Days of Summer

Note: This post discusses the film (500) Days of Summer at some length and includes spoilers. If you haven’t seen it, intend to, and don’t want anything spoiled, you may want to skip this one.

Sometime around 2010, when having DVDs shipped from Netflix to your mailbox was in vogue as the way of consuming media, I listened to recommendations and watched (500) Days of Summer. The film became an instant favorite for its wry sense of humor and elegant cinematography; for Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoe Deschanel’s likability; for a killer soundtrack. But above all other rationale, there’s little denying the reason I was most drawn to this movie was the degree to which I identified with Gordon-Levitt’s protagonist, Tom, a hopeless romantic who splits time between courting, engaging in a relationship with, and, disproportionately, pining after Deschanel’s eponymous Summer.

I liked this movie enough to buy it, and enough for it to enter that small handful of movies from that era that I watched multiple times a year, internalizing its struggles and growing more infatuated as I came to recognize more details and layers and began to memorize key moments. I liked it enough to track down interviews with the filmmakers and cast, and was particularly confused and saddened to read Gordon-Levitt’s own commentary--that when people told him they related to Tom, he did not so much appreciate it as felt they’d missed the point of the film.

What I couldn’t see, single at 26, that’s clearer, married and a father at age 35 is how right Gordon-Levitt was.

I had a tendency to get infatuated--a vestige of dozen or so crushes throughout my teenage years that led to inevitable dead ends because I was too concerned with obsessing over girls in an unhealthy loop of getting emotionally invested and thinking and fantasizing about imaginary scenarios that left little room for actually getting to know these young women. I say vestige because it survived into bits and pieces of my twenties when I found myself single and pining.

I can say in hindsight that it’s not only messed up that I invested such mental and emotional energy into one-sided non-relationships, but all the more problematic that I, like Tom, inevitably wound up blaming the objects of my affection for not giving me what I wanted--as if they or the universe owed me something.

They didn’t.

All the more so, it’s problematic that even now I can look back on these infatuations with a twinge of nostalgic joy for glimmers of good news, like when a girl agreed to slow dance with me in the eighth grade or when I spent the length of a high school football game flirting with a girl I liked and she never told me to get lost. Like the girl I flirted with over AOL Instant Messenger through the wee hours of the night, sophomore year of college, until we agreed to get Chinese food together on a Friday night to follow. Worse yet, I can get nostalgic, too, for bad times. For listening to “Raining in Baltimore” by Counting Crows or “Evaporated” by Ben Folds and how there was a certain sweetness to embracing a mood of sorrow for all it was worth.

That’s not healthy.

I like to think my marriage is healthy. That Heather and I are good partners who are honest with each other, and for all of our bickering spats, at heart, we're kind to each other. Moreover, content and reassured in a mutually loving and sustained relationship, I don’t find myself lost in the same neuroses of insecurity that once consumed so much energy.

And I think of what I might tell my son someday about love. Not to get hung up on the way love happens in the movies, perhaps. That he shouldn’t be afraid to talk to someone he likes or to make his feelings known, but that he should also know that rejection should not impugn his self-worth, nor should he approach a romantic pursuit with any sense of entitlement. That persistence--especially if someone he likes isn’t interested--can be romantic, but is at least equally likely to make him sad and alienate people around him, not least of all the object of his affections.

That he should never reduce anyone else to the status of object.

I can tell him all of this, but I don’t know that he’ll listen. Maybe he’ll have more common sense and better people skills than his old man. And surely there are lessons he’ll need to learn on his own, because parental wisdom, regardless of how well-intentioned, persistent, or even right it may be is no substitute for firsthand experience.

If he ever watches (500) Days of Summer, I hope he’ll recognize the movie for as sad as it fundamentally is sooner than I did. I hope he’ll recognize it’s beauty, too. That that expectation vs. reality party scene with the Regina Spektor song playing over it is truly artful, and that the getting-it-together montage cast against Wolfmother’s “Vagabond” is brilliant.

Just the same, I hope he’ll side with Summer sooner than I did, and see she was a woman who did the best she could and never asked to be romanticized or objectified.

But more than any movie, I hope my son will be nostalgic for birthday cakes with buttercream frosting and the nights his mother and I played board games with him. I hope he’ll remember good friends and that whatever girlfriends or boyfriends he might have were all doing the best they knew how at a given moment--just like he was. Because these are the memories worth having and the perspective worth holding onto.

And I hope he never knows the frustration of a Netflix DVD too badly scratched to finish the movie.