(500) Days of Summer

There's a scene that comes about halfway into Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and very early in the romance between its main characters, Joel and Clementine.  After a less than ideal first meeting, Joel visits Clementine at her workplace in search of a second chance, and though she's willing, she also matter-of-factly lays down the ground rules of their fledgling relationship.  "Too many guys think I'm a concept or I complete them or I'm going to make them alive," Clementine tells Joel, "but I'm just a fucked-up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind."  A beat, and then the two shift character, into the Joel who is deleting his memories of Clementine following the failure of their relationship, and the Clementine in his head, who acts as his tour guide in a nonlinear reenactment of it.  Ruefully, Joel admits that he didn't heed Clementine's warning.  "I still thought you were going to save me.  Even after that."

Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer, from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber, recalls Eternal Sunshine in several important ways.  Like Kaufman's film, it is nonlinear story about a romance, told after its failure, but lacking Eternal Sunshine's SFnal component, it holds out no similar hope for a happy ending for Tom, a wannabe architect who writes greeting cards, and Summer, the girl who, over the course of 500 days, he meets, falls desperately in love with, dates for several months, is dumped by, and spends several more months getting over.  Perhaps the most important similarity between the two films, however, is that Tom is exactly one of those men Clementine is wary, and weary, of--the kind of who wants the woman in his life to be an adventure and a way of imbuing it with meaning.  But then, (500) Days, and Tom, seem to be an amalgamation of so many other romantic comedies and their heroes.  Like High Fidelity's Rob, Tom is a man who thinks that compatibility in pop culture likes and dislikes is the same as compatibility of personalities (and perhaps even that those likes and dislikes are a meaningful way of evaluating a person).  He's got a bit of Nice Guy about him--his reluctance to acknowledge his feelings for Summer, even when asked point blank, very quickly transitions from charmingly insecure to cowardly and manipulative--and not a small amount of Apatovian man-child.

All of which is to say that (500) Days of Summer is a great deal more unromantic than even its premise and title suggest, and much more than it seems to think it is.  It seems almost unkind to criticize a film as eager to charm as this one, but that charm is rooted in the assumption that we, the viewers, will be rooting for Tom and Summer to make it work, to find a loophole in the ending we're promised by the film's beginning.  This was not my experience.  Almost from their first meeting, it was clear to me that Summer and Tom were poorly suited to one another, and maybe to relationships in general, not only because of the sheer tonnage of neuroses, insecurities, and immaturity that weigh Tom down throughout most of the film, but because Summer is such a complete blank, to him, it seems, almost as much as to us.  In the bleak months following their breakup, Tom is advised to get over Summer by following Lawrence Durrell's edict (attributed to Henry Miller) of turning her into art.  It's left to us to judge to what degree we should take this as a meta-statement on the film (just as we need to decide how seriously to take the film's opening titles, which promise that any resemblance between its characters and reality is a coincidence, "Especially you Jenny Beckman.  Bitch."), but the fact remains that Summer is much more a work of art, a construct, than a person.  Tom, we're told, has been conditioned by pop culture to anticipate The One, and the magical, true love that will accompany her.  What matters to him in his relationship with Summer is not who she is, but how that relationship conforms to his image of what love should be like.  When Summer brings him to her apartment for the first time and tells him intimate, personal stories about herself, the voiceover drowns her out, telling us how thrilled Tom is to be at this crucial relationship milestone.  What's important isn't what Summer is telling him about herself.  It's that her stories are capped by what the voiceover calls the six magic words: "I've never told anybody that before."

Nor do we ever get a sense of the nature and tenor of the relationship between Tom and Summer.  Even before they become involved, Summer warns Tom that she doesn't believe in love and doesn't want a boyfriend, and no matter how intimate they become she insists that they are merely friends.  It's never clear whether she's given him fair warning, or mixed signals.  In their last meeting, after her marriage to a man she met shortly after breaking up with Tom, Summer tells him that with her new husband, she knew almost immediately "what I was never sure of with you."  Which puts an entirely different spin on the relationship--it's not that Summer didn't believe in love, but that she simply didn't love Tom.  So which is it?  Is Summer selfish ("you always do what you want," Tom tells her in that last meeting) or just someone who knows what she wants?  Is she a user, leading Tom on even though she knows she doesn't love him, or just a fucked-up girl looking for her own piece of mind?  We never find out, and don't seem to have been expected to care, and neither, it appears, does Tom.  The film's title turns out to be much less of a pun than it at first seems.  Summer isn't a person so much as she's a season, a phase, an experience Tom needs to go through.

