I recently came across this video essay with my friend Katie and now I can’t stop thinking about the movie 500 Days of Summer (2009) again. The video is by YouTuber Sloane Stowe, who pieces together commentary about the film from its makers to add a new layer of analysis to the popular discourse.
The discourse, of course, is that the main character, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is the bad guy. The story follows his situationship with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), around whom he develops a romantic obsession. Through fantastical dramatizations of Tom’s imagination, the film shows very clearly just how Tom only sees Summer through the lens of his own desires and hopeless romanticism. He projects ideals onto her that have nothing to do with who she really is.
The story is based on real events from script co-writer Scott Neustadter’s life: he traveled abroad and dated a girl who dumped him. Scott is Tom.
500 Days of Summer was famously misread by much of its audience when it came out—viewers were quick to believe in Tom’s version of reality, to believe that Summer is some aloof, cold-hearted bitch who plays with his feelings and breaks his heart. But the actual reading of the film—that Tom is selfish and over romanticizes Summer—isn’t just some woke reinterpretation; it’s what the writers intended from the beginning. In interviews director Marc Webb remarks on Tom’s possessiveness, and Scott Neustadter says: “Relationships and romance and love are not one-sided, but for this person it’s very much all about him.”
In 2018, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt tweeted: “It’s mostly Tom’s fault. He’s projecting. He’s not listening. He’s selfish. Luckily he grows by the end.”
I’ve often been frustrated by this movie for reasons I could never figure out, which is why I can’t stop thinking about it. This is complicated by the fact that I actually think this is a well made, well-written movie, and I enjoy watching it. It’s also personal: I’ve been the Summer character IRL a few times and I frequently find myself gravitating back to her with questions in my mind. Who is Summer? What is she actually like, and what was she actually thinking and feeling during the events that transpired in the film? The fact that those questions exist is not due to a lack of character development, but a key feature of the narrative. We’re not supposed to know. The film accomplishes its goal of immersing us completely in Tom’s world, but in doing so it undermines itself. That’s why this film is so hard to read. It’s not the audience’s fault.
Sloane Stowe explains this by arguing that in spite of writer Scott Neustadter’s purported self-awareness, he didn’t seem to genuinely believe his own movie. She notes the script takes great pains to show us that other people see Tom as a good guy, a Nice Guy, which means that, because this view comes from other characters, “it goes far beyond Tom’s unreliable perspective…. It extends from the writers.” In earlier interviews after the film’s release, Neustadter acknowledges Tom’s mistakes but still seems defensive of Tom’s good intentions, and it’s only later he changes tune to echo what his fellow filmmakers and the cast members say about Tom’s selfishness and possessiveness.
The film opens with a comedic disclaimer, appearing on screen: “The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you Jenny Beckman. Bitch.” Sloane Stowe points out that even if it’s meant to come off as tongue-in-cheek, and if writer Scott Neustadter believed himself when he said that there are no villains in this (or his own) story, then this line either would have been removed or corrected at the end.
She also points out that early in the movie’s release, Neustadter seems content to market the film as revenge against his ex. Before its release, when he was still on good terms with his ex, he showed her the script and was upset when she said she saw herself in Tom, not Summer. In any case, he was asked many times if Jenny Beckman (the aforementioned “bitch” in the movie’s disclaimer) is actually his ex’s name, and the fact that he refuses to confirm or deny is telling.
Learning that earlier versions of the movie played around with showing Summer’s perspective more explicitly is also a little frustrating. That could have been the exact right amount of hand holding that the audience needs.
As I’ve been thinking about this story structure and the premise of a delulu, overly romantic, unreliable narrator, I wonder if it’s ever been done right. Yes, there’s The Graduate, which literally gets called out in 500 Days as a film that Tom idolized because he misread it, but I’ve only watched The Graduate for the first time recently (loved it) and I don’t think I’m ready to talk about it in depth.
Instead, I want to share this short story I love called “Halloween” by Marion Crotty (published in the literary journal Crazyhorse). It’s told in first person and still manages to encourage the reader to read between the lines.
The protagonist, Jules, is a senior in high school who is going through a breakup and seeks out advice from her grandmother, Jan. The advice is unequivocally terrible, premised on unrealistic and toxic ideas of love, and Jules, utterly heartbroken and obsessed with her ex, eats it up every time.
“Halloween” opens like this:
My grandmother had fucked up ideas of love. She had been married three times—once to my grandfather and twice to a guy named David who I remember as a quiet gray-bearded man with a motorcycle but who had also broken into Jan’s duplex and set fire to the rattan patio set that she’d always kept in her sunroom. When I asked if she’d been afraid of this guy, she shrugged. “Sure. Sometimes.” In her mind, love was an undertaking that required constant vigilance and bravery.
But when it came to Erika, the girl who had recently broken my heart, Jan was my ideal audience—sympathetic, almost always available and the only person in my life who thought that getting back together with Erika was both advisable and likely to happen.
