One of my favorite movies is 500 Days of Summer. I have watched this movie many more times than I’ve watched any other movie. The reason that it is one of my favorite movies is that I was able to relate so well to the main character Tom. I saw the world very similarly to Tom, in that I believed in destiny and having one true love. But the more times that I viewed the movie the more I realized different truths about aspects of relationships that I had been neglecting myself.
I used to believe that the villain of the movie was the character, Summer, because I always believed that she hurt Tom in a similar way that I had felt wronged by women that I had previously dated. But then I realized that Summer told Tom at the very beginning and was very open about what she wanted in terms of relationships and she never promised him anything. We see the movie through Tom’s perspective, which presents a skewed version of who Summer really is. Tom’s own mindset is what set him down the self destructive path in the movie. His mindset was that even though this woman was telling him that she didn’t want a relationship, he was going to reject what she was explicitly telling him and he believed that he was going to win her over. I believe many young people, including myself, react this way when dating or pursuing someone that we admire. We believe that we can change the mind of someone else and force our expectations of what we want onto them. It took me many viewings of the movie to realize that you can’t actually do this.
And that is why this is one of my favorite movies. It is not a romantic comedy but more of a coming of age story, that helped me to grow up. I was like Tom, where I believed that I could win over a woman who told me that she didn’t want to date and that destiny would be on my side to help. Because of this I often set myself up for a feeling of unhappiness or of not being content. This movie taught me that even though I found someone to be attractive, an overall cool person, and that she liked a lot of the same things as me didn’t mean that she was handpicked by destiny to be my one true love, much like Tom thought Summer was in the movie.
Many movies and pop culture seem to reinforce and teach unrealistic expectations about relationships, and to me, at least, this movie is unique in that it kind of breaks this cycle. This movie describes how you go into relationships that are unlikely to work out and how that can scar you but also how that helps you develop and evolve as a person. I love this movie because after watching it many times I was finally able to develop and evolve as a person in terms of how I viewed adult relationships.