And hence the failure of the film's attempts to charm, despite throwing every clever storytelling device imaginable at the screen--its nonlinear structure, a counter that ticks back and forth between the 500 days, a voiceover that seems to be imitating Jim Dale's work on Pushing Daisies, a musical scene, a pseudo-documentary, a medley of 70s art-house film parodies expressing Tom's misery after the breakup, fantasy sequences, split-screens, and Tom's wise-cracking ten year old sister, who imparts her worldly wisdom, and the film's morals, to her clueless brother.  Romantic comedies work because they provide us with the vicarious thrill of infatuation, making us party to what in real life is a private enchantment that often leaves outsiders befuddled.  As Tom puts it, during a burst of greeting card creativity he experiences when things are still going well with Summer, "I Love Us"--it's the entity that the characters create together, the back and forth between them, that is at the heart of a good romantic comedy's appeal.  But there is no Us in (500) Days of Summer, no sense that Tom and Summer have created something that transcends the two of them as individuals.  We see a few cute scenes between them in its early days, a few rather tepid fights towards its end (despite Summer saying, when she breaks up with Tom, that they fight all the time), but almost nothing of the actual substance of their relationship, and almost no sense of what Tom-and-Summer were like.  Without that invitation into the relationship, the vicarious effect of most romantic comedies isn't achieved, and Tom and Summer come off the way real couples do when they, to take examples from the film, sing to each other on their cellphones from adjoining rooms, or compete to see who can yell 'penis' the loudest in a public park--annoying and self-absorbed.

There is, of course, another way of looking at (500) Days of Summer, and that is that for all that he recalls the heroes of many romantic comedies, at his core Tom has more in common with their heroines--the ones who are hopelessly romantic and desperate to find The One, who can't imagine themselves happy without a man, can't believe that any man will want them, and are too caught up in their obsession with romance to notice the men who bring it into their lives.  Summer, meanwhile, plays the commitment-phobic, emotionally withdrawn Wrong Man--a reversal that the film stresses in one of its earliest scenes, in which Summer explains that she's breaking up with Tom because they've been fighting like Sid and Nancy, then clarifies that in this analogy, she's Sid.  When Summer reveals, in her last meeting with Tom, that she never loved him, what comes to mind is Sally Albright, wailing after making a similar discovery about a man who wouldn't commit to her: "All this time I thought he didn't want to get married.  But the truth is, he didn't want to marry me!"  If you read the film this way, the fact that Summer isn't really a person becomes less important, because what Tom needs to get over isn't the individual woman but the idea that he needs a woman to be happy, and that fulfillment and a sense of self-worth can only be achieved in the arms of a soulmate.

Even this more satisfying take on the film, however, isn't completely so, because despite the role reversal at its heart, (500) Days of Summer still trades in many of the gendered tropes and assumptions of its genre, making for an uneasy mixture.  Summer may not be a person, but she is a weighty presence in the film--far too weighty for someone whose sole purpose is to be the means of achieving the main character's personal growth.  As opposed to, say, High Fidelity, which uses Rob's ex-girlfriends to achieve a similar goal and, like (500) Days, sketches those female characters very thinly as a result, (500) Days tries to romanticize Summer.  There is a sense that the writers can't help but shift their focus to her, can't keep from making her as charming and adorable as they can.  Instead of showing us Tom's infatuation with Summer and using it to illuminate him, they try to make us share that infatuation, and let Tom get lost in the shuffle.  More disturbingly, there is the fact that making ciphers out of female characters, treating them like saviors or villains, but never real people, is something that traditional romantic comedies do quite often.  (500) Days is using an allegedly anti-sexist role reversal to justify employing sexist tropes.

