Like an Indie Song

I fall for people like this: free in ways that feel like they don’t need anything from anyone, moving through the world like they’re floating above it. And I tell myself they’ll stay for me, that I’ll be different, that I’m the one who finally anchors them. It never works. One of you always wants more. One of you is always waiting.

500 Days of Summer is that exact film—Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom, who’s convinced he’s finally met someone worth derailing his life for, and Zooey Deschanel as Summer, who’s made it pretty clear from the start that she doesn’t believe in love, or at least not the kind he’s offering. The film jumps around their timeline, nonlinear, showing you the high points and the bottoming out, the moments where hope gets resurrected and the moments where it dies again. It’s funny in the way that watching someone delude themselves is funny—painful and true and darkly comic all at once.

What gets me about it is how unsentimental it stays. The Smiths play over the heartbreak scenes. There’s a dance number. The dialogue is sharp and cruel and honest. Summer says the things you’re terrified to hear, and Tom keeps hoping he misunderstood her, kept hoping his version of the story was the real one. The whole thing is designed to let you watch yourself in someone else’s desperation, and I kept laughing at how familiar it all was—how I’ve had exactly this conversation, made exactly this argument, harbored exactly this delusion.

I watched it with Sandra, and we couldn’t stop calling her a bitch. Not because we hated her, but because she was right. She was the only one being honest. Tom was the one pretending that love was supposed to override what she actually wanted, who she actually was. He kept trying to be the exception, and she kept not letting him. The film sides with her, kind of, and that’s the ugly truth it’s peddling—sometimes two people just want different things, and one of them gets hurt. No redemption, no lesson. Just the way it goes.

The soundtrack is the other half of why this lands so hard. It’s all indie and sincere, all songs that feel like they’re about love even when they’re not, and that gap between the music and the reality is where the whole thing lives. You’re watching someone’s beautiful delusion get methodically dismantled, and the Smiths are scoring it like it’s tragic and romantic when it’s really just stupid and human and sad.

It’s perfect for a first date if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t need the film to comfort you, who can watch someone get destroyed by their own hope and just sit with that. If you go in wanting to feel less alone in your failures, it’ll do that. If you go in wanting a happy ending, you’re going to learn something worse.