Image courtesy Dune Entertainment
I was sixteen when 500 Days of Summer was released into theaters, ten years ago, in July 2009. I learned about it from trailers I had seen posted on Tumblr, before the site’s rise and subsequent fall, and went to see it with my best friend. We planned which showing we would see through Facebook messages, and had my mother drop us off at the theater.
I loved it the way exactly the way you love things when it’s summer, and you’re sixteen, and with your best friend, and above all, see yourself or some version of it reflected into something larger and exponentially more beautiful than your physical being.
We both fell in love with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the movie’s leading man, about halfway through the movie, when we leaned over the arms of our theater seats and whispered in consensus of how cute we thought he was. His penchant for sweater vests and snappy outfits, architectural aspirations, the scratchy softness of his voice, with Jimmy Stewart-like cadence, his still-kickass karaoke cover of the Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man,” his face as the late afternoon sun hits it through train windows, his earnest admittance of “of course I like you,” helplessly pinned against the charms of the girl he thinks he loves—we were smitten. We would routinely post YouTube clips of his interviews and fan-cuts of the movie on each other’s Facebook walls, stayed up all night watching him host Saturday Night Live later that year, made each other birthday cards with ink-jet print-outs of him pulled from Google Images. The lockscreen to my iPod Touch was a screenshot of him yelling “I hate this song!,” which my teenage brain found funny and ironic. I ripped the pictures from a New York magazine profile of him and taped them to my closet doors; they remain there in my childhood bedroom today.
500 Days of Summer so quickly became my favorite movie; I didn’t take that designation lightly, but calling it my favorite felt so right then. As was typical of me then, and is admittedly still typical of me now, a part of me simmered into anger as the rest of the world fell in love with the movie, and Joseph Gordon Levitt in turn. They were ours; they were mine. (Despite this, I still would have loved the power to spike industry sales of an album solely by quoting it in my high school yearbook, just as Summer did in the movie.)
What was probably most compelling to me about the movie was how the main characters defined their lives by the things they loved—as I would do in turn with the movie itself. I was just like them, fervent lover of music and movies and movies, cultivator of a so-called rich interior life, losing where these things ended and I began. After his first real conversation with Summer, about Magritte, Hopper, and JD Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (my sixteen-year-old self reverberating with joy that these were my favorite things too!), Tom’s little sister says to him, “Just because some girl likes the same bizarro crap that you do doesn’t make her your soulmate.” Not that any of this was bizarro—as a teenager I didn’t yet see how these items were just the sunlight zone of a cultural deep dive. But her remark stung me too, as I thought finding kinship among people who loved the same things as you did was the only way truly meaningful relationships were formed. But I didn’t know then how differently these things nest in each individual person’s mind, how there is a joy in sharing the things we love, but also an unbridgeable divide. I had thought that sharing these things was like cracking some code into fully understanding another, but I didn’t know how much deeper the chasms really ran.
It would be eight months after first seeing 500 Days of Summer that I would date my first boyfriend. We bonded in a way that I thought to be just like Tom and Summer in the movie, as I exclaimed to my best friend. We traded iPods on the way home from an indoor track meet, comparing playlists and scrolling down the list of artists to find common ground in a kind of flirtatious cross-examination. He was the first boy I met that loved indie rock like I did, not just the ska and punk that most high school boys around me loved, but Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes, Regina Spektor. He was the first boy I met that openly admitted to liking reading, that didn’t just write “I don’t read” under “Favorite Books” on Facebook when Facebook still asked us what our favorite things were, not just things we Liked. We would make each other mix CDs and stay up past our bedtimes texting on our flip phones with QWERTY keyboards about the tracks we liked best. He told me that I knew everything about him, and I believed him, because I thought he was inseparable from the things we loved together, and I knew those so well. I thought all of this meant not just something, but everything.
When we broke up, I watched my DVD of 500 Days of Summer repeatedly, looking for some kind of message, a way forward. I had thought I had seen us in the movie, the way I kept it in my mind, but watching it play in real time, my image of us was slowly dislodged.
The movie’s most outright claim is that “while this is a story about love, this is not a love story,” but even when that was spelled out in front of me, as a teenager, I still saw it as aspirational. I thought love was a steady stream of whimsical frolics through Ikea, record shopping, seeing movies at repertory theaters, driving around listening to French singer-songwriters, and none of this would be trite, but meaningful. All of it would enhance my life, and be more than just ways to strategically target ads at me.
