500 Days of Summer, 10 Years On
How A Postmodern Love Story Still Breaks Your Heart
I remember walking out of 500 Days of Summer 10 years ago. I was living in San Francisco at the time. My good friend and I walked out into a sunny Saturday afternoon in an emotional daze. I can still see the sun glowing off the sidewalk and the trees swirling around me. We were in a stupor. Both of us had been in love as younger men, and both of us had our hearts shattered. 500 Days of Summer was 90 minute distillation of our worst nightmare.
Clearly 500 Days of Summer had a big effect on me when it came out. The film really zero’d in on a specific type of male gaze that prefaced the rise of alpha-male nerd culture that has peaked in the last few years. Maybe it started with Seth on The OC back in the mid Aughts, but Tom in 500 Days was the crest of that wave, or at least the vanguard of it. I too was guilty of creating a fantasy out of a real person. I too was resentful and filled with scorn over a perceived romantic debasement. Great art can be a mirror, and the reflection can often be cataclysmic.
Now 10 years later, 500 Days of Summer has become something of a classic film for me personally. My reaction to it over the years has served as a barometer for my current mood, disposition, and romantic outlook. I have re-watched the movie several times over the last few years, and I have been excited by how convoluted the central message of the film has become for me.
500 Days of Summer was to suppose to be the anti-romcom. It was suppose to undermine the bullshit stories we tell ourselves about love: the one, it was meant to be, there is someone for everyone. Those stories had been reinforced by romantic art for centuries. 500 Days was suppose to nuke that from orbit. And it did to some degree, but it didn’t get rid of it all. What remained seems intractable.
500 Days of Summer is a great time capsule of what love meant to some of us in the mid to late 2000s. I should qualify that, what love meant to some middle class privileged white Americans, which is statement that may not have felt as necessary back in 2009. Tom and Summer are the ideal hipster couple. They play house in Ikea. They listen to the Smiths. They buy vinyl. The eat at dingy diners. They are free to be class tourists while always able return to the confides of their corporate jobs and 3rd floor prewar walkups. They voted for Obama, twice.
The explicit central message in 500 Days of Summer also had a postmodern hipster tinge to it: we only have our own perspective, which is always subjective, flawed, incomplete, and biased. Tom sugarcoats his experiences with Summer so that he thinks they are meant to be together. Summer thinks otherwise. This is the on-the-nose reading and intention of the filmmakers. But despite the great craftsmanship of the film, its self-proclaimed central message seems more and more shoddy as time passes from its release. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Summer could be seen as both an incarnation and critique of the manic pixie dream girl trope. This was a term coined by filmwriter Nathan Rabin, who was criticizing Elizabeth Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown (2005). The manic pixie dream girl is a common trope: an exciting and vivacious woman breaks the depressive spell of an isolated and sad man, who is the protagonist, of course. Usually the dream girl exists in the story solely to please the male protagonist and lead him to some transformation. Summer does do this in 500 Days but it is all filtered through Tom, who is mostly painting her for us the entire time. We only see his version of Summer. In that sense, it is a critique of the sexist manic pixie dream girl trope.
Now 10 years later, the film’s pointed critique of sappy romance and female love interests has flowed in a different direction. 500 Days of Summer is less a postmodern love story and more a statement on how easily we can delude ourselves into believing our life is a story that we are writing. In the end, Summer gets married even though she claims she never wanted that. Tom meets Autumn in a maybe too clever high note ending. The film implies that love ultimately wins out but perhaps not in the way and not with the one we think it will. It is more a modernist story than a postmodern one in that regard. Love does exist, we just don’t control or understand it. The grand metanarrative of Love is still there with the same ending, but the beginning and middle are mutable. That conflict between the finality of the film’s narrative of love and its postmodernism criticism of being in love is what makes it so fascinating.
In one sense, 500 Days of Summer is a polemic against believing in true love. Or more precisely, it is a polemic against believing that the one we are with now is The One. It skewers our inability to see terrible traits and behaviors of our partner in order to write a romantic story with us in the lead. Tom’s misreading of Summer’s personality and actions is explicit and pointed through the entire film. “This is not a love story” But in the end, it is a love story. Or at least it is a story that ends in love. Tom is transformed by his tumultuous relationship with Summer. He quits his job and starts doing the thing he really loves, architecture. Then he meets Autumn in pursuit of that dream. It is a very happy ending for what is essentially a tragedy. Does that positively and warmth undermine the ironic anti-romance mission statement of the film?
What are we then to make of the beautiful scenes between Tom and Summer backed by epic and emotive songs like The Doves “Where Goes The Fear Again” or the instant goosebumps of Temper Trap’s “Sweet Disposition.” Are those ironic? Is not the joy we feel watching those scenes sincere? Do we not long to share in that splendor? For a film that states it is not a love story, a lot of it feels like a really well made and poetic love story. In that conflict lies the true power and beauty of the film. The filmmakers aren’t sure if they are being subversive or if they are being cliche. The cliche and criticism intertwine so tightly that it is impossible to spot the strands or separate them.
Ultimately, 500 Days of Summer is an exploration of love with a clear final thesis. It is a story about how love makes us feels ecstasy and how love makes feel like life is unlivable. It is also a story about how love is inevitable. That is perhaps the true central thesis of the film. 500 Days of Summer is a classic romance movie masquerading as a postmodern critic of the genre. That is what makes it such a powerful film. It doubts but finds faith in the questioning. That is why 10 years later it still resonates. Unlike a traditional romance film like The Notebook, 500 Days of Summer has faith in love itself rather than the people who feel it. People are fallible, and love is not.
