500 Days of Summer

1240 Words3 Pages

"This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know upfront, this is not a love story" (Webb, 2009). Marc Webb's film (500) Days of Summer, is an unconventional unrequited story about love. Tom Hansen meets Summer Finn at work and instantly knows that she is the girl for him. He takes the viewers on a journey through the highs and lows of his continuously evolving relationship. Webb relies on editing, style, and image to draw viewer interest. Production techniques and narrative are used to portray thoughts, emotions, and motivations of the two characters. In (500) Days of Summer, content and form work together to create a conventional post-modernist and post-classical Hollywood style film.
The romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer can be viewed as a conventional post-classical Hollywood film based on its utilization of certain stylistic components. The film begins on day 488 as the audience is shown Summer wearing a wedding ring and smiling as she holds Tom's hand. Viewers are then taken to day 1 in which Tom meets Summer: "he knows almost immediately, she's who he's been searching for" (Webb, 2009). Due to the "break in continuity and flow of story information" the audience is fooled into thinking that things end happily even though the narrator warns them that this is not a love story (Cornell, Lecture #6). After the opening credits, Tom is shown breaking plates and though a flashback one sees that Summer breaks up with Tom. "Fragmented" narrative is also a characteristic of post-modernistic film (Grimshaw, 2013). This non-linear storyline continues throughout the entire film as the audience is shown which day of Tom and Summer's relationship they are viewing.
Due to the unusual back and fourth nature of the storytelling, t...

... middle of paper ...

.... The editing and narrative draws in audiences as the story of boy meets girl unfolds.

Works Cited

(500) Days of Summer. Dir. Marc Webb. Perf. Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon- Levitt. 20 Century Fox, 2009.

Cartmell, Paul. "What Is Postmodern Film?" WiseGeek. Conjecture, 13 Dec. 2013. Web. 14 Dec. 2013. .

Cornell, Julian. "Lecture #6: New Hollywood & Post-Classical Cinema." PowerPoint presentation.

Grimshaw, Louise. "A Look at the Postmodern: (500) Days of Summer." Filmophilia. N.p., 5 Oct. 2013. Web. 14 Dec. 2013. .

Walters, Stephanie. "Postmodernism In (500) Days of Summer (2009)." N.p., 20 Mar. 2010. Web. 14 Dec. 2013. .

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