She Loves Me Not 0 comments

By A.G. Harmon

Rejection has oft been sung of and written about. Most everyone claims to have experienced it. But think back to how long it’s been since such a thing was the major theme of a film. (500) Days of Summer, from writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, warns from the outset that their story will not be resolved in a romantic union.

Still, acculturated as we are to bankable happy endings, the mind rebels at that caution. It expects some kind of trick—something coy or good-naturedly double meaninged that will ultimately save the featured relationship that’s developed for nearly a year and a half. For the most part—and I find this a virtue of the film—the promise of heartbreak holds true.

In the example of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), the rare example of unrequited love is displayed, something it seems older films did not shy away from so much. It’s a paradoxical truth that some things reveal themselves best when they’re thwarted: a lock is never so much a lock—forbidding, obstructing, hindering—as when the key is lost.

Summer (Zooey Deschanel, from the great David Gordon Green film, All the Real Girls) is wholly charming—not a blockbuster beauty, but a captivating girl whose enigmatic demeanor keeps you off balance. She has an intense way of listening and of pausing before she speaks. It’s as though she withdraws for a moment, tasting something mellow—like a lemon drop on the back of her tongue after the rough part has worn away. A receptionist for a greeting card company, Summer is the kind of girl men don’t fantasize about, but nevertheless look twice at whenever she passes.

Tom, a would-be-architect-cum-card writer (a play on the Valentine stereotype, but not overdone), is taken with Summer from the start. Eventually, he becomes her beau. Tom is a good, likeable young man who smiles with his entire face, and there’s no conceivable reason for Summer not to fall for him. But fall she won’t. She will walk with him, take his hand, pursue the same trails from time to time, and give herself to him in the frank, automatic way of the urban youth.

But love him she will not. Above board, she tells Tom so from the beginning. He, like us, doesn’t believe her.

In fact, Summer doesn’t even believe in eros, as Tom most assuredly does. He cannot fathom her resistance to this most basic given, but such an impasse—which might be a sign of trouble to another man—gives him no pause. He loves on, harder and deeper, perplexed when more and more the girl pulls away, refuses to smile, has other plans. These things he dismisses, excuses. It is news to him when Summer wants to become “friends.”

Eros is the strangest of the three loves. Mysterious as agape may be, it’s not really all that hard to conceive: (“I love the old guy in the sky, because he made me”).

Philos is even less bothersome to conceptualize (“My brother ain’t heavy; I love him because he’s like me”).

But romantic love resists easy definition and is notoriously difficult to justify. Most can be downright defensive about whom they’ve chosen to adore, and guard their affinities with heated protestations when challenged by those who can’t see the sense of it. From this, we have the aphorism that love is blind.

But it seems the state is not so much sightless as incomprehensible; we love despite—not because—of things, said Faulkner. The enthralled can also give scads of reasons when asked to explain their choices, but the lists often ring hollow. The proffered grounds could just as easily amount to mere affection as to love; friendship rather than romance could lie at the other end of the quotient.

But it does not, and so eros must amount to something more.

Which suggests another line of enquiry: those not experiencing erotic love tend to have little faith in its existence, while those who possess it believe and preach it all the more. So is romantic love the most like faith, stumbling to explain its justification, though shouting its own existence? Do those who can’t experience it, or do so only in small, misshapen ways, therefore have smaller, more pitiable selves? Do people have a talent for this kind of love, just as some seem to have a talent for faith, with larger hearts capable of greater devotion? Do talents beget desire?

It all seems a circle, or rather a forest of trails crossing back on each other. This kind of love is confusing and unspeakable even in its consummation, let alone when—alas—the daisy-plucking winds up on the wrong petal.