Isis Alexa Alvarez Felix
COM 102
Professor Lindsey Icenogle

500 Days of Summer.
The movie 500 days of summer, can be easily related to what we are seeing on our class, which helps us to understand better the concepts that are shown to us in the book, it has numerous examples of interpersonal communication. The movie begins with Tom and Summer, two coworkers with totally different opinions of what “love” meant to each other; to Tom love is about fate, about finding your soul mate, “the right one”, and to Summer love is a fantasy, a fiction created by the media. When we start the movie we think that is going to be the typical love story that at the end both main characters are going to end up together, and live happily ever after. But we realize by listening to the narrator, that this is not a love story, and he is totally right, the main characters don’t end up together. We can see by the way the movie was made the different stages of interpersonal relationship that Tom and Summer have, some of the concepts are interpersonal attraction, stages of relational development, strategies for ending relationships, etc.
From the very start of the movie we can see the different stages of relational development thanks to the way the movie was made, where you can see that in day 100 everything is happiness, and on day 300 things are starting to come apart. The “coming together” is when Tom meets Summer for the first time at their office, we clearly see that “short-term attraction” is well played on this scene because you can tell that Tom is all over Summer, and yet they haven’t met.
When both main characters meet at the elevator, “experimenting” is a very important role in the movie, because is when they share basic information, and Tom realizes that they have something in common. Their talk continues at the karaoke bar where they exchange more information about themselves, the thoughts about what is love, and at that moment we realize that Summer and Tom have different opinions of what love is. Tom is romantic, and believes in fate; on the other hand Summer doesn’t believe that love exists.
“Intensifying” is well projected in this movie; Tom reveals his secret to Summer that he has feeling for her, but she never actually tells him her feelings about him; Tom tells Summer that his most desire job in the world is to become an architecture, and he is planning on leaving the greeting card company, She does the same, “that wall Summer so often hide behind, a wall of distance and space; that wall was slowly coming down” and tells Tom things that has never told anyone before. He takes this as a sign that the relationship is coming together and serious, but Summer doesn’t feel the same way, as we can remember she doesn’t believe in love. Tom often tells Summer his feelings, his desire to be in a relationship with her, but Summer does not agree with him, to her they are just “friends”.
“Integrating” and “bonding” are not played in the film, because Summer gets to end the relationship she had with Tom, maybe because she was afraid of what the future might bring, or because she wasn’t certain about her feelings for him.
On the movie we see different moments of the relationship, and now we start seeing the “coming apart”. “Differentiating” is very easy to see on their relation, because Tom is feeling a little off, so with the help of his friends and his wise sister, Tom takes the courage and asks Summer what is going on? What are we?, and she just didn’t care about it, she said “We are just friends, I don’t want to be in a relationship”. That absolutely bothered Tom because he needed consistency and a relationship, he wanted to know that he could introduce her as his girlfriend, but that’s not what Summer wanted. This became the absolute problem of the relationship.
Tom started to ignore the problems he had with Summer, because it caused problems and the decided to stop bringing it up. This stage of their relationship is “Circumscribing”.