(500) Days of Summer · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He comes out of her building in the morning and the street starts dancing for him. Strangers fall into step. A marching band turns up. A hand-drawn bluebird, animated, belonging to no world this movie has otherwise shown us, lands on his finger while Hall & Oates plays. Watch what Tom is actually doing in that sequence: almost nothing. He grins and lets it carry him. The choreography belongs to the world, not to him.

Deleuze called this the movement of world. Usually a character moves and the world holds still around them. In musical numbers, and in dreams, it flips: the person stops initiating and the world takes over the motion. The dance dances the dancer. For Deleuze that was a sign the ordinary machinery of action had been suspended and something else was moving the image. Marc Webb puts it at the peak of Tom's happiness, and it's the whole film in three minutes. Tom's joy is something that happens to him. He is never the author of the love story he thinks he's writing.

That matters because a romantic comedy is normally the tidiest illustration of what Deleuze called the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, feels something, acts, and the act changes the situation. Boy sees girl, boy pursues, boy wins or loses for a reason we can name. Every gear in (500) Days is a rom-com gear, and none of them turn. Tom acts constantly and nothing converts. What he does instead is look, back, again, at days he cannot alter. Deleuze's word for that character is voyant, a seer: someone who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher, because no available action would resolve what he sees. The engine of this film isn't Tom's pursuit of Summer. It's Tom's re-viewing of Summer. Which is also what we're doing.

So look at the counter. A numbered card is what Deleuze calls a recollection-image: a dated memory, filed and retrievable, the old flashback contract in which the past behaves because you can label it. The cards promise exactly that, and then the film refuses to play them in order. What you get instead is closer to what he called sheets of past. Not a drawer you open but a whole region of a life you fall into, where the good day and the ruinous day are neighbors because feeling, not the calendar, decides the seating. This is why the number never comforts you. You read it, do the arithmetic, and realize you've been handed evidence rather than a scene. Deleuze's name for an image that has lost its immediate obviousness and now asks to be deciphered is the lectosign, a readable image. Alan Edward Bell's editing turns every shot into one.

Then the party. Expectations on the left, Reality on the right, walking through the same evening at the same time, drifting apart until reality takes the whole screen. Deleuze, reading Robbe-Grillet, argued that time doesn't have one present but several at once: a present of the future (what you're anticipating), a present of the present (what's occurring), a present of the past (what you're remembering). All of them are now. They contradict each other. He called them peaks of present. Almost no film puts two of them in one frame. Webb does, and lets one devour the other while you watch. Annie Hall had a split screen and this movie owes it plenty, but Allen's split screen divided two places. This one divides one place into two tenses. That is Webb's particular invention, and it's why the scene stings in a way a plain disappointment scene wouldn't. You aren't told Tom was wrong. You're made to hold both presents at once, exactly as he has to.

Now Summer. Deschanel plays her by withholding, and the film is built so you notice how much of "Summer" is Tom's manufacture. Deleuze had a precise name for that operation: crystalline description, where a description stops pointing at its object, composes a substitute, and quietly replaces it. The IKEA sequence is as clean an example as you could ask for. They walk a showroom playing house, narrating a display kitchen into a home and a floor-model bed into their bed. Nothing there is real. Everything is described. The description is better than the thing. Tom does this to a woman for 500 days, and he does it professionally too: the greeting-card office, walls of manufactured sentiment, feelings written for emotions no one in particular is having.

Deleuze took the crystal image from Renoir. A world where the actual and its reflection can't be told apart, but with a flaw running through it, and through the flaw somebody escapes into a real future. Summer is the flaw. She keeps saying she doesn't believe in the thing he's building, she leaves, and she has a life he never had access to. The crack isn't cruelty. It's the exit, and Tom finally takes it too, back toward the buildings he used to sketch from that bench above downtown and the vocation he'd shelved to write other people's sentiment.

Two things the craft does quietly. Eric Steelberg's palette carries the tense the scrambled story can't: blue keeps arriving with Summer, the light runs golden and saturated on the way up, then grays out on the way down, so you often know where you are before the counter tells you. That's colour as affect, absorbing a scene rather than describing it. And when Tom bottoms out, the photographed world dissolves into pencil sketch, drained to line and blank paper. The setting stops being able to hold an action at all and goes white, which is roughly what Deleuze means by an emptied space.

The greeting-card job is the best joke and the thesis. Deleuze thought modern cinema begins when a character becomes conscious of clichés, when the ready-made images stop working on him and become visible as images. Tom writes clichés, believes them, and is wrecked by them, while the narrator opens by announcing this is not a love story over a film that looks exactly like one. The critique doesn't come from breaking the rom-com. It comes from re-sequencing it. No event here is fabricated. The falsification is done entirely by order and emphasis, which is a sly demonstration of something Deleuze argued at length: you don't need a false event to produce an unreliable truth, editing will manage it alone. High Fidelity let its music-obsessive re-litigate his exes straight to camera and mostly enjoyed his company. (500) Days runs the same narrator and files charges.

The debts are specific. Two for the Road showed that honeymoon and decay can be cut into a single montage and the audience will do the subtraction. Eternal Sunshine established that emotional order beats calendar order in a memory film. Annie Hall supplied the confessional autopsy in fragments. The Graduate, and then Garden State more immediately, made the curated pop song an interior monologue rather than wallpaper, which is why the Smiths work here as a diagnosis: Tom hears a shared favorite song as proof of destiny, when it's proof of a shared record collection.

What it did to film is smaller than a revolution and more useful. It took a device from difficult European cinema, time delivered directly instead of measured out by action, and made it a summer release people quoted. It also handed a mass audience a working vocabulary for how movies mythologize love, an argument that is now common property and that many people met right here.

One question it leaves open. The film's honesty about Tom is purchased with Summer's opacity; to prove she was never his, it has to keep her partly unavailable to us too. Scrupulous, or the same evasion at one remove? Watch it again and try this: don't assemble the story. Take each numbered day as its own complete present that doesn't yet know what follows. That's what the counter is actually offering. Tom can't do it, he keeps reading Day 1 through Day 500. You can. And when the split screen opens, notice which panel you were living in.