I Like Movies With Bad Endings

So in my last post I wrote (if you haven’t read it) I briefly mention the movie 500 Days of Summer. And if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s essentially a “failed romance” in that the two main characters don’t end up falling in love, but rather, drift apart and, ultimately, move on.

Honestly, from an initial opinion, the idea sounds like a pretty underwhelming movie plot. Who wants to watch a movie where the main characters don’t do any spectacular or overcome any odds?

Isn’t that what we watch movies for? To escape our boring lives and immerse ourselves into these fictional characters and their stories?

So if that’s the case, why would we want to watch anything that was so….well….realistic?

Not to mention that it’s a love movie, as well. Why would we want to watch a love movie that reminds us of how awful and sad our own love lives can be at times?

Ironically enough, the movie 500 days of Summer actually answers that very question.

We’re tired of seeing “perfect” everywhere. Every movie we watch, book we read, YouTube short video that’s “trending” (and don’t get me started with Facebook and Instagram), but everything we seem to watch, it’s perfect.

Everything always seems to work out. There’s no sad bitter endings, and even if there are, they either a) don’t last long or b) it’s so tragic and over the top it too becomes even still, unrealistic.

Classic example: Romeo and Juliet.

Be honest, how many of you can genuinely raise their hand and say that the ending to their love story was because your partner died and/or killed her/him self?

And I mean that in the best of ways though. I mean it in that life sucks sometimes, and it can really knock you down, but for most of us, it’s not that bad.

And we know this. We absolutely know this.

We know, deep down, that although some shit happened to us, it really wasn’t that bad. We got through it, or, if you’re still fighting on, most of us realize we will get through what ever it is.

But here’s what I’m trying to say here. In the movie 500 days of Summer, at the very end when the boy sits down next to the girl. When it’s all over, and he’s ready to take one last leap of faith, hoping, praying that she leaves her husband and takes him back, she doesn’t. She simply stands up and leaves.

And I would have been just fine if they would have cut it right there; roll the credits.

Instead, they were still trying to play on this idea that “there can still be a happy ending“, which is fine and all, but the thing is, life doesn’t always get the “happy ending” when we want it most.

I’m not gonna lie, at that point in the movie, when we watched how broken this man was without this girl. How sad, depressed, and torn he was, all I wanted to see was for something to go right for him. But I would have liked it much more if they didn’t give us that satisfaction.

We all want someone to “rescue” us when we’re at our darkest moments in our lives. When we feel helpless and alone, as if there was no one to turn to, we want that person, “the one” to find us, to complete us. But, often times, we don’t find him or her. We find more wasted relationships, wasted energy spent giving your heart over to someone, and in the end, all we did was waste our time.

And, I do think most of us end up making this crucial realization at some point in our lives: We need to start focusing on ourselves and stop expecting things to always have a happy ending.

I’m not saying to be skeptical about every future relationship you get in, or even refuse to get in, maybe because you think that it’s just going to end badly. No, I’m saying that unlike that movie you watched, when things don’t work out, sometimes it’s just because things don’t work out.

I wish more movies would take this approach, and it’s not that I necessarily like seeing things “not work out”, but more so, sometimes it’s good to know…

We’re all human too, and we’re not perfect, and sometimes….things don’t go our way, even if we really want them to.

thanks for reading,

cory