The story immediately establishes that 1) Jan’s ideas of love are fucked up, and 2) the only reason Jules wants to hear those ideas is because she’s heartbroken and desperate. Even as Jan doles out frequent advice to Jules about men and romance, not once does the story take them seriously; and even though Jules is literally the one narrating, the text is written in such a way as to give us distance from her—to make sure we never take her seriously, either.
This is partly due to her own sense of right and wrong (as evidenced by the opening sentence), which is critical to the story: not only does it help the reader break through her internal monologue, it emphasizes the story’s main theme, which is that romantic obsession is impervious to rationality. Crucially, the story also presents factual events that can’t be warped in Jules’s head:
“When it comes to love,” Jan said, “you shouldn’t have regrets. I have regrets, and I can tell you it sucks. I never should have divorced your grandfather.”
She had told me this story many times. My grandfather was a decent and hardworking man who, after years of Jan threatening divorce every time he drank too much or came home late from work, had finally called her bluff. As a result her life had been lonely and difficult for the past forty years.
The irrefutable details here are that Jan regrets divorcing a man who drank too much and came home late from work. Jules makes no judgment of her own in the narration, relaying only her grandmother’s version of events, which allows us to make our own judgment.
Paloma [Jules’s friend] said that Erika was an asshole who deserved no more of my time or attention and that if I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about her, I should make a list of her flaws.
“I can’t think of anything,” I said. “Everything supposedly bad about her I like.”
“She lied to you. She’s twenty and into a seventeen-year-old. She has a girlfriend and a dumb haircut. She’s not that good at art—”
“Okay,” I said. “Please stop.”
The irrefutable details here are that Erika is objectively a terrible person (in contrast to Summer from 500 Days, who was honest with her intentions from the beginning) and that, even when presented with the evidence, Jules isn’t ready to believe it yet.
Lastly, at the end of the story, we revisit Jan’s history with her ex-husband David, the one who burned her patio furniture.
“You know about the furniture right? About David trying to burn down my house and kill me?”
I nodded, though I’d never heard it put that way.
“Nobody knows this and don’t tell your mother,” she said. “But I was with him after that for almost a year.”
Jan says this right after giving Jules the advice to crash a Halloween party at Erika’s house. By revealing this detail about David in this order, the story shows us what it truly means, the terrible consequences of believing in Jan’s version of love, and thus makes it clear that we’re not supposed to agree with her.
I knew that Jan sounded crazy and that it made no sense for me to crash a party where a girl who had not only mistreated me but also made it clear she didn’t want to see me anymore would be hanging out with her girlfriend, but I also knew that I was going to go. I wanted to be in the same room with her, and I wanted this helpless feeling to go away.
The story paints Jules as relatable and sympathetic, but also as a fool in love, and not in a good way. “Halloween” accomplishes this even without moralizing or having Jules learn from her mistakes: she does go to the party in the end, and Jan is the one to drop her off.
In order to expose your main character, you have to ridicule them a bit. Tom from 500 Days of Summer is written as both too relatable and too sympathetic; and, if neither of those is enough to get you to suspend your critique of him, the film is styled as a romantic comedy—with its indie pop soundtrack and punchy humor—which primes the audience to take his ridiculousness for granted.
Throughout the film, we’re offered reality checks from other characters, like someone reminding Tom that Summer explicitly said she didn’t want anything serious, or this line from Tom’s sister: “Just because some cute girl likes the same bizarro crap you do doesn’t make her your soulmate.” But because the film makes Tom’s reality so convincing, it’s easy to dismiss these reality checks the same way Tom does.
The film also distracts us with a more surface-level theme: a belief in love. In the beginning, Summer says she doesn’t believe in love, and Tom says he does. Then Summer undergoes her own arc (away from Tom, offscreen) and by the end of the film (when we find out she’s engaged to someone) she tells Tom she changed her mind—that he was right, that love does exist. This posits Tom’s “belief in love” as uncomplicated and virtuous; it makes us take it at face value. This is what makes the ending (spoiler: he meets some girl named Autumn) so satisfying, at least superficially; it ties the narrative together nicely, but does nothing to challenge this belief. His character’s growth shows only that he’s moved on from Summer and that he’s found himself, not that he knows what he did wrong.
The truth is that Tom’s idea of love is just as fucked up as Jan’s in “Halloween.” From beginning to end, from “Jenny Beckman” to August, the film buries this; and if we’re convinced by YouTuber Sloane Stowe’s conclusions, the reason is that the writer is just as unreliable as his character.
Thanks for another month of indulging me in my rambles about art I love! (I’m rewatching 500 Days of Summer on Hulu as I type this. Not sure where you can read “Halloween,” but here’s a Spotify link to the author reading it.) My essay this month is going to be about AI, I think.