The biggest problem, however, with reading (500) Days of Summer as Tom's coming of age story is that at the end of the film he hasn't really done so.  He's more confident, better able to deal with rejection, and taking steps to improve his life on his own rather than waiting for a woman to give it meaning--great strides all, but despite all of them Tom still hasn't let go of his binary concept of love.  In the wake of his breakup with Summer, Tom, like so many other foolish and self-absorbed characters before him, decides that love must not exist, that it is a fantasy dreamed up by greeting card writers like himself.  In their last meeting, the now-married Summer tries to dissuade him of this cynicism.  It's not that love doesn't exist and that the search for The One is pointless, she tells him.  It's just that she wasn't The One.  Which is fine as far as it goes, but what neither Tom nor Summer seem to have considered is that it's possible for love to exist and still be entirely unlike what pop songs and, yes, romantic comedies, make it out to be.  For all that he's learned, Tom still doesn't realize that love is so much more complicated than his concept of it, and requires, among other things, treating its object as a person rather than a concept.

The relationship between Eternal Sunshine's Joel and Clementine flounders because once the first flush of infatuation fades, they can't deal with the real, messy person they find themselves entangled with, and their decision at the end of the film to try again holds out some hope for success because both acknowledge the inevitability of this disenchantment, and vow to find out what lies beyond it (though in his original script, Kaufman famously undermined this hopeful ending by revealing that Joel and Clementine spend the rest of their lives failing at their romance, erasing their memories of each other, and trying again).  Tom, who never reaches that stage in his relationship with Summer, doesn't seem to have realized that it exists, so that when his story ends on what it seems to think is a similar note--Tom meets a new girl (rather sickeningly named Autumn) and the counter that's accompanied his relationship with Summer drops to (1)--it's hard to feel as hopeful as we do at the end of Eternal Sunshine.  For all his hard-earned wisdom, there's no indication that Tom has learned not to think of women as concepts, merely that some concepts might not complete him.  That's by no means an unusual conclusion for a romantic comedy--the traditional, female-centric often end on this note (though this is also one of the reasons that the genre is generally considered to be such a critical and artistic wasteland)--but (500) Days of Summer has positioned itself as this year's off-beat, intelligent romantic comedy, and it is disappointing to discover that at its heart, it isn't so different from the Hollywood product to which it pretends to offer an alternative.

Comments

Anonymous said…
i'm not sure it's an 'alternative' to romantic comedies so much as it is a deconstruction (though perhaps that's too generous--a 'schematization', perhaps?)--as your analysis of the film, i feel, reveals. rather than the 'anti-rom-com' it was marketed to be (at odds with the filmmakers' intentions, apparently, at least accdg to an interview with Webb published in some local paper or other), it went down this particular gullet as a stripped-down, remixed version of the usual, gormless, vapid Hollywood fare, which, admittedly, to my own discredit, i tend to rather enjoy. so yes, in spite of (or maybe even because of) the objectionable qualities of the film that your (as usual) incisive and insightful analysis reveals, i for one was thoroughly charmed by the film.
Anonymous said…
same poster as the above here--should probably have said 'movie' rather than 'film'. pardon the anonymous posting. though i may be largely unapologetic for liking this sort of pap, i am, nonetheless, not impervious to a certain degree of personal embarrassment with this particular aesthetic. call it a guilty pleasure, this sort of thing, for me.
Paul Brown said…
Slightly off topic, but I always thought that the actual ending of Eternal Sunshine was better than the original idea of an endless cycle; we "feel as hopeful as we do at the end of Eternal Sunshine" because, just like real relationships, we are living in the hope that, although we will almost certainly fail, we might not. Joel and Clem's new "eyes open" relationship will probably self destruct even faster than before as the weight of things said that can't be unsaid (on the tapes) are brought back, but by not showing us that we can cling on to their hope against hope that it just might work out after all. What more could we ask for than that?
Anonymous said…
Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed this review & analysis. I didn't see this movie because I had heard Summer wasn't much of a character--but now reading this, I feel like I got something out of it nonetheless.

