I’ll tell you a secret
let’s make this perfectly clear
there’s no secrets this year
I saw (500) Days of Summer on Friday, and I loved it. I’ll just say that right at the beginning. In fact, I thought it was one of the most sincere films I’ve ever seen.
The movie sets up Tom as a melodramatic and deeply disappointed romantic, opposite the skeptical but equally melancholy Summer, and the narrator tells you right at the beginning that the couple doesn’t make it and that this is not a love story. Which is true. But it is, I think, a story about what happens when love is missing, or when it’s defined wrongly. But more than love, the movie is about honesty: as a virtue, a shield, a tool. Summer, the object of adoration in her inferiority-complex-inducing vintage dresses, is maddeningly frank with Tom, and his inability to accept her version of truth as real, at least for her, is the eventual downfall of the relationship.
“Love is a fantasy,” she says to Tom. Romantic comedies are full of this sort of line: usually spoken by a character who’s lost faith in love, but who is eventually convinced otherwise by an infatuated partner in a last-ditch race to the airport. I always laugh a little here, because the point was never whether love is real or not. The point is what you believe and what you’re willing to prioritize and make real, and if someone who is invested in your choice, who stands to gain from it, is trying to convince you that you believe something you don’t and YOU GO WITH THEM, then YOU are at fault when it eventually goes down in flames. Because all you’ve done is accept their version of the truth, not changed your own in any appreciable way, and that is going to come back to you someday.
Lay your head down at my feet
I’ll blow you kisses while you sleep
and when I know you’re safe and dreaming
my escape plans in full swing
Summer doesn’t make this mistake. She likes Tom, likes being around him, likes having sex with him, but when she suspects that might not be enough for him, she makes this even clearer than she had before. “I’m not looking for anything serious,” she says. “Is that ok with you?” Girls and boys, this is when HE becomes responsible for his own problems. Right here. Because he says that’s fine, and then has the audacity later to blame her for his pain. Blames her for being 100% completely honest with him. Blames her for not feeling the way he wants. Which is understandable, because being in love makes you lose some of your control and rationality, but it’s sort of like blaming gravity for being such a downer.
I’m thinking of the latest Silversun Pickups album, particularly the first track, There’s No Secrets This Year. That’s the song at the top of the post here and that I’m quoting, in case you skipped it, and it’s too perfect not to include when talking about this movie. Just listen to the slide at at 4:44, which is when the song goes from an avowal of perfect forthrightness into an almost threatening declaration of non est mea culpa:
Better make sure
Better make sure you’re looking closely
before you fall into your swoon
YES, for reals. I love that moment so much, because the thing people don’t say about honesty is that truth can be as much a shield as anything else. How often has someone said to you, baby, I just want you to be honest with me, and not thought about the consequences? Like, if I told you I might leave you, and then I did, you maybe have grounds to be sad, but you have forfeited your right to be angry. See how I did that? Non est mea culpa. It’s not a revelation of personal truth that makes one more vulnerable, in fact it’s exactly the opposite: it protects, and it’s what Summer does from day one. The whole album continues in that vein, it’s this really delicious seduction somehow accomplished with a baseball bat. By the time you get to Catch and Release, the line, “Later on, don’t say I didn’t tell you so. Maybe I didn’t but you’re taking it,” is almost unnecessary: a really poetic, calculated admission of the abdication of responsibility. And no one but Tom can be blamed for taking the lure.
Not that he remembers any of this. “You just do what you want, don’t you,” he accuses, in the final scene when he asks her why she danced with him when she was about to marry another man. To her credit, she doesn’t answer him the way I would have wanted to, with, “Yes, you moron. Why won’t you pay attention?” She doesn’t even roll her eyes, which is gracious of her, and probably due to the benefit of being in the position of security here, being the married one. It no longer matters whether he thinks of her as selfish, whether he thinks she cares about his feelings or not, because it is probably better for him in the long run to think of her as flawed. In fact, that was the problem all along, says the movie, that he made her too perfectly idiosyncratic, quirky but essentially harmless, with no hidden rocks he might crash upon, which seems extraordinarily unfair given that she told him that was exactly what might happen. We only ever see Summer as Tom wants her to be, not as she actually is.
