"500 Days of Summer" is my favorite movie of all time. Sometimes it can be hard to explain to people why such a cynical, depressing love story is so dear to me.
Well, that's just it. "500 Days of Summer" is not a love story.
For a while, I idolized Summer Finn. With her brown hair, vintage outfits and quirky personality, she seemed so confident in her independence. And that attracted me.
Tom Hansen, on the other hand, I felt so bad for. Constantly rejected by the love of his life, treated terribly and then left to rot in the friend zone. It's hard not to sympathize with him because, let's be real, we have all been there.
I re-watched the movie a few weeks ago. And it turns out, I still feel bad for Tom. But for another reason.
I'm going to emphasize again. This is not a love story.
In our society today, we are conditioned to set our standards up high and not to settle for anyone but the man or woman of our dreams. This results in having teetering expectations of relationships that topple over at the drop of a hat, and too often we see women and men alike settling into relationships with people they thought checked off every box on their check list of standards, but rather ended up being completely different, even abusive, people. This is rooted in our cultural inability to see the difference between loving someone and loving the idea of them.
That is what we see in this movie. Tom is not in love with Summer. He's in love with who he thought she was. As the days after they meet progress, Tom falls so far deeply in love with the idea of Summer that he completely ignores everything that she has been telling him. Since the start of Tom+Summer, she makes very clear to him the type of person she was, and the type of person she wasn't. Summer doesn't believe in love. In fact, she even goes so far as to say:
But Tom, being the hopeless romantic that he is, looks past all the warning signs and doesn't take her words to heart because he is too blinded by all that Summer is: beautiful, wild, and wonderful.
The actor who plays Tom, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, describes the problems with this when he says, “He (Tom) develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning because he doesn’t care about much else going on in his life. A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.”
We are trained by pop culture to expect them to end up together because they "belong with each other." But Tom and Summer are actually polar opposites. In Tom's eyes, Summer is perfection. But the perfection she possesses has no depth because it is based off of superficial things.
On the left side are all of the things that drew Tom to Summer. As you can see, these things weren't enough to keep them together. This is because Summer is not the girl of Tom's dreams. Summer is just a phase. Tom was standing too close to the image to see the whole picture.
This is so often reflected in real relationships. We get so caught up in everything we build this person up to be. We cut them up and try to mold them into who we want them to be, all the while losing who we are and compromising them in the process.
Tom's younger half-sister, Rachel, is the hero of the movie. She offers sound advice when she tells him, "Look, I know you think she is the one, but I don’t. I think you’re just remembering the good stuff. Next time you look back, I think you should look again.”
Summer wasn't Tom's soulmate. It was just as tough for Tom to realize and accept that as it is for us, because of our infatuation and fascination with unrequited love. In the past, when my friends have confided in me about relationships that ended abruptly, and breakups that came out of nowhere, I have noticed that sometimes there are so many signals telling us that the two of us are not a good match, but we look past them because of the good qualities our significant other possesses.
My favorite quote from the entire movie comes from Tom's best friend, Paul, who is married to his high-school sweetheart. He is asked about what the "Girl of His Dreams" would look like. His response is,
“I think technically ‘The Girl Of My Dreams’ would probably have like a really bodacious rack, you know, maybe different hair, she’d probably be a little more into sports. But truthfully, Robyn is better than the girl of my dreams.
She’s real."
Now that, my friends, is a love story.
