She’s Just Not That Into You

And so the time has come to talk about the movie “500 Days of Summer.”  I have put this off because this movie makes me angry.  Really, really angry.  I have already listed some of its offences in the misuse of whimsy.  Now it’s time to face the demons and add an entry to my “Heterosexuals having trouble” category.

(Warning – many plot points of the movie will be discussed below.  But the upside is if you read this then you don’t have to see it.)

We are told at the beginning of this movie that it is “not a love story,” and that’s true.  It is a one-sided breakup story that pits a well-intentioned boy (Tom) against an impenetrable wall of feminine inscrutability (Summer)

The problem in critiquing this movie is trying to differentiate between the obliviousness of the character and the obliviousness of the writer (Scott Neustadter).  It seems that Neustadter is willing to concede that Tom didn’t see the signs leading to being dumped, and paint him as a little naïve because of that.  Btu his naiveté is supposed to be seen as charming and romantic and sweet.  Still, Neustadter allows the two women’s voices that are heard in the movie (one is Tom’s pre-teen sister, the other is a girl who goes out on a regrettable blind date with him in which he acts like an ass but it’s supposed to be funny) to shout loud and clear that Summer gave him fair warning – she told him she didn’t want a relationship.

But here’s where the “just not into you” premise comes in.  To a man who is smitten, “I’m not interested in a relationship” evidently means “I’m not interested in a relationship until I give it some time and you continue to pursue me and inevitably I’ll fall as hard for you as you have for me,” when, as the self-help genre by way of Oprah has taught us, it actually means “I’m not interested in having a relationship with you in particular.  But we can hang out and mess around if you want.”  So for the heterosexual ladies dealing with this coming from a guy the advice is to adopt the attitude of “If he doesn’t see what I’ve got then he’s not worth it.”  The problem here is that both Neustadter and Tom seem to believe that “If she doesn’t see what I’ve got, she’s an insensitive bitch.”

Never mind the fact that Summer as a character is crafted to be a pretty, indie mannequin in adorable retro dresses, all things that would be positive attributes in an Anthropologie magazine, not so positive in a movie where she’s the love object and has absolutely no personality beyond her styling.

This makes me extra angry because I love me some Zooey Deschanel, but there has always been a serious danger in her just being an adorable indie cutie pie with no substance in her roles.  I haven’t see all of her movies (Yes Man? ugh), but in Elf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and in her role on Weeds she definitely brought the adorable, but there was always something else there to make her a real person.  Elf is a good example of a place where her powers could have been used for evil instead of good.  It’s a ridiculously adorable movie, with a crazy adorable premise, and Will Ferrell allowed to go all out with his man/boy persona by playing a human who was raised as an elf in Santa’s workshop and is now trying to integrate into the real world.  But the movie works because there’s a little bit of an edge to it.  And Zooey’s character is, yes, mostly just adorable (she works as an elf at the department store with Ferrell and he, of course, falls for her), but there is a little bit of darkness to her character that makes her feel real.  She’s a little hostile, introverted, and mistrustful.  And, yes, maybe this is just because she needs to learn how to sing with Christmas cheer in public, but it feels authentic, and really specific to a kind of New York single working girl.

So what scares me about 500 Days of Summer is that it has accomplished the removal of substance from Zooey’s adorable act.  She is intentionally just lovely, that’s all, and that’s enough for Tom and it’s supposed to be enough for us.

(I’m not going to even comment on “there’s only two kinds of people in the world – there’s women and there’s men” remark – and nicely summing her up by her height, weight, and shoe size, or the overly forced adorableness and the use of Belle and Sebastian as a shortcut for cute cool.  Also – Evidently there has been some important work done on the topic of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon.  Fascinating.)

