If you look at the plot breakdown and you examine the films impartially, you’ll see the similarity. That’s not revolutionary. But I’m harping on their connection in order to focus your attention. It’s easy for people to see how She’s Out of My League is unrealistic, bordering on offensive. Molly (the blonde love interest) is walking wish fulfillment. She’s not a real character. Portraying this as an ideal, or even laudable relationship, is at the very least false, if not outright harmful.
But (500) Days of Summer is perhaps worse, because it’s a really good movie.
ADVICE TO OUR TEENAGE AUDIENCE: as a strategy for attracting girls, this never works.
Let’s consider (500) Days of Summer:
Who does Joseph Gordon-Levitt play? JGL plays Tom Hansen, a music fanatic who designs greeting card slogans. He always wanted to be an architect, but never stuck out the application / submission process long enough. He’s a hopeless romantic.
Who does Zooey Deschanel play? Deschanel plays Summer Finn, the new executive assistant at Hansen’s office. She doesn’t feel the same way he does about love.
… that’s it. End of line.
What movies did Summer obsess over as a child, in the way that Tom apparently obsessed over The Graduate? No idea. What did Summer want to do in college that she never followed through on? No idea. What songs make her cry? No idea. Who does she turn to when her heart’s broken? No idea. What existence does she have, outside of a waxing and waning desire for Tom Hansen? None.
As far as the movie cares, when she goes home at the end of each day she stands patiently just inside her door until the next morning, when she has to go to work again and twirl her hair.
I’m being a tad unfair here. (500) Days of Summer is meant to be Tom’s movie, not Summer’s. The movie’s called that because Summer only exists for Tom for 500 days. Before that he was ignorant of her charms; after that, he falls in love with someone else. If the movie were about her, not Tom, it would be called (9131) Days of Summer.
I bring all this up only to stress how unrealistic a character Summer Finn is. She’s a hipster’s secret fantasy – not a blonde lifeguard with a D-cup, but a cute brunette who’ll listen to you rave about The Arcade Fire all afternoon. Her artful tastes do not make her any less a fantasy.
Oh, you've read Dave Eggers too? Isn't he incredible?
But, as I said, it’s not Summer’s movie, it’s Tom’s. So let’s consider Tom.
What do we learn about Tom prior to when he and Summer start dating?
- When he’s in real trouble, he turns to his younger sister for relationship counseling.
- He makes snap judgments about attractive women.
- He has no idea of how to capture a woman’s attention.
- When asked, point-blank, by the object of his affection if he likes her, he lies.
What’s the net result of all this comical behavior? Summer corners him in the copy room and kisses him. Problem solved!
We have to restrain ourselves from calling Tom’s behavior “pathetic.” It’s too recognizable to be pathetic. We’ve all been hopelessly in love before, our tongues cleaving to the roofs of our mouths and our brains thick with fog. Love makes us stupid. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a good job of making that stupidity seem sympathetic.
But most movies depict lovestruck youth doing something desperate and creepy to win the hearts of their loved ones. Whether it’s holding a boombox over your head, lip-syncing and gyrating to “Try A Little Tenderness,” or hiring Will Smith to teach you how to impress a model, there’s at least action. The man has to take a step forward. He has to show some vulnerability in order to attract the woman.
Duckie from Pretty in Pink has more game than Tom Hansen.
What does Tom do to attract Summer? Nothing.
Nothing genuine, anyway. He sings a pretty good karaoke song, karaoke being the very hallmark of post-80s artificiality. He flirts with her in a way that feels forced even to him. And when she asks him if he likes her – when she opens herself up to him – he lies and says no.
All Tom does is want. And, in this movie, wanting is enough. All Tom needs to do is pine away in his apartment, listening to Magnetic Fields and sketching I.M. Pei knockoffs and wishing that he had a girl as perfect as Summer. And then he gets her! Bam! Through no effort of his own. He just stares at her, slack-jawed, until she falls for him.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this is not realistic. Nor is it unrealistic in an encouraging way. The moral of (500) Days of Summer is that all you have to do is want a girl and she’ll be yours. Maybe not forever, but for long enough to be memorable. You don’t have to be smart, or compassionate, or a good provider, or a reliable partner, or drop dead sexy. You just need to wish really, really hard.
