Summer is the bad girl in “500 days of summer”?

500 days of summer tells the story of a relationship in which Tom meets his co-worker and falls madly in love with her because she complements him, he sees her as perfect and idealizes her.

At all times we see Tom's point of view, he is our protagonist and the story always unfolds from his point of view, never from Summer's, so the information we get from her is from Tom's point of view.

At the beginning of the film it says that this is not a love story and in the opening titles we can see that it is really dedicated to a woman who actually exists, this is based on the life of Scott Neustadter the screenwriter of the film, who on a trip to London met a woman he thought was the love of his life and left him. Then we are briefly introduced to the characters and these little facts we are given about them are fundamental for us to understand them later.

Tom grew up believing that he would never be happy until he met the right woman and this is generated by a misinterpretation he had when watching the 1967 movie The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman. The Graduate is basically a love story, a bit murky, but to the general eye it ends well in spite of everything, the ending of the movie is as well known as "Luke I'm your father", so I'll spoil it for you: at the end of the movie Dustin Hoffman leaves on a bus with what he believes is the woman of his life, who was previously rescued from a marriage she apparently didn't want. The film ends with the two of them leaving. The scene is well known and has been parodied several times. The common eye believes that this movie ends well, with a happy ending with love reciprocated in spite of everything, but in reality the neutral look of the two, the strange almost surreal and the situation of both dressed like that in a public transport not really knowing if it will work or not. makes us see that this is pure symbolism and that it is not really a happy ending. After that surreal sequence in which they both escape and are directed to a better life, we see the ordinariness of day to day life, of the commonplace in an aimless collective, not really a happy ending.

Tom grew up with this misconception, that and added to the love movies that say that if you behave well, if you are good you deserve to be loved, when the reality is not really like that.

For her part Summers since she was little lived the separation of her parents, she saw that the promised love is not forever, no matter how strong it seems something is extremely breakable, in other words love is realistic. Realistic is a word that is used a lot to describe this movie. Many like it because it is realistic, because it makes them feel identified. It's something that 80 or 90% of people go through, we all had a love that we thought was the love of our life, that in the end ended up not happening or completely destroying us. I have had the same experience as Tom in the movie, that he ends up hating at the time that person he ended up with. This is because of the construct we have as a society with respect to love, in idealizing the other person, in putting expectations on the other, but that in reality we have no right to do so.

The film shows us how Tom falls in love with Summer, how they start a relationship, but she tells him all the time that she doesn't want anything serious, all good, but nothing serious. The movie progresses, things between the two of them seem like they can't get any better, but then suddenly Summer leaves Tom. We are totally crushed and to top it off we find out that Summer married another guy.

The girl who didn't want anything serious, ended up married to someone else and what does that generate...thinking Summer's a bitch! As we were conditioned in the beginning, of course. At no point do we know Summer's point of view, always from Tom's and that's also why we are conditioned to think Summer is a badass, but really Tom is the one who was wrong. The director of the movie Marc Webb decided not to tell the movie in a linear way but with time jumps, he wanted to tell the movie like when you tell your breakup to a friend.

The movie shows us how they met, then jumps to a happy moment and then another happy moment and so on and so on and then jumps right into the breakup, not emphasizing the warning signs that tell us that the relationship was doomed from the beginning.

The film being from Tom's point of view does that, we see the good, seconds of warning signs very few, and then emphasize completely with Tom. This decision by the director is extremely wise, this is exactly how most people remember after the breakup. They offer extensive stories with vivid details about the good things and barely mention the bad, this in return allows that person to live in the good memories and not get over the relationship and move on with their life. That's what happens with Tom.

