What (500) Days of Summer did for female representation in film

Has there ever been a film character as misunderstood and maligned as Summer Finn? Following the release of indie cult classic (500) Days of Summer in July 2009, the eponymous Summer (Zooey Deschanel) was tarred by critics and viewers as a tease, a player, and a bitch – all for the crime of dumping her boyfriend Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). “I got that take from day one,” Deschanel said in a 2022 Guardian inteview, reflecting on the deluge of vitriol directed at her character.

But this was expected. The film is told from Tom’s perspective as he becomes increasingly infatuated with Summer, and when the pair’s 500-day dalliance inevitably breaks down, Tom is left despondent and heartbroken. It’s easy to see how anyone who has been on the sharp end of a breakup would instinctively sympathise with Tom as we witness him traipse to the corner shop in unwashed pyjamas to buy off-brand whiskey and wallow in his dingy apartment. As Deschanel told the Guardian, viewers’ hatred of Summer is “a very emotional response”.

But consensus does seem to have shifted since 2009, when most viewers had their pitchforks out for Summer. As our understanding of heterosexual relationship dynamics shifted in the 2010s, so too did our understanding of the film: Tom was no longer a wronged victim – instead, he was your classic chauvinistic ‘nice guy’ or self-centred ‘softboi’. NYLON branded Tom an “entitled asshole” in 2018, while GQ described him as “a selfish weirdo with unrealistic expectations of women” in 2019.

It’s even a view shared by Gordon-Levitt himself, who has reiterated on multiple occasions that it’s Tom, not Summer, who’s the real villain of the story. In an interview with Playboy back in 2012, he described Tom’s “obsession” with Summer as “mildly delusional” and posited that Tom had fallen in love with “the idea of a person, not the actual person”. Most recently, in an interview published in The i in June, he described the film as “a great cinematic representation of a selfish young man who’s not even listening to his girlfriend”.

In the 15 years since its release, it’s become increasingly clear that the film marked a turning point in terms of portrayals of female characters on screen, acting as a death knell for the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’. If you’re unfamiliar, the term was first coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in 2007 in a review of Elizabethtown (2005) for The AV Club, where he poured scorn on the two-dimensional depiction of Kirsten Dunst’s character, Claire Colburn. “Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” he wrote. “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

Rabin also highlighted Sam (Natalie Portman) in 2004 film Garden State as another potent example of this trope, but since coining the phrase critics have levelled the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ label at a whole host of other quirky female characters from the 2000s such as Penny Lane in Almost Famous (2000), Sarah Deever in Sweet November (2001), and Allison in Yes Man (2008). On the surface – through Tom’s eyes – Summer is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl too. There’s an airy, ethereal quality to her, with her twee 60s sundresses and big doe eyes. She’s quirky, but in a decidedly normal way: she’s undaunted when it comes to playing house in IKEA and shouting “penis” in public as part of game with Tom.

But unlike other Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Summer was clearly created with a view to critiquing the trope. Tom sees her as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but by the film’s end, it becomes clear that he was naïve to look at her that way. “Yes, Summer has elements of the manic pixie dream girl – she is an immature view of a woman,” director Marc Webb said in a Guardian interview from 2009. “She’s Tom’s view of a woman. He doesn’t see her complexity and the consequence for him is heartbreak.” In a separate interview with Dazed, Webb added that the film’s creators “wanted to tell it very much from one person’s point of view”, adding that the film highlights the way young men can often be solipsistic in their relationships with women. “It was tempting to tell something from her point of view but that‘s not what it’s about,” he said.

While we never get an in-depth look at Summer’s ambitions or desires, the film is still shot through with brief glimpses of Summer’s inner “complexity” – just enough to signal to the audience that Tom’s perspective might be unreliable. For instance, one scene sees Summer opens up to Tom about a troubling recurring dream she has. But just as we’re on the brink of understanding more about Summer’s interior life, the film’s narrator (Richard McGonagle) to start talking over her about how Tom is feeling in that moment: “Tom began to realize that these stories weren’t routinely told. These were stories one had to earn. He could feel the wall coming down. He wondered if anyone else had made it this far.” It’s telling that while Summer is being vulnerable with Tom, he’s only really thinking about himself.

This isn’t to say the film is a feminist masterpiece. It’s still very much ‘of its time’ – one of Tom’s friends mentions the “girl of [his] dreams” would have a really “bodacious rack”; before the pair are even together Tom offhandedly refers to Summer as a “skank” after assuming that she slept with someone at the weekend; and, perhaps most tellingly, the film opens with an author’s note which reads: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Especially you Jenny Beckman. Bitch.” While it’s unclear whether ‘Jenny Beckman’ was her real name, the film’s screenwriter Scott Neustadter has often said that Summer was based on a real woman he dated. If the film is anything to go by, it’s clear Neustadter is critical of his own conduct in the relationship – but equally, calling his ex-girlfriend a “bitch” in the film’s opening moments almost undermines the film’s warning against refusing to acknowledge other people’s perspectives.

Regardless, the film’s legacy is palpable. Four years after its release, The Cut proclaimed the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was dead – and recent female leads have cretainly proved much more interesting and three-dimensional than the likes of “psychotically chipper” Claire Colburn and Garden State’s Sam, who have all but vanished from the silver screen. Take Tashi Duncan in Luca Gaudagnino’s Challengers, who is perpetually brimming with the resentment catalysed by her wasted potential to be a tennis star. Or Poor Things’ Bella Baxter: while her unabashed free-spiritedness is arguably Manic Pixie-esque, she’s depicted as pursuing pleasure for her own sake and resists antagonist Duncan Wedderburn’s attempts to dampen her lust for life. While of course misogynistic portrayals of women still abound, thankfully, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has largely been confined to history as a dated, sexist trope – in part thanks to (500) Days of Summer’s excoriating critique of men who try to idealise women.