This is worse than the rules according to Dane Cook. In Employee of the Month and Good Luck Chuck, the female leads had no sense of agency. They were not the ones choosing a relationship; rather, as soon as the guy completed the correct ritual (became employee of the month, asked a girl out after sleeping with Dane Cook), he got the woman of his dreams. But at least in those stories there’s a ritual! At least the guy has to make an effort! At least there’s a can-he-or-can’t-he tension! In (500) Days of Summer there’s none of that. Tom Hansen doesn’t need to scheme to get Summer to fall for him. All he has to do is wish. And it works.
It’s tempting to say that Summer’s a positive female role because she chooses to initiate the relationship, not Tom. But we already established that Summer is not a complete character. She’s not a human with feelings, except insofar as she has feelings that make life harder for Tom. She’s a blow-up doll with an iPod. To think of anything she does as “choosing” misses the point. It’s like saying the asteroid “chooses” to kill Bruce Willis in Armageddon.
Weak male characters are bad for women because, like Dane Cook romantic comedies, they deny the women any sense of agency. What the woman wants doesn’t matter. All the man needs to do is lie in his bedroom and wish fervently that the woman will tumble into his arms.
The statuesque blonde calls the TSA nebbish out of the blue, thanks him for finding her iPhone and invites him to a hockey game (he loves hockey!). The perky hipster girl corners the nervous copywriter in the supply room and kisses him warmly. The cheerleader slides onto the cafeteria bench next to you and asks if you’ll take her to prom.
It’s wish fulfillment. It’s fantasy. And it’s not good for gender relations.
(Does this mean you should feel bad for liking (500) Days of Summer? Of course not. For one, you might not care about feminism. Or maybe you care about feminism but you think I’m wrong. Or maybe you just like the movie. None of (500) Days of Summer‘s recidivist gender mechanics takes away from its good dialogue, interesting characters or innovative pacing. It’s a good movie. A movie’s aesthetic quality and its moral content are two entirely different traits.
But you can’t watch a movie where the hero lies about his feelings to the ingenue and gets her anyway without wondering, “Should this work?”)
I have a problem with the whole ‘league’ concept in general. It has nothing to do with the woman and who she is as a person and everything to do with how she is perceived by other people. It also falls into what you’re saying is the problem with these two movies, the women have no sense of agency. She is not allowed to want things that other people perceive are outside her league. She is not allowed to want and thus present any sense of who she actually is as a person.
So what if the hot blonde likes the nerdy hockey fan? If she likes his company, then let her persue him if that’s what she wants. Although, this does raise the question, to me anyway, does the nerdy hockey fan like anything about this girl aside from her looks? Because that takes away from her as a person also.
I would argue that the asteroid in Armageddon choose to kill Bruce Willis as it was able to accomplish what no Earthly terrorist could: killing Bruce Willis.
Its also not got for women. If the nerdy loser guy wants the hot blond, and the super action hero guy wants the hot blond, who wants the “ugly” girl. Or instead of “ugly” you could put “non-perfect looking”, because thats how our society views women. Looking at Jennifers Body, you can see how Hollywood can’t even cast a non-attractive girl for the non-attractive girl role. If Amanda Seyfried is the average girl, then an ugly girl would be the best looking girl in any school.
I don’t know how ANY girl in todays modern age can relate to even the nerdiest girls in movies. Not an ounce of fat, bad hair, daddy issues, mother issues, rent, bad weather, or anything real women worry about. But thats an old argument. The only thing in our modern culture that gives us this are documentaries really.
I guess 500 days expects women to fill in the gaps of Summers life with their own biographies and have these 500 days allowed to be inserted into it.
But soon we have to not expect our entertainment to show human life in ALL its complexity. Stories that have 1,000,000 directions like our lives are called unfocussed for a reason. But it would be nice to not have to fill in the blanks or stories. I guess thats what books are for.
