500 Days of Summer

“It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well” ("Charles Bukowski quotes. ” Available online at http://thinkexist. com/quotes/charles_bukowski/) This quote perfectly displays a very simplistic relationship in the beginning of the movie 500 Days of Summer. An undiscovered love between two human beings, with just discussing common interests that slowly morph into stolen kisses in the copy room, getting tangled up in arms and legs underneath bed sheets, and being thankful for everyday they’re together are just some of the occurrences between them.The two main characters are named Tom and Summer.

They constantly have inner struggles as well as outer problems, which makes their relationship take a turn for the worse in the end. But now, one must define end. Is it the unfinished business they have to take care of or is it the fact that one is still living in the past while the other is living in the present? Can it be that one has a false sense of love or is it that there is always someone better than you? No one really knows for sure, but you will know when you have found the one.Tom and Summer both discovered this through trial and error or in simpler words, just life.

They grow from the beginning until the end and then they still continue to grow inside of you. This romantic comedy keeps everything so fresh, imaginative, and compelling. How does one accomplish such a task for keeping the viewer interested? It is very simple actually, structure. Structure is the key component to everything, from the support beams in your house to the glue binding your book together. The structure is one of the main reasons why it keeps this film so fresh.Let’s use Tom’s love at first sight as an example.

The first time he spotted summer in the greeting card office, the structure for his true love was established. What are the odds that his love, a girl from Michigan would come to the place of employment that Tom currently works at? Slim to none, in his opinion. But this also establishes Tom’s definition of fate. It was fate to Tom that Summer had been placed here. With love in his eyes and heart from the first moment he set his eyes on her, he knew that was all he wanted.

With all of the constant laughs, upsets, signs, and feelings Tom and Summer had, it helped support the structure of the film by keeping the viewer grasping for more. It was the modern day love situation that many of us have experienced that made us continue to keep on watching. And speaking of love, there isn’t a true definition of love; it is what one experiences within them for another being. And love is the only thing you can call it, because the emotion overwhelms you and brings you into something unimaginable. Tom and Summer both felt this.

But they had different views. “Tom: What happens when you fall in love? Summer: You believe in that? Tom: It's love, it's not Santa Claus. ” ("Memorable Quotes for 500 Days of Summer” (2009) Internet Movie Database. Available online at http://www. imdb. com/title/tt1022603/quotes) Tom and Summer both have opposing views on love.

As you can obviously see, Summer doesn’t believe in it. She just likes to leave things as they lie, so to speak. She doesn’t like to put a label on anything. Tom on the other hand, needs constant reassurance and always grasps at a hold of safety.

He wants that comfort to know that Summer will never leave him, but he never truly gets that. There is one scene in the movie, that Tom is too far deep in love to notice, but notices afterwards. They were in the record shop and he shows her a Ringo Starr vinyl record album and she looks away. And he goes to try to hold her hand and she pulls it away. It seemed to me like Tom was suffocating Summer, which made her pull away from him, leaving him all alone.

The ground Tom once knew, once walked on so confidently, and was stripped right beneath his feet with nowhere to go.While Summer wanted to move on, Tom was stuck in the past, wishing everything was the same. Their love changed for each other. Tom’s feelings only grew, while Summer’s feelings were apparent sometimes, but she mostly hid them behind her body language.

Tom’s feelings for her also changed, from absolutely adoring her in every fashion to hating everything about her because she crushed his heart. Tom’s so called fate has now just turned into something magical. Occurrence, meaning “the occurrence of events that happen at the same time by accident but seem to have some connection. “ (Coincidence. (2010).In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.

Available online at http://www. merriam-webster. com/dictionary/coincidence) Tom learned this after his departure from summer. He did believe in fate and put all of his faith into it, but when Summer left, just like a season, he felt that his legs were broken and he couldn’t move forward. What is wrong with Tom’s feelings is that he puts them out in the open.

He makes them too visible. Tom is very self-conscious about what he is doing, who he is doing it for, and why he is doing it. He cares about the way he looks in the beginning and when he is with Summer.But that soon fades when Summer leaves, but it comes back just as fast as storm clouds in Chicago. And it is quite obvious that the feelings that he has towards Summer are not mutual. Tom was so sure Summer was the one, but Summer on the other hand, did not feel the same.

She was unsure about something. It was never said what, but what I believe she was unsure of is the natural way of things happening. Feelings are natural and should not be forced. It always seemed like Tom would force his feelings and love upon her and then Summer would slowly back away from him and start to lose that spark in their relationship.Summer was never very self-conscious; she was always just going to the beat.

She always did what she wanted, and that would confuse Tom. But Summer’s problem in their relationship and as a character is that she keeps everything too loose and free formed. You cannot be a freelanced type of person in a relationship with someone who needs constant reassurance. Summer never thought critically about anything or why or how it happened. Questions are the essence of life, and Summer disregarded it like dust in the wind.

Personally, I don’t think either one of them had problems.They are who they are, and they cannot change that, but what they can do is to find someone who has the same happenings and feelings as they do. Thus, when Summer moved on, Tom changed into a whole different person. Tom was irritable, depressed, and sick of everything.

What once was flourishing with love now was a pool of hatred. But then Tom realized his potential and ditched the greeting card place and tried to become an architect. This is where he found Autumn and was finally out of the season of Summer. A very important thing that changed Tom was the fact that it was not fate that he believed in now, it was occurrence.That all happened because he was with Summer and grew from her. If he wasn’t in the exact place at the same exact time, the event may or may not have happened.

And because he was with Summer, experienced it and her, he decided to unleash his potential as an architect and because of that, he met Autumn at one of the firms. Autumn ended his summer days and started a new season. The 500 Days of Summer has come to an end. The clever title, 500 Days of Summer, was a very interesting approach.

Because there are 365 days in a year, and obviously a season doesn’t have more than 100 days, but in the movie the season stayed the same.This impacted the scenes because it holds significance. To what you ask? Because when Tom was with Summer, it felt like forever, and he loved every single second of it. Every single day that he would see her, it felt like 500 days and he never wanted it to end. And when he wasn’t with her, he craved for her being. This made the scenes much more important and significant, but also, very ironic.

The irony in this film is not noticed too well. Like when his little sister was giving him relationship advice, or when Tom believed in what Summer believed in the end and vice versa.Also, when Tom met Autumn at the end and a new season started. It is inferred that it will last forever.

The optimism is ironic because he had just spent “500 days” in/with Summer and now he was moving onto the next season. Tom finally moved on like Summer did; only the ironic humor in it was that he moved onto a different “season” or woman. Summer took it one step closer and married a guy who she met in the coffee shop. She didn’t believe in love, but after she met her future husband, she caved in and told Tom everything.

They morphed into each other, without knowing, and resented each other deep down. They became each other and blossomed into better people, and if it wasn’t for fate, coincidence, or whatever you want to call it, they would have never been this way, fell in love with their soul mates, and never would have had any experiences with real love. They became quite the opposite people from when the film began. Tom, starting out believing in fate and then switching to coincidence and then Summer, being wild and free like a breeze falls in love and has a wedding ring on her finger.

Maybe it was trying to symbolize that people can change just as fast as the season. Or maybe it was the fact that you should cherish the time spent with a loved one, because they can be gone as fast as the seasons change. Either way, the treatment of love is a touchy subject. It is for a person’s own sake to interpret their own definition of the word love and the feeling of it. It can be a powerful feeling, but it is quite possibly one of the best experiences of anyone’s life.