500 Days of The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

“500 Days of Summer” is a film that explores the dangers of romanticizing people and ideas, and how that can unravel your own perception of your relationship along the way. Directed by Marc Webb, the movie follows Tom; Tom is a young writer in search of his ‘great love.’ 

Enter Summer: A quirky, but stubborn woman who listens to the same music as him so she must be the one. (Forgive the sarcasm, but this is just the beginning of Tom’s infatuation with her and her entire persona that revolves around being eccentric and charmingly old-school in both her style and personal tastes.)

At the beginning of this movie, the audience sees Summer as a wide-eyed, innocent girl. She wears outfits that can best be described as vintage sweetheart, with many pieces including headbands, lace, Peter Pan collars and swing-style dresses that often stop just above the knee. 

So much of Summer’s aesthetic revolves around clothes that make her appear much more youthful and innocent than she is. She often wears bows or ribbons in her hair, another nod to her apparent love for the style that she so completely encompasses. 

While there are brief glimpses of Summer and her clear lack of naivety (like making out with Tom in the photocopier room at work) it is clear that much of her personality is, like her, hard to pin down. 

However, one of the first clues we get about the film’s true message is how the story is told in a completely non-linear way. Next to scenes where the audience can see Tom fall in love, are scenes where you can see Summer promptly fall out of love. 

By the end of the film, and by the time the proverbial wool is pulled from Tom’s eyes, the audience begins to realize that Summer seemed cold because she wasn’t what Tom wanted her so badly to be. 

The film is full of these sequences that show the reality of what is happening between them, in one scene going so far as to portray Tom’s expectations of what would happen between them after reconnecting at a party, versus what actually happened. 

As the film progresses, Summer’s wardrobe changes from pastels and airy fabrics to darker colors and more sophisticated silhouettes. And yet, something that Marc Webb does well here is the subtlety of the shift and how it is not enough for the audience to notice until the end. 

At first glance, it appears that Summer becomes cold, distant and lacks the similar quirkiness that originally made Tom so bonded to her. However, the actuality of it is that we are seeing Summer fall out of love with Tom through his own eyes. 

Because of this, what seems like a distinct change in Summer’s personality is really just a harsh dose of reality, and perhaps what was always underneath the surface. Another way that director Webb portrays this is with the slight color filter over the film, leading up to the moments where Summer completely detaches from Tom, when the filter is completely gone and a once-vibrant world seems just sort of… average. 

And yet, this is the point of the entire film: “This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know upfront, this is not a love story.” 

By the end of the film, and by the time the proverbial wool is pulled from Tom’s eyes, the audience begins to realize that Summer seemed cold because she wasn’t what Tom wanted her so badly to be. 

This didn’t make her a bad person, nor did it mean that her entire aesthetic or fleeting affection was a ruse; It just means that she didn’t fulfill the role that Tom assigned to her extremely early on. 

What director Marc Webb achieves with “500 Days of Summer” is a realistic portrayal of how people grow up, and grow apart. It’s also a realistic portrayal of how our own perceptions of those people can entirely dictate the narrative to our life that may be entirely unfounded upon closer examination. 

The whole movie feels like an indie fever dream, but it’s not quite the “Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind” that most moviegoers had hoped for. 

But, with the color filters, general aesthetic and song choices throughout, one can surmise that Webb himself was giving us a romanticized version of a break-up story, only to be torn away to reveal a raw and distinct narrative that almost all of us have felt before: How (and when) to let go.