If this was a movie about a guy being oblivious to the fact that the girl that he loves for superficial reasons (their first moment of bonding is over the Smiths) isn’t as into him as he is into her, it might be interesting.  And it might stay being about the characters rather than about the author.  The problem is what happens after the unexpected dumping.  Tom is heartbroken and determined to get Summer back (not recognizing that he never had her), but it’s no go.  So time passes, he’s starting to recover, and they run into each other on the train to a co-workers wedding.  He’s freaking out, but she’s friendly, and they end up having a great night together – dancing, talking, etc.  He’s thrilled – maybe this thing could be back on?  So she invites him to a little party at her house.  He brings her a present of the book he had been reading that she had remarked on.  Cue the intervention of a whimsical gimmick to emphasize the unfairness of what’s about to happen to him.

Split screen – one shows what his expectations were for this evening, one is what actually happens.  In real, harsh, unfair reality, she doesn’t hug him affectionately at the door, she’s weird about the gift, and she’s disparaging about his job to her friends*.

*Please note that what she says here is that he could be a great architect if he wanted to be (“architect” in this movie is shorthand for a creative, but respectable, career) instead of writing copy for greeting cards (the dumb, brainless, go nowhere, but conveniently cute and quirky job that he has allowed himself to get sucked into – which my wife points out is a job that many people would want and would consider an actual career.  He’s not working at a convenience store or something.  AND please note that the greeting card copy-writer as shorthand for cute and quirky but go-nowhere job was already used extensively on Will and Grace, when Edward Burns guest starred as Grace’s writer boyfriend who wants to write screenplays but writes schlocky cards instead.  And at least that guy was a writer.  How does someone who’s studied architecture get this job?  Is there no writing skill involved at all?)  Okay, so Summer is being a bitch at this party because she’s saying he doesn’t apply himself and use his degree to get a job in his field instead of being the affectionate and flirty girl of the other side of the split screen.  And then the entire victory of the end of the movie is that he does get his act together and starts pursuing a job in architecture!  So is this a self aware insight into the fact that sometimes the things we hate hearing about ourselves the most are the things that are the most true?  Nope.  Her behavior here only exists to demonstrate that she’s an uncaring bitch.

And then it happens.  The piece de resistance.  The thing that makes this movie the piece of insulting crap that it is.  On the sad, reality-based side of the screen, Tom watches from a distance as Summer happily shows off an engagement ring to a friend.  And the thought that has been engineered to go through our minds at that moment is “What a bitch.”  Why?  Because all that we have been given is what Tom chooses to see about her.  We as an audience have no insight at all into her character, because, well, it doesn’t exist!  So this moment comes out of nowhere as much for us as it does for him, which, from the point of following the arc of the story, is a little bit frustrating.

So now Tom knows it’s really over.  He falls apart and lies in bed eating only twinkies (just like a heartbroken girl!  And that’s what we’re supposed to think here.  Look at the tables all turned around!  Boys are sensitive too!)  He quits his job by having the most by-the-book “I can’t stand this job anymore” outburst in a meeting that has ever existed.  And then he puts himself back together, better than before – that’ll show her!

At the end of the movie we get to see a full scene that we had been given a flash of at the beginning – Tom and Summer sitting on a bench together.  Her hand resting on his has an enormous engagement ring on it.  Now we learn that she has shown up on this bench (his favorite) hoping to see him.  Although we’re not given any reason why she wanted to see him, of course, and in the end the interaction seems to exist only to provide closure for him in a convenient way that didn’t have to involve him asking for it because she just magically showed up to give it.

Tom gets to have his gender-reversed “Sex and the City” moment of asking “Why not me?”  And Summer kind of shrugs and just says that the things that she wasn’t sure of with Tom she is sure of with this guy.  And finally Tom gets to understand that she just wasn’t that into him.  There was nothing else he could have done.  And it lets him off the hook in this Man-version of the idea, where if you just persist you’ll get her.  You just have to pursue.  Well, this girl was a bitch who didn’t want to be pursued by him.

