(500) Days of Summer

Nick at Nite played Gilligan's Island reruns in the early morning while I was growing up. My siblings and I got in the habit of watching it as we prepared for school. While the show typically framed Ginger as the idol to ogle, I had a thing for Mary Ann. I was sure that I was alone in this, that I saw something in her sweetness and approachability that others didn't see.

It turns out that everybody except closeted homosexuals state a preference for Mary Ann. Being incapable of actual straightness, the queer bets all his chips on the obvious choice - compelled toward that very drag queen glam effect which repulses straight men. With the exception of a few felons and Alaskan fishermen who are so manly that only a big bold broad will do, all men who prefer Ginger are gay.

To this day, I have a crush on Mary Ann, and I still feel that we have a special chemistry. Of course, that's not really the case. A subset of women are blessed/cursed with a "Something about Mary" effect which entrances men. The movie, (500) Days of Summer, lampoons this very phenomenon in the intro. Summer isn't special in any quantifiable way...she's just special. She's played by Zooey Deschanel, an actress who truly has that effect and even looks a bit like my shipwrecked sweetheart.

The protagonist, Tom Hansen, is a true Beta of the Month, and the movie itself is one powerful clarion call to the millions and millions of American "men" who've been drained of their masculinity, robbed of their mentors, and even exposed to testicle-shrinking hydrocarbons. He begs Summer for some kind of commitment, but falls for her web of bullshit about labels, freedom, and ownership. He's such a coward that even his kid sister looks down on him, ordering him to man-up and demand a commitment.

He eventually discovers that Summer got engaged to another guy. Summer goes on to get happily married to some other guy and Tom, after a major depressive episode, refocuses on his passion for architecture. At the end of the movie, he asks a woman who's interviewing for the same job as him on a date. Her name is Autumn.

Most reviewers celebrated the film, with a few likening it to Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. But only NPR was smart enough to catch what was actually going on: "For all its rhetorical whimsy and hipster dressings, (500) Days of Summer is a thoroughly conservative affair, as culturally and romantically status quo as any Jennifer Aniston vehicle."

They're correct in surmising that it's a conservative movie. But their bias leads them to dismiss it as merely "status quo" when it's actually outright subversive. The core messages were traditional, anti-modern, even anti-feminist: Be a man, take a leadership role in the relationship, and recognize that liberal platitudes about freedom, boundaries, and labels are bullshit. It's all squid ink deployed by women who know what they're doing at men who don't. Grow a pair.