Not About a Love Story

(500) Days of Summer is not a love story. It is a story about love. It is a story about the joy of love and the pain of love, the magic of love and the torture of love, the comfort of love and the anxiety of love. Marc Webb’s film takes a new approach to the modern romantic comedy. He takes us on the roller coaster ride that is Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn’s (Zooey Deschanel) relationship. While we see the relationship develop from beginning to end, we are unable to do so in any sort of order. The viewer is bounced around from high to low and forced to keep track of which of the (500) days were filled with happiness and joy and which were filled with heartache and torment. The non-chronological order of events puts further emphasis on love’s unpredictability and lack of consistency.

From the beginning, we see that Tom and Summer have conflicting sentiments about love. Tom grew up knowing that he would never be truly happy until he found “the one”, while Summer is convinced that the idea of love is born out of the false hope and that neither destiny nor love actually exist. Tom loves Summer from the first moment that she walks into his life. The feelings are not mutual. We see Summer gain and lose interest throughout the (500) days and until the very end of the film, she proves to the audience that she truly does not believe in love.

In the end, (500) Days of Summer is not a film about finding your soul mate, it is a film about finding yourself. Both Summer and Tom learn from each other about matters of love and life. While their relationship did not work out in the end, it is clear that their lives both change for the better as a result of the tumultuous (500) days. Tom must come to terms with his loss of Summer and in doing so, he starts a new chapter in his life. Rather than waiting for destiny to take its toll once again, he decides to jump start his new life. He finally decides to pursue his passion for architecture and lead a life that will make him happy, rather than just going through the motions and getting by as he was. Summer is married in the end. To whom is insignificant because we know that Tom taught her the ways of love and opened her eyes to a new world that she had refused to see before she met him.

So how is this a true romance if our lovers do not reunite in the end? In a way, one can consider (500) Days of Summer a romance with life. Our protagonists were not meant for each other, however we see that both of their lives change dramatically and for the better as a result of their interactions. I cannot be mad at the ending because, although unconventional, it is in fact a happy one.

Not unlike Ken Kwapis’ film, He’s Just Not That Into You, which was released about half a year earlier, (500) Days of Summer serves as a realistic and honest approach to the classic love story. Is this a new subgenre of the romantic comedy in the works? Both stories tell us how it is regarding matters of life and love, while avoiding the usual practice of tiptoeing around our feelings.

Eric Steelberg’s camera work provides with beautiful images of both the characters and our characters’ surroundings. The close-ups allow us to take a step into the personal space of our protagonists, which helps us fall even deeper in love with them as an audience. The pans and long shots would make any East Coaster want to book a flight out West in an instant. The dream sequences and split screens showing Tom’s ideal situations and reality were extremely interesting and added to the complexity of our characters’ feelings.

Finally, the soundtrack goes hand-in-hand with the hipster/indie-style cinematography. Being serenaded by the likes of Regina Spektor and The Feist is not something that I can complain about and it will most definitely keep (500) Days of Summer on my mind for as long as the Soundtrack remains in my iTunes.

Benjamin and Narrative as the Essence of Film

In his piece, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin discusses the transformative effects of film technology on the sense perception of the audience. I found sections XI, XII, and XIII to be particularly helpful to keep in mind during our viewing of Fight Club and Amelie.

Amelie utilizes many various film techniques, such as the close-up, slow motion, and the long shot (among others) to emphasize and give the audience more insight into the life and pleasures of the protagonist, Amelie. We are told that Amelie takes pleasure in the simple things in life. For example, we are told that she loves dipping her hand in sacks of rice and the camera allows us to experience this with her and allows us to enjoy this simple act as much as the character does. In section XIII on page 680, Benjamin states, “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives.” An excellent example of the camera taking us beyond where the audience’s eye can reach is the scene where Amelie finds the box hidden in the wall of her kitchen. In this scene, the camera penetrates the wall and shows us deep into the hole in the wall where the box was hidden. The close-up is used most often to express the emotions of Amelie and to allow the audience to experience her emotions with her.

