500 Days of Summer

I watched the movie 500 Days of Summer* on a recent plane ride. Despite the treatment it received in the Moscow-based entertainment magazine, Afisha, as an art film, 500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy or, in common parlance, a "chick flick." The tag line for the movie is: "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't."

In this non-linear production, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a drone making greeting cards, dreaming of someday returning to his true ambition, architecture, and of finding L'Amour Parfait™. He is infatuated with the very idea of being in love with a temp at the greeting card company, Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who doesn't understand why men become puppies in her presence, and who doesn't believe in Les Amours Parfaits™ that Tom espouses. Throughout the film, we see Tom as a manic-depressive, perhaps clinically neurotic individual whose stress-management skills include mechanically throwing dishes onto the ground and writing huge to-do lists in chalk on a wall of his apartment. Summer, conversely, is dead-pan and more-or-less serene even in the most emotional moments of their break-up.

The process at work here seems to be the following. The filmmakers have acknowledged gender stereotypes in a romantic comedy - they should make the man tall, dark, and handsome (or, to put it in the words of a British television actress: "Gorgeous, and he doesn't speak a word! My kind of man.") and ought to imbue the woman with emotional and stereotypic obsessions. They then attempt to reject the stereotypes by crafting characters who are the polar opposites.

But this thought process still hinges upon

1) the concept of a binary of gender
2) the definitional stereotypes of each gender in that binary.

Rather than refuting anything, the filmmakers have solidified the pre-existing stereotypes. A creative individual cannot play with forms if the initial shape of those forms changes. Without the stereotypes, their creation of polar-opposites makes no sense. The polar opposite of a Thing, then, eventually returns back to the very Thing itself.

-Drunk

*2009, Fox Searchlight Pictures. Directed by Mark Webb. Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber.