TORTURED INTELLECTUAL TEEN WRITING: 500 Days of Manic Pixie Dream Girling
This is an essay written in 2015 when I was 16.
In Plato’s Symposium, the mortals are described as once having been essentially two people in one, and when the gods punished them by cutting them in half, they would spend the rest of their lives searching for their other half. Most romance movies/greeting cards/love songs are based on a similar premise, the idea that a person requires his/her “one true love” to finally feel “whole.” The “manic pixie dream girl,” a type of stock character who lives her “quirky” and “spontaneous” existence solely to enliven the brooding artistic male protagonist and serve as his love interest, was also born from that notion. The MPDG is not a “real” person, but can be mistaken for one when people view the world through the male gaze, objectifying and idealizing imperfect humans. (500) Days of Summer is a movie often criticized for its supposed use of the MPDG trope, when it actually depicts the damage done when the protagonist, Tom, chases after Summer, the MPDG of his childish fantasies, apparently finds her, but then realizes that he was projecting his ideal vision of a woman onto Summer, who never wanted to be idealized. However, because the movie is almost entirely told from the perspective of the self-pitying Tom, viewers leave sympathizing with him and his problematic worldview. 500 Days is not a movie guilty of perpetuating the manic pixie dream girl trope or Tom’s “nice guy” worldview, but is instead proves itself critical of the male gaze, the lens through which Tom lives his life.
Tom is an everyman, someone whose beliefs are likely to intersect with those of the viewers of the movie, and someone likable enough for the audience to root for. Because he wins the allegiance of the audience, if they don’t realize how emotionally manipulative he is, they will sympathize with him as he passes through the seasons of obsession and later hatred of Summer. He is a “nice guy,” a person who feels entitled to a woman’s love because he is “nice” to her, and when she doesn’t express interest in him, decides that she is a “bitch” or a “whore” for “playing games” and “leading him on.” But from the beginning, Summer is honest with Tom, telling him explicitly that she is “not looking for anything serious” and that she doesn’t want to be anybody’s girlfriend. Tom chooses to ignore her feelings and continue his pursuit, despite her continual insistence that she cannot guarantee him anything and that she doesn’t even believe in love. He never asks her about her opinions, lest he, according to his sister, gets “an answer you don’t want, which will shatter all the illusions about how great these past few months have been.”
Tom is an unreliable narrator, and the movie’s anti-MPDG agenda becomes clearer when listening to the characters who are not Tom. Tom’s friend Paul gives the “thesis” of the movie when he says, after listing the kinds of qualities the “girl of his dreams” would have, says that his girlfriend is “better than the ‘girl of my dreams.’ She’s real.”
Tom’s views on love are almost completely influenced by pop culture’s portrayal of “love,” based on a meet-cute and a common love of an arbitrary thing. Tom enters life so ready to fall superficially in love, that as soon as he finds out Summer likes the same music he does, he decides that they are soulmates. He conveniently ignores the fact that they disagree on fundamental beliefs because it would disrupt the quixotic vision in his head. A formative moment in Tom’s childhood occurs when he watches The Graduate and interprets the ending as a happy one where “true love” prevails, even as he sees the couple’s smiling faces dissipate into looks of uncertainty in the last frame. After Summer watches The Graduate, she leaves in tears, partially because she realizes that the film does not have a happy ending--the characters realizing only at the very end that they’ve made a huge mistake--but also because Tom’s inability to see the film for the way that it is makes her question their compatibility.
Tom has no idea why she became upset. Tom has no idea who Summer really is. When Tom says earlier that he loves Summer, he lists her physical traits, like her hair and teeth. He says that he “loves how she makes me feel,” meaning that he only loves the idea of Summer and relies on Summer to make him happy.
But after Summer finally breaks up with him, Tom falls into a slump because his idea of love involved codependency, the concept of “I can’t live without her love; I can’t breathe without her love.” He finally starts to get his life back together when he reexamines his relationship with Summer and the unrealistic expectations he had of her. This time, he looks at memories from a more objective lens. So he quits his job writing greeting cards, which he realizes was a source of the unrealistic depictions of love, love that almost literally involves shoving words into people’s mouths, to focus on his passion for architecture. Architecture is in some ways a symbol for love, a process that starts from the ground up, starting from nothing and then creating something that hopefully last forever. Tom enters his relationship with Summer already 90% done with a monument built on a foundation of an insubstantial fantasy created by a child of divorce instead of giving Summer a chance to build a relationship with him.
Tom finds happiness while seeking self-fulfillment, “not in the big, blue eyes of the beautiful girl,” as director Marc Webb asserts. Even at the very end of the movie, when Tom starts talking to his new love interest, named “Autumn,” at a job interview at an architecture firm, he doesn’t automatically fall for her. He decides to continue on his road towards self-fulfillment and tells her, only half-jokingly, “I hope you don’t get the job.” There’s hope for Tom, even after he asks Autumn to get coffee with him after the interview. The conveniently-named Autumn represents a time of transition for Tom, who may finally realize that he doesn’t need his dream girl to be happy.