Now keep in mind that we never get to see the fiancé, not even at the party where she was showing off the ring.  And we get no indication of why she is going into this (convenient for the plot) quickie marriage besides her saying that she feels sure of it.  Aren’t women just so inscrutable?  And the problem is, it’s so clearly the writer trying to prove this to us.

How do I know this for sure?  Well let’s just take a quick moment to mention how the movie starts.  On a blank screen the words read “Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.” Then it says, “Especially you, Jenny Beckman. Bitch.” Ha ha…. ha?  Um, not so funny?  Because he has just let us in on the fact that this movie has an agenda.  And it’s not adorable or excusable.   It’s about calling this girl a bitch.  It’s badly executed misogyny, the worst kind.

Here Neustadter nicely outlines for us exactly how he turned his sad, sad breakup into a movie!  Here’s a prime quote:

“Reliving every moment of my bitter-sweet, one-sided romance was a cathartic experience for me  -  and the end result, we were shocked to find, was pretty decent. The finished film tells it all just as it happened, however embarrassing my puppy-like devotion and however aloof it makes her look. “

You just know that he had to have a kickass denouement to make sure that we know that Tom is going to be okay, and is still, you know, a man who knows how to pursue.  At an interview for a job at an architecture firm the other candidate in the waiting area with him is a pretty girl.  They joke a little about how they each hope the other doesn’t get the job.  Then Tom is called in and starts to walk away.  Cue the horrible voiceover that has been used sporadically throughout the movie and that you had forgotten about at this point.  Again – it’s supposed to be quirky and adorable, and it’s either the exact same guy who did the voiceover on “The Royal Tenenbaums” or someone doing their best impersonation of that guy.  So the voiceover cuts in and tell us, No!  Tom hasn’t given up on love!  He must still believe!  All hope is not lost!  And to demonstrate this to us Tom goes back and asks the girl if she wants to go out with him after their interviews.  What heroism!  But – oh no!  She can’t!  She’s meeting someone!  Well, either she’s just blowing him off or she has a boyfriend.  Shot down again.  But wait!  She gives him her number, and she just looks tickled pink to have been asked.  Hurrah!

So, you understand, the victory of this movie is that this guy is able to ask out another pretty girl.  And hopefully this one won’t be a bitch.

Now, just to finish up this diatribe, I would like to direct your attention to a really crazy article from the July 26th New York Times Magazine.  It’s called “Love in 2-D” by Lisa Katayama, and it’s about Japanese men who claim that inanimate objects (mostly body pillows with covers depicting pre-teen anime characters) are their girlfriends.  Really.   One of the main guys interviewed, Nisan, brings his “girlfriend” Nemutan with him everywhere he goes.  He sets her up in chairs in restaurants and eats dinner with her.  They go on road trips together.

This is an entire movement of men called 2-D lovers, they are “a subset of otaku culture – the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade.”  They are so committed to their identities as 2-D lovers that when Toru Honda, the guru of the 2-D movement, admitted at a panel discussion to watching human porn, he was booed.  So not only is a real woman too complicated to deal with on an emotional level, she’s even too complicated to objectify.  It’s that third dimension that messes it all up.  Everything is so round!  (nevermind the fact that these men are fetishizing images of children, which nicely takes out even more of the complexity of a real woman, rendering the desired female form as a complete blank slate, uninfluenced by the burdens of maturity.)

Nisan is loyal to his Nemutan pillow, but some men enjoy the level of pillow promiscuity the “lifestyle” allows.  A guy called Momo sleeps with (and I do mean the euphemistic “sleeps with”) three pillows from his collection of a hundred and fifty every night.  He explains to Katayama that he was once close to getting married, but that the complication comes in the fact that “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean.  In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else.  With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

Wow, Momo.  Way to really sum it up.  So, fellas, maybe it’s time to invest in a nice, simple, understanding body pillow.  She’ll never leave you.  Just be sure to wash her in gentle detergent to show your love.

Now would be a good time to listen to this song.

(By the way – this lady nicely summed up the 500 DOS issue a little more succinctly than I did.)

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