I think that (500) Days of Summer is actually trying to make the same point that you are about Summer. Since we only see it from the male perspective it has a bias. She never really fully wants to be with him originally, but through seeing him singing and being himself (or more of himself anyway), she becomes attracted to him. When they get together things become more like they were originally, causing her to lose interest in him. She doesn’t seem to actually like the same things he does anyway. Therefore she leaves him and happily marries someone else. He gets mad and realizes she isn’t his fantasy after all, but it is implied that he isn’t her’s either. When he meets the girl at the job interview, he acts on his fantasies rather than sitting on them. It is just a matter of perspective I suppose.
Speaking of agency and women in film, that was my biggest beef with the Watchmen movie. Laurie Jupiter was not only stripped of most of her character nuance, she wasn’t even allowed to have the realization that was the crux of the story on her own – it became a function of Dr. Manhattan’s magic revelatory finger probing her mind.
@ Donn
I know right? They stripped everything out of Laurie’s character! Worse yet, they made her boring. It would be one thing is Laurie was some kind of happy ditz but she’s not. Laurie is a aggressive, over-sexualized, angry pragmatist who hates the alienation that comes even with dating Dr. Manhattan (i.e GOD.) The idea of gender agency is something never properly expressed even by most writers. Even writers I like deal women a bad hand in this game (I’m looking at you Chuck Palanhiuk!)
Yeah, yeah, yeah we only see Toms side in 500 Days, but last summer I compared myself to Mr. Hansen in desire for the never truly attainable. His blindness shows a side we all experience at some point. The inequality and over thought put upon the other person who never fully exposes their self often kills the relationship. Unfortunately, The Magnetic Fields never soften the blow.
Then again, aren’t movies with two deep and emotionally mature main characters a boring drag?
I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it here. One thing I enjoyed about _(500) Days of Summer_ was how it made the male the hopeless romantic and the female the one rather against love- and not because she was holding out for someone else (which, I’d argue, makes her a romantic, nonetheless, just of a different nature), but because she didn’t believe in it. Typical rom-coms have crazy women-folk as the believers, and Manic Pixie Dreamgirls are usually dragging the men they change kicking and screaming into the relationship, or at least shock them into giving it a shot.
So here’s my thing: I don’t really think Summer changes Tom’s views on love, or if she does, it’s not enough for them to alter his courses of action (after his grieving period over the loss of Summer is over, at least)- meaning in the end, he DOES ask out that girl in the waiting area, something he would have been at least moreally okay with before meeting Summer, even if he wasn’t emotionally confident enough. Any reasons for NOT asking that woman out would have been because of his own self-confidence, not his thoughts on love in general. He’s a romantic before and after his five-hundred days.
Summer, however, does the 180- she GETS MARRIED, after all. So perhaps it’s a stretch, but I saw Tom as a Manic Pixie Dreamboy, of sorts, especially if taken from her perspective. Summer meets a guy that intrigues her, she takes a chance in spite of her previous notions of romance and love, and ends up changing those notions as a result of having been with him. I realize the movie is from Tom’s p.ov., but even so, none of this information is conjecture- we see it all happen.
I would argue that the women in romantic comedies tend to be shallowly written because the writer wants the women watching to be able to place herself in to that character. If you add too much background information, the women watching will start being able to say “that’s not like me” and it will take them out of the movie. Then they, along with the woman in the movie, can either fall for the male lead or hate the male lead… but at least they spent a moment connecting with someone in the movie. Even if it was false.
Extend this to the most popular romantic thing of the moment. Isn’t the most brilliant part of Twilight that Stephanie Meyer made Bella (who is narrating the books, mind you) so devoid of real substance that women, who spend over 3,000 pages with her, can place themselves and their experiences in to this story? They either fall for the male lead (Team Edward) or hate him (Team Jacob) and in a real, fistfights over it kind of way.
And I’m excited to discover that the male version of the ponytail and glasses is a pompadour and the propensity to make funny faces.
“You should know up front, this is NOT a love story”
So, while I appericate the article I feel you missed the point altogether. This is not about men and women as the subject. This is about being human and how we position ourselves in the world in a particular way and create our own misery and joy. Tom’s expectations about life are laid out when the film begins and Summer as we see at the end is a brief moment of opening till he falls back to his blindess.
Take everything you said in your article and remove 500 days of Summer and put Elizabethtown. You want to feel the industry sell bits of your soul then that is the movie.
