500 Days of a Romantic Douche-Canoe

Sometimes, when I’m lying in bed in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling, I wonder: If my life was a movie, who would star as me? Who would direct it? And most importantly, what would the sound track be? Gotta have The Rolling Stones in there, some The Who, Talking Heads, XTC, and definitely The Cranberries. Maybe some Vampire Weekend too. My first instinct is to say The Smiths, but then I remember the connotations behind the infamous band: phrases like “Male-manipulator,” “sociopath,”, and “downright psycho” come to mind, likely attributed to movie soundtracks like American Psycho and The Killer. 

Yet the most recurring image that I see – and I'm sure that many people of my generation would relate – is the elevator scene from the iconic 2009 romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer. If you don’t know the scene I’m referencing, put 500 Days of Summer on your to watch list, but simply put, an innocent boy, Tom, listening to “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths in his headphones doesn't really muffle the sound to anyone passing by. Then the girl he’s been crushing on, Summer, walks into the elevator. The confines of the elevator make the scene more intimate. Summer walks in and says, “I love the Smiths.” Tom gets visibly confused, Summer starts singing along to the song, and she says “You have good taste in music.”. Shaboom! Tom is in love. 

I like movies, and I like them so much I make them. Sometimes this infatuation with the cinematic world does me some good, like in Jeopardy, but more often it just screws me over. The biggest problem is that line of questioning I ask myself when I can’t sleep. I constantly compare myself to the fictional characters I meet on the screen. Not only has this given me wonderfully crippling feelings of inadequacy, because how could I possibly be as cool as James Bond, or as smart as Will Hunting, it also has molded me into a hopeless romantic, emphasis on the hopeless.

Some famous romantics that I compare myself to include Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate, Patrick Verona of 10 Things I Hate About You, and of course, Tom Hansen of 500 Days of Summer. I think I’ve mentioned this movie enough times, so here's some context:

The movie is a Rom-Com, that's hardly romantic. We follow Tom Hansen as he falls in love in this nonlinear love story. Tom thinks that Summer is out of his league until the famed elevator scene. He pursues, she pulls away, then she kisses him, and they become a  situationship. Although complicated and obviously not likely to last, Tom becomes extremely cheerful and carefree. They start out fine, but Summer refers to him as a “friend,” even though, confusingly enough, they’d already had sex in a shower. Tom wants to take the relationship further, but Summer firmly doesn’t. They begin to fight, their relationship deteriorates, and then Summer ends things. Tom returns to all his routinely depressed way of going about things. Months later, Tom and Summer reconnect, and Summer helps him get over their shared history. 

Even this summary hardly does the film any justice. It’s not until you watch it from both perspectives, thinking about the plot from both Summer and Tom’s point-of-view, can you understand what makes the movie so generational. 

Every generation has a defining movie. Everyone has seen it, everyone has a take on it, and it’s about either love or coming of age — The Graduate, Annie Hall, and The Breakfast Club. They represent the time period, in music, fashion, and outlook on life. Kids of those generations developed strong opinions on what those movies meant, and as they grew and matured those opinions did too.

This generation, mine, I think, is defined by 500 Days of Summer. The “not-quite romantic-dramedy” about Tom and Summer played by Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel respectively.

Some people see the film under the eye of romanticism, taking the quote on quote “side” of Tom, and hating on Summer. Others watch in Summer’s shoes, taking the more cynical approach, and call Tom selfish and dismissive. But after stepping away from both my romantic and cynic tendencies, a middle ground, what I think is the true underlying message of the film becomes clear: Compatibility. Whether it's the wrong person or wrong time, if it doesn't work, there's no making it work, I’d even go as far as to say it is about how we venture to understand what it means to be compatible. What we ought to value from our relationships, what we learn from them, and how that helps us grow as people in the world. 

In 2009, when most people gave the film a first watch, generally audiences concluded that Tom was in the right and that Summer was in the wrong. Twitter flooded with commentary more or less all summarizable as “Summer’s a bitch.” 

I was no exception. In the Catskills, on a bed that's ninety percent memory foam, underneath a thin sheet, criss-cross applesauce, with my laptop on my lap, I first watched 500 Days of Summer. It was June, not 2009, more like 2020, …. It was around the time I was starting my first ever job; I felt like an adult — entitled to my correct opinion. This was also around the time I was reading books on how to be a stoic, so basically I thought I had the world figured out. “There are two types of people,” I would’ve told you, “the good who are healthy for themselves and others, and the bad who are inherently, well… just that. Bad.” 

So I got my way through the movie, only having to pause and pretend to be asleep twice while my grandma checked on me to figure out what that strange noise was. As the credits rolled and Tom met his next love, I was both heart warmed and struck by the untraditional, but still happy, ending. Being as dumb and opinionated as I was, without more than 20 seconds to process, I texted a group chat full of boys, “Yo you boys gotta watch this shit called 500 days of summer. Good ass movie, but the main girl is such a dickhead.” Except I didn’t actually say “dickhead.” It was way worse than that.

For the sake of convincing you that I’m not as big a douche-canoe as that quote makes me out to be, remember that irrational thinking is the child of immediate action. Without the time to process, I couldn’t have possibly come up with something more profound to say when recommending the movie or describing my initial feelings towards Summer. Besides, lots of people felt that way after their first watch. 

I think that feeling is partially due to the human nature of sympathizing with the dumpee. Those of you who have faced rejection or been dumped know that it really does suck. Sometimes you can sleep it off. Sometimes it takes months to pick up the pieces. 

At the same time however, break-ups are hilarious. Not in the moment of course, but to look back on. I can’t stress this enough, this is not a love story, but there's some rom-com in it.   

