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Maoist movie reviews
Heterosexual patriarch with XY chromosomes and strategically
ambiguous patriarch with XX chromosomes have a trivial romance
problem while children and Third World people are oppressed
(500) Days of Summer
Starring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Directed by Marc Webb
Watermark
PG-13 (United $tates)
95 minutes
2009
Reviewed August 2009
MIWS has been stressing recently that there ought to be a scientific
definition of "youth," if that term is to be used at all except as a
chronological designation devoid of all connotations, not an
opportunist definition designed to recruit male teenagers, flatter
people in their twenties or even defend Barack Obama. The male star
of "(500) Days of Summer" was born in 1981, which makes him almost
thirty. Some will call Joseph Gordon-Levitt a "little kid," but
whether Gordon-Levitt is "youth" in any sense, "(500) Days of Summer"
represents intimate relations between female and male adults in the
United $tates. For both females and males in the United $tates, the
average age of marriage is around Gordon-Levitt's age. I emphasize
Gordon-Levitt here not because "(500) Days of Summer" is a story told
from Gordon-Levitt's character's viewpoint, but because Westerners
are used to fantasizing about "young women" such as one called
"Neda"; Zooey Deschanel is actually older than Gordon-Levitt. The
fact that Gordon-Levitt acts in "(500) Days of Summer" and is even
younger than Deschanel should not stop people from thinking about
adult relations in the context of this movie. In their twenties is
when females' and males' societal positions as adults crystallize in
the United $tates. Approaching "(500) Days of Summer" as a movie
about youth "searching for themselves" to gain a foothold for
resisting youth oppression would be misleading.
Unlike some reviewers, I did not go into "(500) Days of Summer"
thinking "3rd Rock." I am familiar with some of Gordon-Levitt's
"indie" work as an adult, so I was expecting something off-key or a
little different from most romantic movies when I saw "(500) Days of
Summer" before it became a sensation. Subjectively, I saw "(500) Days
of Summer" as a critique of the gender aristocracy of privileged
female adults in the United $tates (whether the moviemakers intended
it to be that or not), but I wonder whether if someone made a movie
critiquing the gender aristocracy, would Amerikans understand it as
such. "(500) Days of Summer" evokes (and invokes) the word "bitch,"
but it is likely that Amerikans will come away from the movie
thinking that they should lower their expectations regarding "true
love." One review calls "(500) Days of Summer" "hopeful" as if
Valentine's Day cards could still be correct in a capitalist country
before imperialism is overthrown. The bracketed number in the title
of the movie refers to the seemingly random flashbacks and
flashforwards in the movie that most obviously contrasts Tom Hansen's
positive feelings about his relationship with Summer Finn with later
disappointments.
Summer expresses to Tom up front that she just wants a casual
relationship -- kind of. Summer tells Tom that after they initially
bonded over their shared love of The Smiths. They meet at work. Their
relationship acquires all the appearances of a non-cohabiting
long-term relationship, but when Tom points this out, this alienates
Summer. Later, Tom finds out that Summer could go for marriage, just
not with him. Tom and Summer work for a greeting card company in
which Tom churns out witty romantic lines. Summer's and Tom's
relationship with the company parallels some of the developments in
their own relationship. Tom has an outburst against the culture that
gave him romantic ideas.
"(500) Days of Summer" is not an easy movie to talk about. It is not
the first movie one would take a different-sex date to. It's not the
first movie a heterosexual U.$. female would see with other
heterosexual U.$. female friends who are not Gordon-Levitt fans -- a
"chick flick." On the other hand, it is not that this reviewer gives
a sh*t generally about U.$. males screwed by U.$. females in intimate
relationships. Yet, "(500) Days of Summer" illustrates some things
about the gender aristocracy.
Homo sapiens sapiens cannot rid itself of patriarchy,
including the gender oppression of children, without extricating
itself from 'ho activity. Thus, at this time there is only so much
this reviewer can object to the idea of sex for its own sake in the
imperialist country context. (A notion of asexuality would be
preferable. Both the idea of sex for its own sake and its romantic
alternatives in the First World are misleading.) At this time, sex is
connected in specific ways to leisure-time privilege (for things
other than sexual pleasure), money, or power, and sometimes all at
the same time. So, one individual female's expression of desire for
sex is not the issue. What is the issue is that in reality
sex-for-its-own-sake is a myth. Instead of leaving sex as it is able
to, the gender aristocracy uses sexuality to lord it over children
and Third World people, and to obtain, reproduce and exercise gender
privilege -- like U.$. males.