It would be interesting to look at male-centered rom-coms as a genre in light of the problems you raise here. I do think rom-coms tend to focus more on one member of the couple, often flattening the object of desire, but the results aren't always as troubling as what you describe here.
Anonymous said…
It's funny, I thought the opposite, that is - the Eternal Sunshine ending seemed completely bleak (due to the pattern of failure between the main characters), while the ending of 500 days seemed to be at least marginally hopeful.
All attitudes are influenced by personal experience.
Anonymous said…
Thank you for this great analysis.
I cannot remember ever feeling so... angry and hateful towards a film before. I think in a way it must have hit me a bit too close to home, and your writing is finally helping me make some sense of things and understand why it might have triggered such strong emotions in me.
Putting Eternal Sunshine and High Fidelity, two of my favourite films, as contrasts even made it better and I could only wish to see a mention of Garden State in here as well to complete my cycle.
This is becoming a bit of a ramble now, so I'll just conclude with a kudos and a wish that I had a friend of a psychologist who "got it" like you. :P
John Kessel said…
Just a note: I think the end of "Eternal Sunshine" is not so hopeful as you suggest. If you remember, the image is on Clementine and Joel playing on the snowy beach. But it keeps fracturing and repeating. To me this implies the same thing that Kaufmann's original script does--that they keep having themselves erased and then repeat the same pattern together many times. Why else repeat this film clip over and over?
Anonymous said…
Perhaps I'm a hopeless romantic (which I'm not as a cynical, disillusioned divorced woman), but I found the movie charming. The vacuousness of Summer, in my opinion, was due to the limitations of actress Zoey Deschanel who is pretty, but bland. Still, I enjoy reading your analyses of movies and television and novels. Have you read Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith? I suspect you would like it.
hanum said…
I like this movie a lot, it reminds me of someone. Good.. Good..
Anonymous said…
wow....you're so clever lol
wish my essays could sound like this!
Anonymous said…
-love is such a big shoe to fill. Doubt one person, limited by a gendered experience... is enough....or should be "enough".
-I wonder if hetero-centricity and monoamory limits rom coms.

great critique.
sharon.cheryl
Elaine said…
Hmm...but i think the fact that Tom learns that relationships and the blossoming of love are unpredictable and irrational actually DOES address the problem of viewing these women as mere concepts. Tom now knows that he can't merely expect women do do certain things or have certain effects on him. He acknowledges the fact that he needs to just go for it and embrace chance.

He does ot believe that women embody just ONE or only a FEW comcepts, but many in that love and romance is unpredictable and cannot be defined. There is a 180 degree change in Tom's initial attitude toward Summer and Autumn. He is more daring, he is taking chances, and he is embracing the fact this woman won't give him everything--failure is a possibility. The key words are chance and unpredictability.
Anonymous said…
100% agree. Felt a little like High Fidelity if you removed almost all of the chemistry, charm, humor, character growth and great music. Never understood why so many people thought this was a great film. I would rather watch Better Off Dead (in keeping with the Cusack). - KeeperOTD
Summer.. said…
i love this movie.. it's my abs favourite ! <3
mikebgood said…
I know I'm digging up a really old topic but I thought I'd share my thoughts.
First of all I love your review of this movie, even though I also love this movie.
Your main qualm with the movie is that Tom hasn't been shaken out of his illusions about women.
"his story ends on what it seems to think is a similar note"
I find it funny that you say the story thinks. Of course stories don't think, though you can attribute thoughts to their creators, which is what I think you were trying to do here, but you didn't want to overreach and put words in their mouths. Yet you did overreach because you did put words in the creator's mouth (or pen as it were). The lesson in Eternal Sunshine might have been that the value of romantic relationships outweighs the pain and uncertainty associated with them, which is an awesome message, but that doesn't mean (500) Days was striving to tell the same lesson.
Think about the ending of (500) Days. Tom is looking for a new job. He's cheerful despite being single. Good acting on the part of Levitt lets us know he's optimistic, yet not carrying any illusions. And though it's clear that he's immediately attracted to Autumn he doesn't become defeated and bitter when she initially turns him down.
While the voice over device symbolized the fantasy aspect of relationships -think back to the voice over use to almost deify Summer as it introduced her to the audience- I don't think we should read too much into the meaning of the little counter. I honestly just think it's a counter, a way of tracking the chronology of events in a relationship, and nothing more.
Adam Wynne said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
KWT said…
Coming way late to this and found it on accident. I enjoyed the essay very much but I think you glossed over the importance of Tom's sister and thus, what the movie was trying to say.

