On an afternoon in August of 2009, I dragged my mother to watch a movie since my college class ended earlier than expected. I don’t recall what other movies were on that day that made us pick (500) Days of Summer. We didn’t see any trailers for it at all but since it looked vaguely rom-com-ish and nothing else in the box office looked interesting, we decided that was going to be our mom-daughter movie date.
The movie began with a warning: “This is not a love story.”
Suffice to say, I left that movie theater with a new title added to my list of favorites. However, it was initially because of my gross misunderstanding of the entire movie.
Much like Tom’s misinterpretation of The Graduate, I misinterpreted (500) Days of Summer. I was rooting for Tom, and I was angry at Summer. How could she dump someone who was so in love with her? How could she be so laissez-faire while he was so committed? And Autumn will never be as good as Summer for Tom. Tom was such a good, perfect, loving gentleman and Summer was a bitch.
Nothing like rooting for the “nice guy,” right? I’m visibly cringing. So why did this affect me so much?
As a writer, I’ve always been afraid of giving characters flaws.
I know it now, based off of reading my old short stories and that fact that I used to take stories at face value. I had little to no practice of story analysis or character development whatsoever. Whenever I wrote a scene, I always imagined what it would look like if it were adapted in film. It looked good in my head, so why wouldn’t it look good on paper? I only cared about the pretty pictures without the thoughts behind it. My characters didn’t struggle. They just magically survived as the story went on. There was clearly no growth, no life-altering journey, nothing interesting about these characters that I wrote because the point was for them to get from Scene A to Scene B.
But I know better now. Not only should I be giving characters journeys like Tom’s, I should also have been writing characters as multidimensional as Summer.
Tom was naïve, sweet, complacent and self-centered. He was also an unreliable narrator. At one point, Tom lists all the things he loved about Summer, which we were supposed to love about her too. But when his heart got broken, he lists those same exact things as the worst parts about her.
Summer was beautiful and carefree, careless even, a cynic, and clueless about what she wanted in her life. We never hear from her except only from Tom’s point of view. Who was the real Summer anyway? But we see both facets of her personality in the movie in between Tom’s admiration and spite for her.
They both develop and change in the end, and then the narrative successfully serves its purpose to inspire introspection.
The best part of this film is that you can have several interpretations. For me, the meaning of the movie has changed over time as I’ve matured and learned more about the art of storytelling. Therefore, (500) Days of Summer continues to be a favorite, even if it’s not for same reasons as I had in the first place.
I used to only revel in characters who only do good, and triumph over what the universe has thrown at them because they’re good people. They were basically perfect beings in god mode, nothing could take them down. They couldn’t even roll in mud. That was unrealistic.
But (500) Days of Summer gave us an excellent character-driven story. The great part about it was that Tom changed in the end. He moved on. He began to pursue his dream job. He let go of the idea of his ideal love. His heart break didn’t kill him, so what else was stopping him from making his life better? He shed his mopey, complacent and unrealistic counterpart at the beginning of the film. He was honestly a lot likeable at the end. You want to keep rooting for him. And Summer, if only we knew her thoughts and motivations, also did, too. She finally believed in love after Tom.
When I finished my first novel, I learned how terrible I was at developing characters. I know now that characters, people, are multidimensional and complicated. I’ve began to read more, watch more well-written shows and movies to understand how to achieve this.
Like Tom, I had to shed a part of me, too. I had to remind myself that characters are not actors who are just going to step on their markers in my novels. Now I write my characters as people with vast histories, dynamic temperaments, and flaws. They must change and grow, and shed their old selves at the end to become better. Because what’s as good as a plot-driven story? A character-driven one.