“What does Tom do to attract Summer? Nothing.”
But then, what does Summer do to attract Tom? Equally, nothing. Unless you count being rilly, rilly hawt, I suppose.
There seems to be a double standard being applied here – it’s unfair to depict Tom winning the girl if he doesn’t work hard enough for it, but it’s OK that Summer gets him without any more than a flick of her hair?
@Joe: since the movie’s told from Tom’s perspective – like I said, it’s not called (9125) Days of Summer – I think it’s fair to put more of an emphasis on Tom’s efforts than Summer’s.
Also, Summer does something: she asks him! POINT BLANK! if he likes her! and he lies! Sorry for the yelling, but I brought that up twice in the article. That’s really the element of the movie that bugs me the most.
I don’t think asking if he likes her counts – for one thing, it’s not unambiguously a come-on, and secondly, she’s already won him (to all intents and purposes) by this point. The question I’m really asking is: why did he fall for her so much in the first place? It’s just as unexplained as her leaping on him by the copiers.
As a notorious ladies man in my own right, I can say that Tom doesn’t necessarily have to *do* anything per se to attract Summer. Sometimes you’re attracted to someone even though they have done nothing to “earn” it. That’s the initial attraction, anyway (you see someone you find attractive, you’re going to be drawn to them even if they have the personality of a piece of cardboard. You only learn that later as you get to know them).
I would say that any woman who informs me that she likes the Smiths is automatically ten times more attractive in my book (doesn’t hurt if she like Joy Division, Wilco, or Weezer either). It’s a shared connection, which Tom then blows all out of proportion (I laughed as much with cringing recognition as amusement when he dismissed Summer out of hand after she failed to respond to “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” being played on his computer for her benefit).
“It would be one thing is Laurie was some kind of happy ditz but she’s not. Laurie is a aggressive, over-sexualized, angry pragmatist who hates the alienation that comes even with dating Dr. Manhattan (i.e GOD.)”
WTF? A ‘happy ditz’ is more interesting then what you just said?
Thanks for ruining the end of Armageddon for me!
…Just kidding.
Great article. I just wonder what the writer’s intentions were in portraying Summer’s automatic attraction to Tom. I suspect, in the interest of moving the plot forward, they were more lazy* than revelatory.
*(or due to time contraints, pacing, etc)
You missed the point entirely. 500 Days of Summer isn’t about how little a guy has to do to attract a woman; it’s about how much shit guys are willing to put up with self-absorbed females who pass off their physical attributes for beauty, before they go looking for someone decent, genuine and truly beautiful. The movie isn’t about meeting Summer, it’s about getting through Summer to get to Autumn.
Yeah, I haven’t seen 500 days but I thought similar things about Garden State, but not the parts about it being a good film. How can these female characters be read as anything but figments of the guy’s imagination? It can be done well though, anyone seen Little Murders?
@Peter: no, but now I kind of have to.
Don’t overthinkit, enjoy it. Romantic comedies that aren’t romantic or funny should not be compared to anything that is both. Go watch the first ten minutes of Up for inspiration.
@Roger I love Up but it was clearly make under the male perspective that this article criticizes. Ellie wasn’t a character, she was just an inspiration, a male fantasy. I notice that writers love women with male hobbies, maybe because in theory it’s easier to speak with them. Ellie loved Charles Muntz as much as Carl did, what would happen if she loved Frank Sinatra like many girls during the 40s?
This crap won’t dissappear in a long time, there are too many lonely insecure men.
Great Article. But to think you can even compare She’s Out Of my league to 500 days in any aspect is blasphemy.500 days might have a hopeless romantic Tom, but he is also a likable character. Unlike the character in SOML, who is just so cliched, and sex crazed. Tom didn’t do anything to attract her, but neither did Summer.If tom would have been listening to a different song in the elevator he probably wouldn’t even pursue her as much. Tom didn’t even actually LIE to her! He said he did like her, maybe not in boyfriend/girlfriend but he said HE LIKED HER. 500 is not a common romantic comedy and it is a very good movie. When Tom asks out Autumn it just shows that Tom learned his lessons with summer and he is not only matured emotionally but have gotten over her completely. I know i’m rambling but i just thought i should bring up some points.