I wanted to write about a movie I watched last week, (500) Days of Summer. So I searched on Youku where I watched it the first time, wanting to see it again for details. But I couldn’t find it any more. I realized that what’s left in my memory is nothing but fragments: a sentence the character said, a facial expression … but when I try to focus on these fragments, even they become blurry, leaving me with the vague mist of colors and indescribable feelings of loss and tenderness.
Walter Pater said in his Conclusion to The Renaissance, “Experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality … But when reflection begins to play upon those objects … each object is loosed into a group of impressions—color, odor, texture—in the mind of the observer.” So I shouldn’t feel bad about what I’ve already forgotten. Time filtered my memory for me; whatever is left is the whole essence of the movie.
His name is Tom. His dream is to be an architect. His real job is to write unrealistic romantic words on greeting cards. His favorite movie is The Graduate. He believes in true love and that he cannot be happy until he gets it.
Her name is Summer. She has only liked two things since the disintegration of her parents’ marriage: one is her long dark hair, the other is how easily she can cut it off and feel nothing.
They are together. One is in it for eternal love; one for that of the very moment. His love is a building he’s constructing; hers is her long hair. The outcome of this love story is not that hard to predict: his building falls apart along with himself; her hair is cut off by herself—and she doesn’t feel a thing. He is surprised that the woman who doesn’t share his faith in love is soon engaged, telling him about “this guy” she’s willing to spend her life with. What you want from me is not that I can’t give, it’s just that I can’t give to you.
Now that I wrote the plot, I am disturbed by it. It’s so real that it’s plain and sharp at the same time. Reviews call it a “postmodern, urban love story,” which I think is in regards to the non-linear narrative of the movie.
The 500 days with Summer are shuffled like poker cards and displayed one after another in front of us in a random order. We see “Day 1” of sweet encounter, then “Day 488” of a defeated Tom, then back to “Day 3” of romance and sweetness, which is shadowed with the dark, ominous clouds of “Day 488.”
Time is subverted in the movie. But the power of time is not crippled; it’s intensified. It reminds me of the French movie Irreversible. The story is told backward in a reverted time frame, which generates a destructive force so powerful that the story itself becomes a supporting character. Time, having been subverted, is what the author really tries to tell. This shapeless yet orderly force rushes forward endlessly, carrying all that is beautiful and precious, till it hands it over to death.
What we see is always the crime scene; the criminal remains invisible.
If Irreversible is ruthless condemnation against time, then (500) Days of Summer is nostalgic recollection of the past. During the reminiscence, we even see the future, just a glance—as light as a dragonfly dancing on the surface of a summer lake.
Tom quits his meaningless job after a heroic speech, determined to pursue his real dream in architecture. When he waits for a job interview, he meets a girl. They chat for a moment. He asks her out for a coffee when he walks off to the interview, but she says no. Then she says, “You know what?” He walks back. She smiles with a subtle sparkle in her eyes, “What the heck, yeah I’d love to get a coffee with you.”
He asks. “My name is Tom. What’s yours?”
She says, “Me? I’m Autumn.”
The only one who can drag him out of that long disastrous summer is—Autumn.
I believe in things like this in life. Like the story Lily told me about: her friend felt a calling to go to Putuo Mountain and she really went. There she met a guy who she later on married, and they lived happily ever after.
I love you, you don’t love me. I believe in eternity, you believe in the moment. For thousands of years our love stories haven’t escaped these few patterns. Yet for the main character of each role, their love story can be heart-wrenching.
Summer is hot, burning with dangerous intensity. The question is: when you pick up the first leaf from the ground, can you recognize the person you’ve been waiting for all these years?
I figured out where time will go in the future!
It is late. I sit down on the coach after a shower and Tim, who is buried in the beanbag chair with a notebook and a pencil (same pose as usual when he’s thinking of stories), says to me with excitement in his eyes,
“Hey check this out, I’ve got another idea for a book. I’m gonna write six short stories that are totally unrelated. Some happen in the present, some in the past, and some in the future — and in totally different locations too. Then I’m gonna relate them all in the very end in a way that all the details make sense and connect and all serve as part of a bigger story!”
This thought tickled me, then shocked me with a realization. I’ve figured out where time will go in the future! I mean, I thought time had no future. Okay, slow down a little: back to St. Augustine.
You see, time used to be a linear thing. There was a beginning, and there would be an end. Augustine talked about it in Confessions — the past, present and future. The establishment of Christianity straightened out the concept of time from being a primitive circular pattern (when in agricultural society time was day after day, year after year) to a linear logic. God created the world in the beginning, and it will come to an end when Jesus comes back to end the earthly world.
That was the way stories used to be: from “Once upon a time…” to “…they lived happily ever after.”
Then the pattern changed, again. We see movies like Back to the Future, Run! Lola Run!, Irreversible, popular American TV shows like Lost, Flashforward… Time breaks into pieces, together with a lot of things in the world.
Because the world changed. Time changed. It changed from being a linear logic into fragments, just like the way we do things now: we don’t make a whole machine by ourselves, we make parts of it. We are not ancient craftsmen anymore; we ARE the machines that make machines.
Things fell apart, so did we. Soul and body. Artists portray body parts, a glimpse of things, a moment of feelings… Time is shattered, subverted, disabled.
Now. Now it comes to my realization. If we live in a non-linear time with no past, present and future, where are we going? Do we live in the future already? Can we survive the subversion of time?
Tim’s story idea gave me an answer:
Things evolve back and forth between two extremes. What if it’s time for order again? This time the order is not THE order. Time is being RE-arranged and RE-organized in a subjectively logical way now that it has been subverted. I mean, there are the confusing six stories — at first, unrelated, illogical, non-linear — and this is phase the phase we’re in. Then we jump out of this, escape and carry on. Time will become linear again, or circular, or whatever shape or order. But it’s not going to keep being fragments. The moment is gone.