Now I see that 500 Days of Summer defined not so much my teenage self as I was, but the future I envisioned for that teenager. I thought I’d be working in some high-ceilinged rustic-chic loft office—but in a job that was not as soul-crushing as a greeting card writer ostensibly was—and be living in a large stylish apartment that I would have all to myself, both of them filled with light, light I recognized as the same hopeful light that filled my high school classrooms in late afternoons and beckoned towards this exact future.
500 Days of Summer conveyed a zeitgeist that seemed so contemporary, I never imagined it feel archaic. I thought I would still be listening to iTunes on my office computer, just like Tom. I thought I could still flounce around in pastel-flowered full-skirted outfits in 2019 and be considered cool and chic, and not like someone who still sleeps with a nightlight.
Revisiting the movie now, ten years later, I see the ways it has not aged gracefully—it’s clearly a perpetuator of the manic pixie dream girl trope that proliferated the films of the 00s, a seemingly male-centric movie mostly consumed by women. There’s so many lines of dialogue that make me wince today, like when Tom’s friend attribute Summer dumping him to “a hormonal thing,” the narrator’s reductive statement that there’s only two types of people in the world: men and women, the whole exchange in the karaoke bar where Summer expresses she doesn’t want a boyfriend and the men react in disbelief. When she says “you don’t believe a women could enjoy being free and independent?,” Tom’s friend MacKenzie responds, robotically, “are you a lesbian?,” and ever-so patiently and graciously, Summer laughs and ‘breaks it down’ for the awestruck men, saying she wants to enjoy being young and have fun and “save the serious stuff for later,” MacKenzie concludes that “she’s a dude!”
Even the character of Tom himself, the untouchable perfect man of my sixteen-year-old mind, has faded around the edges for me, would have lost his touch completely if played by a less charming actor than JGL. He seems emptier than he did to me as a teenager, but then again, no emptier than the average person, and that’s all he ever claimed to be: ‘perfectly adequate Hansen’ was his college nickname, after all.
I can see now that this is not a movie about extraordinary people, as they first seemed to me, but ordinary people ascribing extraordinary meaning to everyday things: like love, and books, and music, and movies, desperately looking for these things to elevate their lives to what the movie calls ‘cosmic significance.’ 500 Days of Summer is a movie about people who love stories, who love narratives, and the “ecstatic highs and desolate lows” of art as Nick Hornby once so aptly put it, who need their lives to feel this way, who imagine a narrator and a perfectly matched soundtrack guiding them through their lives, who cut chronology into their own timeline that makes sense to them. I am one of those people, and that’s why I loved this movie so much—if these things don’t elevate our lives, what does? What can? And if they don’t, then what’s even the point? But I think I see now that there’s a difference between these things, and the versions of ourselves we project on them, and we shouldn’t base our entire identity on the latter.
I read somewhere that perhaps the most iconic location of 500 Days of Summer, the park bench overlooking the city, what’s referred to in the movie as “Angela’s Plaza” but really called Angel’s Knoll, closed, news that would surely dismay Tom Hansen, in whatever strange dimension fictional characters exist in. It upset me too, somewhat irrationally, this nostalgia for a place I had never been, but still feels like my own, even though it probably didn’t look like it did in the movie in real life, or more importantly, look like it did in my mind.
I was sixteen ten years ago, a decade. My life doesn’t look like what I thought it would. I haven’t spoken to that high school best friend in years, she’s married now, to a woman, which makes me sad I hadn’t known something so essential about her all those years ago. But I can say that my real-life relationships are better than Tom and Summer’s, because as Tom’s friend Paul in the movie says about his girlfriend, they were “real,” once I learned to love people for their living, breathing selves and not what I had projected onto them.
Watching this movie now is like running into an old ex. It is slightly awkward, the charm and mystery faded. It has made me promises it hasn’t kept. But I can still see parts of myself in it, and if I allow it to, sometimes it can still move me, the way a first love always can.
Nikki Barnhart is a writer in living in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Rumpus, Drunk Monkeys, Newtown Literary, The Review Review, and Maudlin House, as well as the music and culture blog, Alt Citizen.