In places like Los Angeles, there is a rock scene that rock fans can
go to find people for casual sex. So, even taking rock for granted,
there are alternatives to what Summer Finn does. Instead of
approaching sex in a context where it is more clear that sex will
just be casual, Summer meets Tom Hansen as a lone Smiths fan in a sea
of apparently mundane people at an office workplace and contributes
to Tom's notion that she is 'the one'. In the elevator, Tom is
listening to "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out." Summer knows the
words. "To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die." (The
words may be ambiguous in the song, but in the movie they imply a
long-term relationship.) Others are aware of Summer's and Tom's
relationship to such an extent that the relationship figures in a
discussion of Tom's work performance. Summer is a temp, but meeting
people for 'casual' at a workplace is a bad idea in the first place,
because a relationship may end on bad terms while the people still
have to work with each other.
Even in the British alternative rock scene context, Summer would have
been having sex with people with a style connected to The Smiths. How
alternative rock relates to gender privilege is not revealed by
"(500) Days of Summer," but the gender aristocracy uses style to
attract males even though it has less sex drive than males. One
reason is that white females are competing with non-white females, as
the ending of "(500) Days of Summer" illustrates. Even when style
attracts males who want casual sex and is even bound up with
pleasure, style is connected to romance.
In "(500) Days of Summer," it is the man who wants romantic monogamy
and the man with female biology who wants 'casual'. Usually, one
thinks of males as wanting sex with anyone without commitment. The
hit Young Money song "Every Girl" talks about "f**king every girl in
the world" -- an impossibility but an ideal for the males the song
represents. Even if U.$. males pursue sex with anyone without
commitment, U.$. females might not. "(500) Days of Summer" adds to
this that even if U.$. females behaved more like U.$. males, there
would not be harmony. U.$. females gained career in an imperialist
country and consequently have less drive for commitment. At the same
time, they want to retain commitment as an option. Summer Finn says
that she doesn't want 'serious', but she lays the groundwork for
marriage by allowing her workplace to know about her relationship
with Tom Hansen, not to mention what she does to lead Tom himself on.
This is somewhat like what U.$. males seek. U.$. males want casual
sex when they are young and think more about commitment as they get
older.
Though Summer's development is reminiscent of the development of the
U.$ male or suggestive of a reversal of the situation where the U.$.
male is less interested in romance, what Summer wants appears
considerably more ambiguous than what the young heterosexual U.$.
adult male wants. Is Summer looking for her soul mate? Does she want
to be 'friends with benefits'? Does she just want a male friend and
puts up with the sex? Reminiscent of a Smiths song, is she even that
heterosexual? Western so-called feminism would look at someone like
Summer in different ways. Some Western so-called feminists would
celebrate ambiguity in general as having liberatory potential. Some
influenced by Toward a New Psychology of Women would say that U.$.
females are figuring out what they want in a process of becoming
liberated. Another angle is that society should put up with female
ambiguity because females may be bisexual -- straight U.$. females
make use of ideas about bisexuality and lesbianism as is convenient
for them, to entice males with a threesome-friendly image being only
the most obvious use. One school of thought even says that there
should be different standards for female evil and male evil because
females need to be like men before they can become something else --
a notion justifying everything from heartbreaking to war crimes
perpetrated by people of female anatomy.