Let's run down the similarities between Tom Hansen and I. One, until I was fifteen I wanted to be an architect; Tom wants to be an architect. Two, we kind of have similar clothing styles. Corduroy, Cardigans, Cashmere. Three, I find myself time and time again involved with girls who don’t want to go official, hearing Summer’s same mantra, “I’m not really looking for anything serious.” I always pretend I don’t mind, like Tom did, but this just leads to me resenting when I should be loving. And while love is what makes life worth living, I find myself at the end of those love and loath situations, either unsatisfied or dumped. 

 Fourth, we both like The Smiths, so we’re pretty similar.

 Last year, I found myself thinking about how uncanny our similarities really are. It was in the midst of a spring/summer-fling turned situationship. But I’m a relationship kinda guy, and I made that very clear with a variety of romantic stunts – that's just my style. This girl, I’ll call her Winter, claims she isn’t really the relationship kinda gal. I don’t know if I didn’t believe her or if I thought I could change her, but I sure as hell must’ve been delusional. 

Either way, I had an endless list of cute dates for us planned. It was going to be the perfect highschool relationship. My bad luck was going to turn around, and I would finally fall in love like I always imagined I would in highschool. The only sign that really had me doubting myself, was in the birthday card she wrote to me just three days before dumping me. “I’m sorry for how ambiguous I am about us. I wish I had more clarity to offer, but I don’t.” 

Ouch. Blunt and clear.

Even after all that, I was clueless of the break-up surprise that would hit me in the face about two minutes before a meeting with a teacher I was meeting for the first time. Talk about good first impressions.

But although that break-up really did suck, as all break-ups do, months later, Winter and I are great friends again. Also looking back at the birthday card, there are some really nice things in it too. You can’t isolate sentences, or moments, but rather you need to see the whole picture, or card in this case, to fully understand someone’s feelings.

 It’s by shifting your perspective that you can discover a completely new side of a person that you may have never expected to exist. Take Summer for example: 10 years after that film’s release, people started to take the director’s advice and watch the movie in Summer’s shoes. The crazy public opinion about Summer was reversed. Finally people took Summer’s side and pointed their finger at Tom. Some critics contribute this to the development of essentializing language for men, like the “nice-guy” and “fuck-boy” tropes. 

At the film’s debut, Summer easily fit into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, coined by the film critic Nathan Rabin. He said the Manic Pixie Dream Girl “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” But Summer made her intentions for a loose no label-ship very clear, and Tom was either too selfish, or too self centered to listen. 

Yet, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope describes all our feelings toward Summer perfectly: “Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against her and her immediate family.” Summer’s character simultaneously charms us into love and deeply offends us to our core. 

But there’s still some confusion. Is Summer really a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? She motivates Tom to be an architect and then moves on and gets married. We can try and understand this with Tom’s famous line: “You never wanted to be anybody's girlfriend, and you’re somebody's wife.” 

Although this conundrum leaves Tom confused, we can always try to analyze it. From Tom’s perspective, the move seems shitty and cold. But from the eyes of Summer, how can you blame a girl for wanting relationship freedom in order to keep her eyes out, looking for “the one” and then changing her ways when finding him. But to be fair, it's only after looking at both perspectives that the truth is revealed. I learned that from Court TV. 

I sat on the question about Summer’s character for a while, and after little progress, I began to bring it up with some friends.

Then one fateful day I discovered something. School was out for a snow day. It had snowed brutally all morning but perfectly cleared for some afternoon sledding with friends. This very unlikely circumstance led to one of the most enlightening and profound conversations.

I took the opportunity to get Winter’s opinion on the matter. After long deliberation and a few rounds of hot cocoa, Winter and I came to the conclusion that 500 Days of Summer tells us that love is about finding compatibility, but it's also about openness. When Summer was open to the possibility of having a serious relationship, possibly falling in love, rather than what she had been clear about from the beginning with Tom, then she could actually change her cynical ways. So it's just as much about him as it is her. And although it’s probably a myth that we can change people’s ways – the "I can fix them” phenomena – if someone is open to receiving that change, the impossible becomes possible. 

If I wasn’t open to seeing Winter differently and moving on from our so-called break-up, I never would have been able to rekindle my friendship with her. Fresh off the break-up, I was so fed up with Winter that I could’ve cast her aside, and I almost did. She had the gall to tell me she wanted to stay friends. The nail in the coffin was seeing her hook-up with her ex at a house party, just three weeks after we ended. 

But different people need different amounts of time to recalibrate. Maybe she had a foot out the door for a while, maybe I just didn’t mean as much to her as she did to me. I don’t know, and I doubt I ever will. But it's better to keep moving forward than sit on it. And in order to move forward, you have to be open to doing so.

Without openness, you end up stagnant, which is exactly what happens to Tom after his break-up. Tom spirals into depression and stops caring about anything and everything. He loses all faith in love and romance until his romantic heart is resparked by a chance meeting with Summer months later. 

Looking at that chance encounter, the film has a clever split screen scene to show Tom’s “expectations vs. reality” of the events of a party Summer invites him to. 

Tom and I are very similar in that sense as well. I have always set high expectations, built large optimistic images of impossible outcomes, and always getting crushed by the lame reality. Maybe I watch too many movies and then get disappointed when my life isn’t so cinematic, or maybe I’m too much of a control freak that can’t control a thing. Bottom line is that I need to learn to not get my hopes too high or get too hopeless, especially when it comes to romantics: Somewhere between optimism and realism, where it isn’t always summer, but it isn’t always winter either. 

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