500 Days of Summer…and the Male Loneliness Epidemic

By Prisha Jain

500 Days of Summer gave us many things – a template for romantic reels, a resurgence for fans of The Smiths, hope for office romances and an early indicator of the male loneliness epidemic. Right off the bat: yes, the movie is the man’s experience of his relationship with Summer, she must be portrayed through his gaze. I’m just not a fan of that gaze. 500 Days of Summer gave us many things – a template for romantic reels, a resurgence for fans of The Smiths, hope for office romances and an early indicator of the male loneliness epidemic. Right off the bat: yes, the movie is the man’s experience of his relationship with Summer, she must be portrayed through his gaze. I’m just not a fan of that gaze.

Throughout the film, he rarely asks her about her life. His question about past relationships is only to gauge where he stands in his life. When she blows hot and cold, unsure whether she likes him, he calls her a bitch. She is the epitome of the manic pixie dream girl: inaccessible, indecipherable, a temptress who thrives on attention and runs away after getting a dose of it. When she gets married, it is this unbelievable revelation because if she didn’t want to get married to him, she must just simply not want to get married…right?

Tom was the pioneer of the male loneliness epidemic: Summer must reassure his own faith in his attractiveness, Summer should be wowed when he punches a creepy guy in the bar, Summer is to

ying with him when she says she doesn’t want a big commitment, only to see where their flimsy relationship goes. What Summer wants is unknown. She is unknown to Tom because he makes her an enigma, but she’s unknown to us because Tom doesn’t care enough about who she is or what she wants to ask her and let us know.

The male loneliness epidemic, a concept that comes out of sexist textbooks and a manchild complex, talks about the isolation of men, their lack of romantic relationships, the emotional upheaval wrought on them by indecisive and cold women. Similarly, Tom Hanson’s romantic bad luck is Summer’s fault. Her rejection of all that he could give her and all the Big Feelings he has for her is because she is emotionally constipated, because she does not value his feelings. His despondency in his work towards the end of the film is because she has inconsiderately left him and the job with an admirable flippancy (or so he tells us). But Tom’s unwillingness to listen to the terms she clearly lays out is most likely the reason for his romantic bad luck, or loneliness if you will.

Tom’s insistence on evoking in Summer the same Big Feelings he has is an imposition on her. This urge comes out of his self-centered notion of romance that supports the premise of the film: his experience of the relationship. Summer is a concept, not a whole woman. He must unravel her. The same patriarchy that makes men think that their romantic interest is ‘not like other girls’ makes Tom want to believe that he can be the special man that makes Summer finally reveal all of these enigmatic layers she has, the very layers that set her apart from other women and make her so magnetic to him. When she breaks his illusion, he begins to find flaws instead of simply accepting, with whatever measure of sadness, that she’s just not that into him.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates this better than his opinions on her hair, laugh and freckles. On day 154, Tom Hanson loves Summer: her haircut, her smile, her heart-shaped freckly, her knees. On day 322, he hates her crooked teeth, her 1960s haircut, her cockroach-shaped freckle and her knobby knees. Sure, Big Feelings and confusing romance makes us all think some unfortunate things, but Tom’s refusal to move past visualisation of Summer as a montage instead of a person makes me think it’s that central characteristic of the male loneliness epidemic: an inclination to romanticise a woman who potentially could be the love of one’s life that serves to reinforce one’s own ego and then to vilify her when it turns out she doesn’t share the same conviction.

I like to think that after the scene on the bench, when he learns of her marriage and that she just was never sure of him as a romantic interest, Tom introspects on his views of romance and, instead of putting Autumn on a pedestal, treats her like a person instead of a manifestation of all his desires. That’s my dream character arc (for fictional and real people).