Early on during the opening credits old family videos of Summer and Tom growing up are shown, this is done to show us that they both grew up living similar lives. Tom's parents treated him no better than Summer's parents treated her. She grew up the same way Tom did, however, later on after the credits we receive a bit of information that will help us later on explain why Summer is the way she is. As stated earlier this information we receive is that Summer's parents went through a nasty divorce. Divorce in a young person's life always messes things up a bit. In Summer's case it drastically deviates her concept of love, to the point that she doesn't believe in love until the end of the movie, so now because she thinks about how her parents ended up she avoids any kind of commitment that could lead to that later on, so she stays safe in her comfort zone and doesn't feel pain, she has things straight. Bottom line: Summer explained from the first moment that she didn't want anything serious that she was a free and independent woman, that they were young and then there would be time to talk about something serious, however Tom obviated what she told him, ignored it and put her on a pedestal, put expectations on her and even said that only with her he would be happy, that she complements him and is his happiness, but now that society and our vision of love is not so Hollywood changed, we realize that no, love does not work like that, you can not depend on someone to be happy, happiness although it sounds cliché is in oneself.

Another mistake Tom made was demonizing her, as we always emphasized Summer was clear and when she simply cut off the relationship so as not to hurt him further. She was the bad one, the bitch, the damned one. It is only until the end when he discovers that she has already married someone else, that he seems to understand that he learned from his mistakes and started over. And I stress, he seems to.

Even star Joseph Gordon-Levitt said that watching it now he thinks Tom is wrong. I think if the movie were made today it would have another point of view and another message, luckily and yes it seems like it's a movie from recently but it's already 10 years old, and 10 years is a lot. Putting a little bit in context, Summer was shown as an independent woman wanted to be detached, she wanted to live her life and experience it and didn't want to be tied down while doing it, something that is common now, before it wasn't so much.

During the karaoke bar scene when she explains that she feels love is a fantasy and she had not yet experienced real love, the guys made her feel like she was weird because she was not willing to do it, she tells them that a woman you can be free and independent, although Tom's friend tells her that she thinks like a man, when she was just sharing her point of view. Summer's point of view is completely justified to keep things casual and have a good time. Tom's point of view didn't match from the beginning, we could say that the mistake Summer made was not cutting off the relationship sooner, knowing that one of the two was going to fall hooked, something that always happens when it comes to quote-unquote 'friends with benefits'. But despite all this Tom has a toxic reaction to his breakup. As we said before his source of happiness comes from being with her and it's something a lot of people do, both men and women and his possibility of her being his didn't align with what she wanted to feel comfortable with. He thought that because she shared certain things with him that gave him the right to own her as a person, this is demonstrated in the simplest of ways, like when Tom fights with a guy at the bar for trying to hit her after she had him under control or telling her not to get a tattoo. When Tom shares a list of things they did together like holding hands at ikea, having sex in the shower, and so on, she tells him they're just friends, Tom yells at her that she's not the only one who has a say in the relationship.

It actually takes 50/50 consent to be in a relationship and Tom was 100% wrong.

After they break up, Tom tells a blind date he has about Summer, that she is the only person in the universe who can make him happy. Too bad, you can't put your happiness in someone's hands, expect them to follow your expectations, it's completely unfair to put that on someone.

When Summer ends it and he is heartbroken, his sister comforts him by telling him that he thought Summer was the one but she wasn't, the next time he looks back he should look again.

Many people we don't look at the warning signs and it's normal it's natural, they don't make us bad really misunderstand or not know how to deal with it, so when Summer ends up with Tom, like many people, he keeps chasing the good memories he has without looking at the times when it should have been obvious that this wasn't going to work out.

Already at the end of the movie Tom seems to give himself another chance and meets a new girl, but the movie ends (!!) and shows us that it starts all over again, we don't know if Tom really moved on mentally, if he overcame everything and matured. We don't know and by not knowing, the movie tells us that Tom wasn't really bad, just that Summer wasn't the one for him. The new girl seems to be. The movie doesn't tell us that what Tom did or felt for Summer, regardless of his transgressions, is not a healthy way to have a relationship, and it should make it clear but it doesn't make it clear, it seems to confirm to us that Summer is a bitch and he's just a poor guy, not that he's to blame for his own mistake.

So in and of itself it would be wrong of us to say he's the bad guy or she's the bad guy, no one really did anything to hurt the other on purpose. What we can say is that Tom was wrong, that he misunderstood things and that we hope he has matured and that we all have matured with him.

© Emby Lat

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