Toward a New Psychology of Women was written more than three
decades ago. It's now 2009, and it is time to admit that U.$. females
have settled into a pattern. Much of the appearance of ambiguity on
the part of U.$. females in dating is just that, an appearance. It is
an appearance, constructed by both U.$. females and U.$. males,
overlaying a clumsy 'ho process. The U.$. female doesn't want to come
off as a "slut," but she doesn't want to alienate males. At the same
time, the U.$. female doesn't want to come off as a gold digger; the
male that she wants to get a house with usually isn't rich by U.$.
standards, and a gold-digger image might repulse him. Distinguishing
between gold digging and romance and laying on the romance thick can
alienate males, too. From the point of view of the U.$. male: The
U.$. male does not want to draw too much attention to the desire
difference between females and males, but does not want to foreclose
offering non-sexual benefits to females. The practice of some of
drawing finer and finer distinctions between relationships -- such as
between "casual sex" and "casual relationship" and between "f**k
buddies" and "friends with benefits" -- is both an attempt to get a
hold of competing pressures and relational phenomena arising from
them, and something that makes a certain female outlook on
relationships seem compatible with a certain male outlook when they
are not compatible in an imperialist country. People can come up with
new categories and distinctions, but the United $tates still has one
of the highest divorce rates. It is even true that people who leave
"casual relationships" have difficulty being "just friends." People
have different views of "friends with benefits" even when they're
both calling their relationship "friends with benefits." One could
see "(500) Days of Summer" as a story about two individuals,
differing perceptions, and mixed or misunderstood signals, but ideas
about perceptions and signals need to be kicked up to a group level.
Outside style and romance ideology, this reviewer fails to see what
Tom himself has to offer Summer. It isn't clear how The Smiths
figures in Summer's enjoyment of sex with Tom. Without capitalism,
bands of such renown as The Smiths might not exist anyway. Tom has an
urban hipster look and feel. The urban hipster image for males is one
of a male who isn't particularly muscular and is more likely to call
the police than kick ass himself. If Tom did have brawn, it would go
unused. Even in terms of class, though many activities and things are
cheaper with more than one persyn, the viewer does not see Summer and
Tom sharing an apartment to save on rent, for example, something that
a female could do with female friends. There is an element of
prostitution to most intimate relationships today even in the First
World, but it is seen more clearly in the First World that 'ho
activity between people can take place separately from class.
There is a widespread idea in the United $tates that females like
cuddling more than males and trade sex for cuddling with their male
partners. So, the female gives penetrative sex to the male and
receives a cuddle, even if the male wants the cuddle to some extent,
too. This is less obviously a 'ho proposition than "you'll get some
tonight after taking me to a nice restaurant," but would be an
example of 'ho activity occurring purely within the leisure-time
realm, if the female does not receive any class benefit. There is not
an equal sense of pleasure. I read an article in a "women's"
lifestyle publication recently that raised the cuddling topic and was
like "how to orgasm while going down on your man." Actually, now that
I re-read the article, the words are "get off."(1) By "get off," the
article does not mean orgasming necessarily (only "[s]ome women can
reach orgasm while performing fellatio"), but "reducing the stress
and tension of daily life" by "taking a penis into your mouth and
sucking."
"How do you practice phallus worship? Make love to his penis.
Not him, his penis. Every man secretly wants to experience a
woman in thrall to the power of his sexual organ. . . . In that
moment, he becomes his penis, because your passion is pure --
not dependent on his money or status or good looks. (Sometimes
it's the best part of him, isn't it? I've had more than one
intense personal relationship where I loved the penis -- but the
man, not so much. I call it being dick-matized.)"
If I had to defend this Lemondrop article, I would point out that the
idea of having sex with a male not for his money, status, or good
looks, is an advance compared with what some frankly say and what
females have been consciously, or unconsciously while saying
something else. Even "good looks" could be connected to style, such
as clothing style, that would not exist without class, gender and
national oppression. In actuality, whether they know or not, females
who don't have sex with random males in the dark or with strangers in
restrooms do usually have sex with a motivation other than, or more
than, pleasure. Overall, the Lemondrop article is about adjusting to
sex that is less pleasurable for females, with males who may not be
attractive. (Attractiveness is bound up with style. That is part of
the problem. What is unattractive may be beauty without a certain
style, and what's attractive may be non-beauty with a certain style.)
Instead of leaving sex, admitting that more females aren't very
heterosexual or shunning fellatio if that could be done without
unsettling all sex, the gender aristocracy puts out articles like
this Lemondrop one. There are numerous whole books and videos about
how to have heterosexual oral sex as if sex should be that
complicated. People can talk about enjoying sex equally; whether that
actually happens is another thing.