Consider with your ear
We are still sincere
Not that Tom is a jerk, not really. Just deeply misguided, which the narrator points out right at the beginning: he works for a greeting card company and thought the end of The Graduate was about true love. All of which makes him patient, and adoring, and very cute, but also the most frustrating creature we have ever seen. I have to feel a little sorry for him, though. Summer lives in the real world, and Tom doesn’t, and therefore Tom’s life is always going to suck a little more, as he proves in a sad-sack I-quit outburst that manages to offend all of his coworkers except the stupid one, who claps. (Because he likes it when morons make a scene? Because he’s bored? Because he also thought the nice lady’s pictures of her cats would make terrible cards but was too cowardly to actually put that into words and say so? Not sure.) Whereas Summer doesn’t even have to feel guilty about any of this, because her own straightforwardness absolves her.
Who knows?
How this feeling grows?
Was it truly worth –
Truly worth the starting
Who knows?
Why the engine’s blown
Hope it’s truly worth –
Truly worth the parting
We never find out if that frankness makes her happy, though. She does end up getting married, and the thing she didn’t think would happen, that she would be sure of love as a truth for her in specific, not the vague dreamy bliss that Tom is after, seems to come true, so maybe. It’s a nice thought.
All in all, it’s quite a delicately rendered little movie, very pretty and luminously shot, and with the kind of story I can get behind. Both characters are played well, I think, and the director heightened the adulation of Deschanel’s character, which is exactly as it should be. She has a muse-like quality that works here. And Gordon-Leavitt’s Tom is puppy-earnest and violent at the same time, wonderfully childish. You have my 100% recommendation to see it, and I hope you tell me what you think if you do.
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August 9, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Pangolin
We’ve already discussed this, but I reiterate my belief that the final exchange between Summer and Tom isn’t about how honesty freed her, how her total devotion to herself made her happier — she herself admits that she was selfish to spend the trip to Millie’s wedding with Tom, to dance with him, and to invite him to her engagement party WITHOUT EVER TELLING HIM SHE WAS ENGAGED. She wasn’t honest. She admits that she wanted to spend time with him and enjoy his company, and telling him the truth would have spoiled that for her — his feelings really didn’t matter to her, much the way her feelings didn’t ever really matter to him. And in the end, as is so often the case, there’s a sense that this selfish decision actually ruined the potential for any post-romantic platonic friendship that might have been there. The film centers on Tom and how he sees the world, but the scene in which she admits her selfishness is one of the moments in which we see her as flawed and truly human, as self-centered in her way as he was in his. It’s one of the few glimpses of the real Summer, unfiltered by his idealized vision of her.
And I assumed that Tom’s friend clapped because he felt he was supposed to. He’s seen the shows in which the hero makes an impassioned speech and the audience is silent until one person starts clapping, after which everyone joins in. He figured this was one of those moments. Another of the film’s digs at how popular culture can inform and warp our expectations.
You’ve already heard most of my other immediate reactions to the film, and I’m sure I’ll bother you with more later…
{peregrine says: you’re right, that end scene is a little different. But do you think it’s one in which she hopes to reinstate the friendship? I feel like she’s walking away, but wants to give them a real last conversation. Just because she didn’t love him doesn’t mean she didn’t like him and feel things for him. So yes, she’s a little selfish to want to take that time from him, but at the same time I’m not sure he could ever have reached a platonic place for her, or at least I would feel that way in her situation. I do agree though, that it was unnecessarily harsh not to tell him about the engagement before he showed up.}
August 9, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Pangolin
I think all along there’s a hope in her that they can remain friends. She even says as much at one point. She doesn’t want to lose what they have. To her it seems reasonable. I think when she finally walks away after admitting to her selfishness, she has come to accept the impossibility of that, but only because she’s finally realized that neither of them is really willing/able to meet the other half-way.
I don’t even think the invitation was “harsh”, just impulsive and blindly self-centered. She didn’t care enough about the consequences of her actions to think it through or take his feelings into consideration.
August 10, 2009 at 1:17 am
matt b
[Girls and boys, this is when HE becomes responsible for his own problems. Right here. Because he says that’s fine, and then has the audacity later to blame her for his pain. Blames her for being 100% completely honest with him.
Not so simple, I suspect. Which is to say actions and words each convey meanings, and communication is always more muddled than we’d like. If our relationships functioned always and only according to what we said rather than what we did . . . well, they’d be a whole lot different.
