful soundtrack plays into this idea as well. Even though it’s sort of a joke of a popular indie soundtrack, it’s not a joke at all; people still like the soundtrack and it’s still good, even though the very idea of it is highly vulnerable to parody.

Side-note on this: so many people had this soundtrack for some reason, and I’m not totally sure why. I had the soundtrack and it was the only “song soundtrack” that I ever owned on CD. Many of my friends owned it as well. But why did I have it? I never asked for it. I thought it was good but it didn’t blow my mind. A whole generation, it seems, just liked it and all of a sudden owned it. Maybe that’s a phenomenon?

7. What does the future hold for 500 Days of Summer? There’s a chance this movie could just be forgotten, but if it’s not, I think it could also become a majorly recognized classic in the decades to come.

As stated before, 500 Days of Summer has a reputation that feels a lot bigger than the film would immediately suggest upon first viewing. The movie spoke to people in ways that I don’t think the director really intended, and it played a major role in rewriting the playbook for the successive wave of indie cinema. If it holds to the critical byline of the “MPDG deconstruction”, it could eventually become the movie that people point to to examine not only that archetype but potentially all of 2000’s romantic comedies. A future critic compiling a list of best 2000’s rom-coms could definitely place this movie at #1, because #1 slots are always most comfortable with “the thing that was a meta-commentary on all the other things of its kind”.

500 Days of Summer feels both like a normal rom-com and an abnormal one; it’s not obviously different but it is undeniably so. It could be categorized, in a way, as an “alternative movie”, a movie written with the language of a mainstream comedy that holds ideas that run parallel to its own material. Definitely worth a rewatch on this side of the times.

-mcoe