Summer in "(500) Days of Summer" knows that Tom aspires to be an
architect. Architecture in the First World is an intellectual
activity requiring a high level of education. Females who claim to be
seeking intelligent males and locate intelligence in the character of
an individual male may still be dating for class -- in the First
World, dating someone else who is bourgeois or petty-bourgeois, or
dating someone who has a college degree. Occupation and income aside,
females' dating males for their intelligence to some extent involves
an undeserved flattery of males. Even in many Third World cities,
more than half of college students are female. Instead of openly
acknowledging that it exchanges sex for other things, the gender
aristocracy contributes to romantic delusions and even to myths of
male superiority. Even dating to have someone with whom to walk on
the beach involves a delusion encapsulating a sexual transaction, and
to the extent that it does not it is enjoyment of leisure time at the
expense of others.
Summer Finn and Tom Hansen have sex. In a city like Los Angeles,
females can have platonic male friends and even males to cuddle with
without sex, but I would not say that Summer has false gender
consciousness. On the contrary, any cuddling a Summer does with a Tom
would be part of a package deal in which Summer's having a
heterosexual relationship itself confers privilege to Summer
connected to heterosexuality. Even before having sex, Summer is part
of a group that derives benefit from heterosexuality. For example,
time and space are partitioned for heterosexual adults, and for
heterosexual female adults and heterosexual male adults specifically.
Summer Finn claims to have had a same-sex experience, but it is
possible that a majority of white females in Los Angeles could claim
such at some point in adulthood. That is just to talk about what
happens within U.$. borders and ignore the rest of the world. U.$.
females as a whole, regardless of sexual orientation, benefit
globally from a heterosexuality devaluing Third World females and
even First World males. For this to work, at least some U.$. females
have to have sex with males.
Characters discuss love and relationships abstractly, explicitly in
"(500) Days of Summer," not a subtle movie. One topic that does not
come up as far as I remember is childbearing. Recently, Bloomberg.com
reported a study on fertility. The Bloomberg headline includes
"babies are in" (different from "babies make a comeback," the title
of the August 6, 2009, News & Views article in Nature).(2) The
specific claim (in the Mikko Myrskylä et al. Letter "Advances in
development reverse fertility declines" in Nature, August 6,
2009) of a reversal of fertility declines in "highly developed
countries" and fertility's increasing (but not necessarily above
replacement levels) with futher "development" (HDI) after reaching a
threshold of "development" is interesting for various reasons, but
the notion that having children is to some extent independent of
"economic development," living standard increases, health
improvement, education and skills development, and improvement of
females' conditions, is not surprising to this reviewer in the least.
Though the general economic uselessness of children to individual
adults under imperialism -- a fact not always mentioned in
discussions of fertility decline -- may have contributed to lower
fertility, adults obtain non-economic benefits from children, not
just economic benefits (historically and capitalistically).
Children's oppression is a gender oppression giving rise to
reproduction of children as a group, including their biological
reproduction. Movies and books that focus on the female-male
relationship but do not address children have a blind spot. In "(500)
Days of Summer," Summer does not marry Tom, and it could be that she
didn't think Tom would be willing to have children or good
economically for having children.
Physical beauty of a mate may have something to do with desire to
have children, but a concept of attraction that has more to do with
style than with physical beauty or sexual pleasure would be useful
for having children, not for sustaining a relationship for more than
five years. (Even a relationship based on physical beauty could be
unsustainable if the deeper basis is having children. Child ownership
plausibly contributes to a separation of physical beauty and sexual
pleasure so that females end up dating males who have physical beauty
whether there is sexual pleasure or not.) After five years, U.$.
children are in school, and having a spouse is less useful for child
ownership. It is well-known that marriage in the United $tates takes
a hit after children "leave the nest." More disturbing to the U.$.
public would be the idea that U.$. adults including females have sex
with adults (not just for conception) for an oppressive reason
relating to children -- a weak basis for a long-term relationship in
countries with a high standard of living. U.$. females do not want or
need commitment with males as much as females in the Third World do.
