Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch (500) Days of Summer
2009 · Marc Webb · (500) Days of Summer on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the numbered day card before each scene and do the arithmetic. (structure)
The counter promises an orderly filing system, then Webb and editor Alan Edward Bell refuse to run the days in order. A joyful day sits next to a ruinous one.
Payoff: You stop watching a story unfold and start sifting evidence, which is exactly what heartbreak makes a person do. In the reading: sheets of past (order of time). Days arrive by feeling, not calendar. That is what the reading calls a sheet of past: a whole region of a life you fall into.
Notice how often blue turns up in Summer's clothes and rooms. (light)
Eric Steelberg threads blue through wardrobe and decor wherever Summer is. The light runs golden and saturated while things are rising, then grays out as they fall.
Payoff: Because the timeline is scrambled, color often tells you where you are emotionally before the day counter tells you when.
Watch how little Tom actually does during the morning-after dance number. (performance)
Gordon-Levitt grins and walks. Strangers fall into step, a marching band arrives, an animated bird lands on his finger. The choreography belongs to the street, not to him.
Payoff: His happiness is something happening to him, not something he made, which is true of the whole relationship. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the person stops initiating and the world takes over the motion.
Listen for the songs Tom and Summer share, starting with the Smiths. (sound)
A shared favorite record becomes Tom's proof of destiny. Webb, coming from music videos, keeps letting needle drops carry the emotional information the shuffled scenes withhold.
Payoff: A shared record collection is not fate, and the soundtrack lets you hear Tom mistake one for the other.
Look at the walls of greeting cards in Tom's office. (setting)
Tom writes sentiment for feelings nobody in particular is having, surrounded by racks of it. The film keeps returning him to that room between relationship scenes.
Payoff: His job manufactures the same ready-made emotions he lives by, which makes you ask how much of his love he wrote himself.
Once you have seen it
Follow the left panel at the party until reality fills the screen. (cutting)
Expectations and Reality walk through one evening side by side, drifting further apart with each beat, until the hopeful panel is squeezed out entirely.
Payoff: You are not told Tom was wrong. You are made to hold both versions of one evening at once. In the reading: peaks of present (series of time). Two presents run at once in one frame: what he anticipates and what occurs. The reading calls these peaks of present.
Track how much Summer actually tells Tom about what she believes. (performance)
Deschanel plays Summer by withholding, but she says plainly and early that she does not believe in permanence. On a second pass those lines stop sounding like coyness.
Payoff: The evidence was always there, and watching Tom not hear it shows you how much of Summer he invented.
Watch what Tom narrates into existence in the IKEA showroom. (setting)
A display kitchen becomes their kitchen, a floor model becomes their bed. Nothing in the scene belongs to them. The description is more convincing than the thing described.
Payoff: This is the whole relationship in miniature: he furnishes a life she never agreed to live in.
Carry this in: Watch the day counter. Let each numbered day stand as its own present before you reassemble the story.