Fight Club utilizes these same film techniques and takes the audience beyond what the eye can or chooses to see. Benjamin describes this on page 680, “An unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man…the camera introduces us to unconscious optics…” Slow motion is utilized to emphasize the blow of punchers during the fights. This effect makes the fight scenes much more dramatic, and therefore much more emotional for the audience. Benjamin addresses the effects of these techniques and states, “With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended”. This is true of the effects of these techniques in both Amelie and Fight Club.

These techniques reveal to the audience the most basic details, which make up routine actions and often go unnoticed. The combination of the verbal narrative and this visual insight that the camera gives make up the magic of film. Without narrative, the scenes revealed by the camera would have less weight because often times, the narrative adds significance or relevance to what the camera is showing us. For this reason, I do not believe that promoting narrative as the essence of film is a criminal error. I do not, however, whole-heartedly agree with Dulac’s claim because I believe that it is the combination of narration and visual images, which make up the essence and film and cannot be demonstrated by an alternative media. Yes, silent films were able to tell a story by utilizing music to stimulate the emotions. However, Hollywood films that we know and love require dialogue and some form of verbal narration to be paired with the images that we see in order to have an emotional impact on the audience.

Did Nora Ephron read Bordwell in Intro to Film??

While watching Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, I found it hard to get David Bordwell’s piece, “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures”, out of my head. From the beginning to end, I cannot think of a major instance in which the film strayed from Bordwell’s outline of the Classical Hollywood film.

Bordwell outlines the classical plot by saying that it consists of “an undisturbed stage, the disturbance, the struggle, and the elimination of the disturbance”. The plot of Sleepless in Seattle closely follows this outline and is therefore a classical plot. The undisturbed stage consists of the scenes leading up to the first time that Sam is on the radio. Until this point, our characters lives have not crossed paths and they are in no way interconnected. The moment that Annie hears Sam on the radio, a disturbance exists- she finds herself crying and having feelings for this man who lives across the country and who she knows very little about. She makes an instant connection with Sam when she finds herself mouthing “magic” at the exact moment that she hears Sam say it on the radio- Sam is describing the magic he experienced the first time he took his wife’s hand and Annie instantly thinks of her mother’s story about the “magic” that she felt the first time her husband (Annie’s father) took her hand. Each subsequent time she hears Sam on the radio, a struggle builds because she finds herself having stronger and stronger feelings for this stranger. She feeds these feelings by looking into Sam’s life, hiring an investigator and ultimately flying to Seattle to see him in person. Although there are no words exchanged between the two in Seattle, the connection is made when Sam first sees Annie at the airport and then when their eyes meet across the street in front of his home. Upon Annie’s return to the East Coast, the film tries to trick us into believing that the lovers will never cross paths. However, Annie sees a “sign” in the form of heart-shaped lights on the Empire State Building, where she had requested Sam meet her, and knows that she must at least go to the top of the building to see if he is there. Finally, our disturbance is eliminated when Sam and Annie unite on the top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day.

According to Bordwell’s “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures”, a classical story must end with a clear resolution of the underlying problem and the accomplishment of the major goals of the film. As was obvious, the problem that existed throughout the film was the distance that separated Annie and Sam, what with her living in Baltimore and him residing in Seattle. I saw the goals of the film to be the following: for Sam to find a women who he could love as much as his wife and for Annie to find a true love and experience the “magic” that she had learned about from her mother and Cary Grant movies. In the end, Annie and Sam finally meet atop the Empire State Building and experience the “magic” of their love when he takes her hand for the first time. This first in-person rendezvous serves as a classical ending, as defined by Bordwell. When Sam arrives in New York in an effort to retrieve Jonah, the problem of distance is eliminated and we start to see our happy ending pan out. Finally, when Sam and Jonah walk off the elevator and Sam takes Annie’s hand, both goals of the film are achieved- we see that Sam is in love and we can tell that Annie is finally experiencing the “magic” that she had always heard about.

Sleepless in Seattle was the perfect film to watch after reading Bordwell’s piece on Classical Hollywood. I really enjoyed being able to relate the reading to the film with ease. While I really liked the film (huge fan of the chick flick) I think that Ephron played it a little TOO safe in sticking to the outline of the classical Hollywood film. The movie was for sure a “feel good” and the ending made me smile, but it was a little too predictable for my liking. That’s my only complaint! J