500 Days of Summer is the best example of a postmodern love story that blurs the fine line between a ‘fated love’ and a ‘projected fantasy’.
As someone who is an enthusiast of deeply analysing the minor details of the world of film and cinema, here’s my take on ‘500 Days of Summer’, and no, I’m not going to make you pick between Team Tom or Team Summer (because no one held a completely seraphic crown in this movie).
The movie follows through Tom’s POV wherein he believed that he’d never be happy until he found “the one”. Summer, on the other hand, did not share the same belief; she had seen a fair share of fallouts and chose to mostly stay distant from what she truly felt and detached from love. She was pretty upfront that she did not see the world with rose-tinted sunglasses.
In the initial days of their meeting, Tom already starts viewing Summer as his dream girl; he puts her on a pedestal and announces that he is in love when in reality he has not seen Summer for the human she was and kept on staying out of touch with the ground reality of their lives, hence eventually spiralling in a fantasy that he created of her.
The movie followed a series of ‘expectations vs reality’ scenarios, both directly and indirectly.
“ Summer: There’s no such thing as love, it’s fantasy”
The movie had its fair share of moments where Summer kept signalling that she was scared of commitment and rather disliked the idea of love and considered it a fantasy, and even though this cold, harsh reality was right in front of Tom, he could not brush off that “dream-girl-Summer” persona he had created of her in his mind. The reality was always there, it was just ignored and brushed off.
The movie did an amazing job at actually portraying what happens when we put someone on a pedestal and create a dream world around them when in reality they are just simple humans. Projecting your fantasy makes you ignore all those warning signs. It makes you forget that they can be human as well; you ignore any chances of accepting that they can be flawed too. That is exactly what happened in the movie– Tom was too quick to fall into his fantasy of a dream girl walking into his life and named it ‘love’.
Love, on the other hand, is never about viewing them as your “dream person”, it’s more about seeing them and accepting them for the human they are, no matter how flawed.
Summer’s home is metaphorically displayed as a reflection of her true self. It was a place where she could be open and vulnerable about what she was scared of and why she chose to be so distant from her feelings.
All this time Summer had established her boundaries around each other, and Tom could just never stay honest about what he wanted out of the relationship they held. When the consequences of the reality which he agreed to show up, he is often shown freaking out by being faced with the truth. Summer had always made it clear that she didn’t want a relationship but Tom and, well, he never wanted to face it.
After halftime, the movie starts shifting more and more towards the reflection of what they had created.
When Tom starts seeing everything for what it is, he starts hating Summer for who she is and hates himself for the dream world that he still holds in his heart.
He felt completely shattered and rather angry when he was shown how Summer had everything clear from Day 1, and how it was Tom who kept on pretending that he was chill and cool when he wasn’t and was just too scared to confront Summer about it.
Just around the end of the dreams that Tom had woven all this time, he wished his expectations would finally align with his reality.
But the truth is, the expectations were just the dreams around the potential that he felt was still there; and in reality, Summer was engaged.
Tom spiralled again for the last time; he tried to find out where it all went wrong and who was at fault.
But, that is the cost that everything came with, it was a lesson that both of them had to learn. For Summer, she had to still work on her views towards commitment and love, while Tom had to understand what love was.
The whole point of the movie was to show that when a relationship falls apart, it’s never all of a sudden and is actually just a result of faultlines that were never really patched up.
“Tom: What happened? Why? Why didn’t they work out?
Summer: What always happens. Life.”
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