Bloke's Column: Garritt Fishbaum

Well this column’s supposed to be a love-and-sex bit and so you ain't heard from me all summer because I ain’t had a lick of either since the wilting bloom fell off of Spring.

Don’t cry for me. I have still gone to the movies!

So let’s talk about just one of them, a very rare 'romantic comedy' that actually brought me delight instead of a barrel of rolling eyes.
500 Days of Summer was good. Good enough for me to turn in a movie review masquerading as a sex column (sorry, editors!). The reason I'm doing this is: 500 Days of Summer makes you think about how modern love actually works, as opposed to how it’s supposed to feel.

There’s a bit of high-conceptual switcheroo in this film: the Guy believes in true love, and the Girl has a fear of commitment. Well it was the Girl who got me in the theatre. A pretty rare feminine specimen, she doesn’t want to settle down, and yet isn't an insecure slut. Instead, the girl just wants to have fun.

In your humble columnist's experience, this would be a welcome reversal of roles!

And yet it drives the movie's Guy - an insecure type who is pining away for love rather than living life to its fullest potential - fuckin nuts. Understandable: the Girl’s a catch. But she knows it. To be fair she’s pretty straightforward about it with him, tells him she’s just playing with him, and he’s happy to play along, fooling himself about 'them' in the ways that my partners typically have about 'us', believing that this time’ll be different, that 'it' will come only if you want it bad enough and hold hands through it, and so he tries and fails and she bails and he wails.

So that’s sort of where things get interesting. Well, the Guy gets more interesting. In the process of losing her and hitting bottom, he stares straight into the face of feared fundamental failure. And then, he breaks on through to the other side – where he finds something in himself worth loving and pursuing. See, Whisper Mag readers, how this movie bucks its Chickflickville Station? He becomes a better man by having to be alone.

Now, the cutesy final scene suggests that the whole ordeal will repeat itself—without necessarily a more successful result. So he's identified and deconstructed his own personal psychological pattern of love-dependence, and yet that hasn't enabled him to escape said pattern. But maybe he’s at least found a way to enjoy it.

The Girl, on the other hand, gets less interesting as the movie proceeds. Her fiercely self-serving single lady streak turned out to be a sham (spoilerish warning ahead.) She, too, just wanted a Mr. Right to put a ring on it; she was just fooling herself and all concerned parties along the way. So much for that alluring independent woman that drew me into the theatre. But maybe this, too, is to the movie’s credit, for suggesting that Modern Wonder Girl is just like the rest of us: the path to our partners leads through ourselves.