500 Days of Trying: A research on Queer Temporality, Masculinity and Romance in 500 Days of Summer

Abstract

This thesis explores how the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer (Webb, 2009), engages with, and potentially challenges, masculine heteronormative ideals of romantic progression. The movie deviates from the typical romantic comedy storyline, through its non-linear narrative structure, lack of a happy ending and the portrayal of romantic failure. In this thesis it is therefore analyzed whether this deviating narrative could be read as a critique on the reproduction of heteronormative ideals of romantic progression, offering a different perspective on romance and temporality, which resists or disrupts heteronormative temporal structures. It draws on queer temporality theory, which critiques the way time is structured around heteronormative life paths and explores alternative temporalities through the experiences of queer lives (Cordero, 2022). While queer temporality has mostly been theorized through the perspective of people that resist or are forced out of these heteronormative temporal structures, little attention has been paid to the affective costs of people who try to conform to heteronormative temporal structures, but fail in doing so. In this thesis, by analyzing protagonist Tom’s romantic journey through affect theory and the concept of hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005), it is investigated whether the portrayal of failed heterosexual romance and masculinity critiques heteronormative temporal ideals and could enable a queer reading of time. Employing a narrative and mis-en-scène analysis, this thesis studies how Tom’s story engages with heteronormative temporal structures. The findings suggests that the movie initially appears to critique masculine heteronormative ideals of romantic progression, but in the end the movie seems to realign with the same structures it seemed to critique in the first place. Nonetheless, 500 Days of Summer does offer the opportunity to rethink masculine heteronormative ideals of romantic progression from within heteronormative romance itself.