LONELY HEARTS CLUB
By Michael Sun
There comes a time in everyone’s life when it all suddenly shifts: when the course of fate is altered, dramatically or otherwise, whether you realise it at the time or many years down the track, under the clear-eyed sunshine of hindsight. For some, this is an overseas trip; a tragic event; a dream job offer. For me, it was sitting at my family’s ancient desktop computer, aged 11, learning how to use BitTorrent and mining for whatever movies I could get my hands on (while also accidentally installing nine different viruses at the same time). A few clicks later and there it was, the holy grail: 500-days-of-summer-XviD-BRRIP[720p].mp4.
I couldn’t have predicted it on first watching, but this was a film that I would soon turn into my entire personality in the way that teenagers latch onto cultural artefacts to evade existential doom (or maybe that was just me). Released to mild critical fanfare, (500) Days of Summer starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the prototypical softboi and Zooey Deschanel as his doe-eyed, Smiths-loving, blunt-fringed foil. Against the best wishes of the film’s narrator – a gravelly storybook voice pronouncing at the outset that “this is not a love story” – I went ahead and based all of my romantic templates on this incredibly twee affair without a second thought. I couldn’t wait to watch old movies and browse through record stores and fall dramatically and turgidly in love – a tale as old as time (or at least 2009).
When I started dating fantasies onto life itself. In the film, Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel’s first kiss comes after an entire month of will-they-won’t-they equivocating: long stares and meaningful sighs across the office. C and I, too, had been through an agonisingly long gestation period of mutual – though concealed – crushes. Finally, I thought, I’ve found my . (Obviously, as the ‘quirky girl’ I was the Zooey in this relationship.)