{peregrine says: I never meant to suggest that she was completely perfect in this relationship. She’s clearly selfish, and occasionally unkind. However, I can’t see that Tom is right in blaming her for his pain. She warned him, I think, precisely because she wanted to avoid that responsibility, which is perhaps a coward’s move, but doesn’t change the fact that he had been warned. Which is really the point of the post. I had several more paragraphs written, going deeper into her faults, but in conjunction with this SS Pickups album I’ve been listening to, it made more sense to focus on his, so I deleted them.}
“You just do what you want, don’t you,” he accuses, in the final scene when he asks her why she danced with him when she was about to marry another man. To her credit, she doesn’t answer him the way I would have wanted to, with, “Yes, you moron. Why won’t you pay attention?”
And that analysis actually strikes me as slightly cruel, as is, of course, being somebody who does only what they want regardless of the feelings of others, whether those feelings are to our greatest convenience or not. And I know you know this, X.
{peregrine says: True. I’m one of those people who thinks kindness is worthwhile, simply because. That it’s worth striving for, and hard to do. But at this point, and remember we’re seeing her through Tom’s eyes, she could have gotten down on her knees and groveled and apologized for everything and he might still have resented her for being human and having faults. The fact that she can be selfish is no longer a surprise to either of them. So I was actually quite surprised that he was bringing this up so late in the game, as if it was a new thing. She DID call herself Sid Vicious. Which, again, is not an excuse of her behavior, but is at least somewhat self-aware. Maybe I’m projecting, but I would be frustrated to be dragged through the mud again at this point, when it’s all over and the best I can offer is a goodbye and hopefully some small comfort.
Anyhow, the borders responsibility are not so easily demarcated as Summer would seem to like, she can’t have a relationship and yet not have one at the same time. We are shown her saying she wants nothing serious on one hand; but we’re also showing her clearly being the aggressor and the initiator in the relationship, several times over. She kisses him first, she strips in his bed, etc. Most importantly, she comes to him after the barfight, which is not the act of somebody who just wants fun so much as it is the act of someone who values a relationship. Thus, to my first point, given all of her behavior, pleading innocence and ignorance and golly-what’s-that-about when he expresses deeper feelings than she would like seems hardly convincing.
{peregrine says: This actually makes a lot of sense to me. Her desires are contradictory. She genuinely likes him, she cares about him, but not enough to walk away when she knows she can’t give him what she wants. So she reacts by leaving the responsibility on him. Self-interested, and unkind, but completely believable. And remember, she didn’t make him any promises.}
He’s seen the shows in which the hero makes an impassioned speech and the audience is silent until one person starts clapping, after which everyone joins in. He figured this was one of those moments.
I believe this is known as the “slow clap,” and its cultural genealogy lies in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
{peregrine says: I know the tradition, but I still think it’s a mean thing to do under the circumstances. As if everyone in that room wasn’t already offended or frustrated enough. Also, this is the same guy who throughout the movie is kind of living in a fantasy world, so it’s not surprising at all that he treats them as if they’re characters in a movie and not real people, like he’s performing in some way.}
August 10, 2009 at 4:16 am
Pangolin
I agree with/understand many of your points, though I can’t help but wonder if that might not be because we’re both male.
As for the positive “slow clap”, the first one I remember is from the film “Lucas” which predates ST:TNG. Whence this meme?
August 11, 2009 at 12:54 am
matt b
Her desires are contradictory.
Precisely.
I have not heard of Lucas, alas. I merely have fond memories in my youth of seeing the crew of the Enterprise engage in such a thing, which I and my awkward friends emulated enthusiastically; for instance, in fourth period European history.
Pretty sure either source dates from before anybody but evolutionary biology geeks knew about the word ‘meme,’ though.
X – Relatedly, you might enjoy this.
http://www.firstshowing.net/2009/08/08/enjoy-this-500-days-of-summer-bank-heist-music-video/
{peregrine says: Adorbs.}
August 12, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Getting out of Writing A Review of (500) Days of Summer – Possible Spoilers « A Little Thinking
[...] came across this review of the movie, which exempts me from providing my own. I agree with most of it: it’s very well [...]
September 7, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Stefanie
I just found this review linked at the bottom of my own and I have to say that I love it. You’ve put what I was thinking into words far more simply than I did, and it’s nice to see someone else coming at the film in a similar way. Plus you’ve made me want to check out that Silversun Pickups album.
{peregrine: thank you, stephanie, that’s very kind! i hope you like the album, it’s one of my favorites.}
November 16, 2009 at 3:05 pm
caught in amber « Perpetually Peregrine
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