(500) Days of Summer: Still Kinda Into It

Willa, maybe I'm just blinded by my increasingly debilitating crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt (now that I've started following his smart and witty Twitter feed, it's reached the point where I'm considering trying to wangle an introduction), but I honestly didn't experience (500) Days of Summer as the misogynistic bait-and-switch you describe. To me, the movie's portrait of romantic love as a one-way delusion was purposely and wistfully tongue-in-cheek; the whole film is a "critique of the fact that Tom is totally oblivious to Summer’s inner life" (even if, thanks largely to JGL's winning performance, that critique is an affectionate one). And unlike the vaguely man-shaped cutouts in He's Just Not That Into You, Tom pays a heavy price for his inability to apprehend Summer's otherness: He loses her, painfully, to someone else.

Though the movie is sympathetic to its starry-eyed hero, the audience is also meant to cringe as Tom repeatedly misinterprets Summer's explicit cues that, shared iPod playlists or no, she's just not that into him. Deschanel's character, Summer, may have been been underwritten at times (I would have loved, for example, a scene where she and Tom hashed out their difference of opinion on The Graduate), but I certainly never saw her as cruel or stupid. Her inscrutability is the inscrutability of the beloved to the lover—a timeworn trope, maybe, but one that cuts both ways, gender-wise.

Photograph of Joseph Gordon-Levitt by Eric Jamison/Getty Images for CineVegas.

Comments

Sirenis, I agree with you

By: mumchup | Tue, 07/21/2009 - 16:17

Sirenis, I agree with you completely.
I've recently found myself single again after years; and just had my first run-in with a man who suffers from the inability to differentiate initial physical attraction from actual love and compatibility.
I was thinking about it when I read the blog posts. Lots of men are susceptible to the same problem that women are so often accused of (and sometimes guilty of), which is to assume that the object of your affection is presumably exactly perfect for you. And that if they aren't they can become so over time.
Maybe the difference in the sexes here is that the women feel like they've done something wrong and the men complain that women just don't appreciate nice guys.

I forget where I read this

By: sirenis | Tue, 07/21/2009 - 09:36

"Beautiful women are invisible." In my own life I've found this to be true. When I was at my peak I was beset by men who didn't like my personality at all but insisted on trying to date me anyway. From my perspective it was totally bizarre. They tried to argue me into being the person they wanted me to be and to date them, and got mad at me when it didn't work. The real me was an inconvenience, they worked hard not to see it. I was glad when the blossom of my youth began to fade. For the most part I only experienced it as a nuissance. It made me a target. As an only moderately attractive woman I feel I am allowed to have a personality.