Cruel Summer

Is life governed by fate or coincidence?  This is the central conceit of the movie, (500) Days of Summer.  It also ironically has many links to my day and my life.  If you read my post yesterday, you would know that I mused on the subject of “one true love,” with me reaching a conclusion that it does exist but very rarely.  And that ended up being the theme of this wonderful, sublime, enticing, all-too-ephemeral golden nugget of a movie.  I won’t spoil any part of it for those planning on seeing it, and I urge you all to see it.  But I will not spoil it when I say it is not a love story, because it makes that patently clear in the best prefatory start to a movie ever.  But it is a story imbued with the question of love.  I also am not spoiling anything when I note that it tracks a relationship from the courting to infatuation to break-up to reconnection.  In this manner it drew eerie parallels to a relationship I once had with with this woman I thought was the “one”.  It was quite a short-lived relationship but one with flickering embers that burned for about a decade leading to an emotional reconnection a couple of years ago.  But the reconnection of feelings (and these may have just been feelings on my part because I did not ask and did not know if it was a reconnection; I did not ask if she felt something too; I did not want to know because I knew it could not happen, not at that stage of my life, so I willed it not to happen) also ended up being the extinguishing of the embers and she is now happily married with a newborn.

The breakdown of this relationship happened nearly twenty years ago and elicited the same response that the protagonist of this movie endures sans the drinking and degradation of his work product.  In the movie, the guy starts drinking and quits his job: I never reached such extremes, but I was in the throes of my romantic period and I know the frustration he felt at the inability of what felt like true love at the time to transcend obstacles both external and internal.  The “happy” ending is that I would have this “true love” feeling two more times, and for all I know, I may have that feeling in the future.  This, of course, suggests that there is no such thing as “true love” or that I am incapable of achieving it.  As an aside, Jung had this theory of the container and the contained, with the container in the relationship being the one who nurtures the relationship; to reach that level requires a connection at the deepest level, but it has been achieved, at least in literature (see the Birkin-Ursula  relationship) in Women In Love.

At any rate, a movie that leaves you churning thoughts in your mind hours after the movie ends, is a magical movie.  And this is a magical movie and not just because the utterly cute and talented Zooey Deschanel is in it. 

By the way, my way of coping with that broken relationship 20 years ago?  I made a mix tape which I called Disintegration in honor of the classic Cure album.  The first side (yes, there were tapes and sides back then) contained the saddest songs I knew and the other side contained the most joyous and hopeful songs I knew.  My theory was that you have to travel into that heart of darkness to see the light of hope; you have to open yourself up to deep pain you feel to begin to heal.  It is not an easy or pleasant experience but ultimately it is a rewarding one,