Commitment for U.$. females is a road to owning children, a road that
U.$. females can leave. U.$. females seek ownership of children and
flexibility in relation to adults -- as do U.$. males, though the
flexibility sought appears differently. This tendency becomes more
pronounced as U.$. females' career security becomes more established
individually and groupwise. U.$. males also want to own children, and
this leads to further contradictions with U.$. females. The idea --
promoted by those with no concept of children's oppression or who
don't place any intrinsic value on children (as a social or
biological group) even in a traditional way -- that U.$. females have
babies or get married because of only money and/or coercion is not
accurate. Various discussions about unintended pregnancies and the
burdersomeness of childbearing and child care should not obscure the
reality that the gender aristocracy oppresses children and seeks to
own them. This becomes more clear as trade-offs between career and
children become less. Not recognizing this and then talking about
childbearing and child care difficulties leads to shifting
childbearing and child care onto foreigners as a phony solution to
sex inequality while children's oppression goes on.
If it were possible for U.$. females to own children without
involving males for conception, child care, or postpartum care, much
sex would disappear. Banning insemination through intercourse,
sterilizing males and requiring females who decide to bear children
to obtain random sperm from a storage facility would involve a loss
of "choice" for individual females, but would be profoundly
clarifying even in just isolating conception. So would a special
plebiscite of females to formalize the species reproduction question.
Real feminism is not in favor of using romance or unscientific
pronatalist ideology to trick females into bearing children. The
reason these ideas do not even come up with the gender aristocracy
except in fringe outbursts is that the gender aristocracy has
gender-privileged interests in the 'ho system that it masks with
individualism, and also because the gender aristocracy wants to own
white children and would be averse to bearing non-white children.
Even mandatory abortion after supplying free birth control if an
agreement to bear children has not been signed, accompanied by harsh
penalties for absent fathers in a socialist society and penalizing
males who participate in an illegal conception necessitating abortion
or resulting in birth, is offensive to the gender aristocracy. The
Summer Finn character, with a downtown career and an urban Democratic
Party look, may not evoke fertility and not all individual U.$. adult
females are intending to own children, but the gender aristocracy
represented by Summer must be overthrown for the gender-oppressed and
the majority of females in the world to advance.
Some sympathize with the Summer Finn character as a kind who is
misunderstood, but who is honest and never mean-spirited. Honesty is
irrelevant. Yeah, if I had to live with Summer as a roommate, I might
be inclined to find the good in Summer, but the character of one
individual isn't interesting scientifically. Summer reflects a whole
social group in the United $tates, one that oppresses children and
Third World people much as U.$. males do. Nor are criticisms that
movies like "(500) Days of Summer" ignore poor or non-white females
that interesting in 2009. Not only is Summer an exploiter of Third
World workers; she is a gender oppressor. Discussion of "difference"
is for exploiter unity or pro-imperialist unity unless the majority
of U.$. females is understood to be a gender aristocracy.
Third World people have a reason to call as "sluts" those Amerikan
females on CNN stirring up war against the Third World with
pseudo-feminist reasons involving leisure time the Third World does
not have. At the same time, some of the dynamics seen more clearly in
the First World the proletariat will have to deal with even after
imperialism is overthrown. The ideology of the gender aristocracy
propping up patriarchy, and of its male allies supporting the 'ho
system to preserve sexual access to females, must be defeated. The
gender aristocracy obscures the workings of patriarchy with notions
of choice and style. People with liberal mores and alternative
lifestyles like Summer Finn projecting an avant-garde image and
questioning romance before returning to it are part of a vanguard
defending the status quo. The gender aristocracy as a whole has an
ambiguity that represents an unconscious strategy more than an
uncertainty. U.$. female would rather imprison people domestically
and kill people in foreign countries to preserve a 'ho system lacking
formal structure than have a progressively revolutionized system
where the economic, children-related, sexual and other lifestyle
terms of relationships are spelled out in advance for those who want
to have sex or a relationship. This is the story that "(500) Days of
Summer" does not tell.
Notes
1. Susan Crain Bakos, "Can You Get Off While Going Down on a Guy?
Yes!" 2009 July 29,
http://www.lemondrop.com/2009/07/29/can-you-get-off-while-going-down-y
es/
2. Elizabeth Lopatto, "Babies Are In: Fertility Rates Increase in
Developed Nations," 2009 August 5,
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=ac7nDxl6G8U4