You're right, Summer is a complete fabrication, but she's a fabrication in the way that Kelly LeBrock was in Weird Science. Summer is everything Tom thought he wanted because he believed that if he ever found what he wanted, he would live happily ever after. It never occurred to Tom that what he wants, may not want him back.

About Summer, she is attractive but not unattainable, she is witty and smart but not condescending or aloof, she likes just enough of the same type of movies, art, music that Tom believes they are destined to be together. But like his sister told him, "just because some cute girl like the same bizarro crap you do, that doesn't make her your soul mate, Tom."

And that's the point of the movie. Tom actually finds the girl of his dreams only to realize that dreams are not enough. His friend articulated as much when he described the girl of his dreams - which was not his wife - but then added that she was better than the girl of his dreams, because she was real.

Does this mean that Autumn and Tom live happily ever after? Who knows, but I like to think they would. Maybe I am a hopeless romantic as well, but I want to believe in a world where love and happiness does exist and that it exists for everyone.
Jason said…
This movie certainly was confusing.

The movie seemed to back and support the concept that "Summer was clear upfront" and "Made it clear that she didn't want to have a relationship". Then as the movie goes, she proceeds to give every indication in the world that she wants to be in a relationship with Tom. Dates, sex, deep conversations, etc.

Then the movie tries to portay Tom as clingy, or even, "bitter", because he feels that Summer led him on.

This is super interesting, because men are often clear that they want a casual relationship as well, however, women seem to be encouraged to be upset with men if all men want out of the relationship is sex. Men who are often seen as most attractive, the aloof "non creepy" men, are also the men who seem to desire this non committed relationship. Contradictory to the movie however, when men make it clear they don't want to commit, they seem to be very aggressively attacked by women.

How silly, is this a double standard that the writers of the film overlooked?
Unknown said…
This article is simply brilliant! I can't help feeling that there is still a lot of enjoyment to be gotten out of the film, the cinematography and the soundtrack included, if you don't think about it too hard....But I'm glad you're hear to conduct a thorough analysis for us! It's true that the film could have been much more rigorous in its exploration of Summer's character.
Yen said…
A lot of the points mentioned were great, and although all these contradictions exists, I felt that that was precisely why I love the film. It's a pretty good reflection of relationships in real life where nothing is clear cut and blind spots are everywhere. I feel that these aspects in complicated relationships are not reflected enough in media, but 500 Days managed to capture that confusion and that unsatisfaction on screen.
I wouldn't think it was the intention of the film to have clear cut messages, meanings and themes. I believe it is more of a critic on conventional forms of romance that are constantly made in media because it shows all these different layers in a relationship.
That Man said…
Your analysis is accurate and precise. It made me see points I had completely skipped when I watched the film, and gives the whole story more depth, credibility and closeness to reality than the movie itself could. Great job. This article is excellent.
Missy said…
Well done! I just stumbled on this review thankfully. I was starting to feel that I was the only person who thought the film was not a success. You bring up so many good points and so many different ways to see the storyline. I hadnt thought of the fact that her aloofness as a character was meant to show how 2dimensional his concept of love was. It's a great point, and I would've been far more interested in exploring that idea. But I dont think this was really the intent of the filmmakers. As you more succinctly put it, the way he carries on with what looks like an equally 2dimensonal love interest at the end shows that the character and the film overall doesnt have the depth to consider transformation, which means it really is just a flashy one sided coin, propelled by the same old boring question, is she the one..whatever that means. Outstanding analysis!!

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