(500) Days of Locking In

One of the most endearing aspects of revisiting the media I grew up with is the opportunity it gives me to map out the evolution of my own tastes. I love being reminded of what characters, genres, and storylines I sought out growing up, and think about what they tell me about the person I was and the one I am now. It is with this curiosity in mind that I rewatched (500) Days of Summer this month, a movie I first picked up in the new release section of my local library as a teen back in 2011, and have rewatched many times since.

(500) Days of Summer (2009, dir. Marc Webb) follows the story of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a twenty-something aspiring architect stuck in an office job as a greeting card writer who meets, falls in love, and falls out of love with a woman named Summer (Zooey Deschanel). It is important to clarify here that (500) Days of Summer is not a movie about Tom and Summer’s relationship, but a movie about Tom’s relationship to Summer, extending from the first time he sees her, to their first kiss, his infatuation, and his eventual heartbreak–as the omniscient narrator tells us in the opening scene, 'you should know up front, this is not a love story.' Tom believes in love and longs to meet 'The One', Summer doesn’t and refuses to enter a relationship. The story unfolds in a mostly nonlinear structure, playing out as a sequence of interconnected days, starting from Day 290, and making its way back and forth through the 500 days of Tom’s life.

I love (500) Days of Summer—I love its impeccable casting, I love its iconic soundtrack and thoughtful costume design, and though my relationship to the story has evolved over the years, I still find it an utterly charming film. Every time I rewatch it I feel something new—toward the movie, toward the world it was released in, toward the world I am now experiencing it in. The movie had a successful release in theatres worldwide in the summer of 2009, and has since become a cult classic. Unsurprisingly, like many cult classics of the 21st century, it has been celebrated and discoursed in equal measure: Tom is a villain! It’s a movie about the Nice Guy™! Summer did nothing wrong! I'm not here to debate any of these points. No, instead, I’d like to discuss one of my favourite scenes in the whole movie, and one of my all-time favourite narrative devices–what I would call the lock-in montage.

You know the one: the movie's protagonist, tried and tested by the narrative's hurdles, puts their head down and gets! shit! done! Cue the montage of trial and error as they read, study, and generally get it together. This is not quite a training montage, which usually features characters working out or preparing for a big battle. Nor is it a makeover, in which a character is given a brand-new look. My personal bible, tvtropes.org, suggests the 'Hard-Work-Montage', a title I find too literal. I would instead call it the turn-your-life-around montage, or in 2025 terminology, the lock-in montage–referring to a prolonged, hyper-focused approach to work, studies or pursuing one's ambition. Think of Elle Woods reading from her textbooks on the treadmill in Legally Blonde (2001), or the ending to An Education (2009), which, though short, should get a special mention. And few of these montages have left as indelible a mark on my young psyche as the one in (500) Days of Summer.

In the movie’s third act, following the breakdown of his affair with Summer a few months earlier, a still heartbroken Tom unexpectedly reconnects with her at a mutual friend’s wedding, only to promptly discover that she has since become engaged. Crushed, he falls into an even deeper depression, quits his job, and lets the days unfold, motionless. But sometime around Day 456, after a discussion with his younger sister Rachel, Tom emerges from his post-break-up slump determined to become a new person: he will find a job, find a purpose, find a renewed will to live! Tom wipes the slate clean on his life, literally cleaning his chalk paint covered bedroom wall and filling it with a drawing of the Los Angeles skyline. The montage, set to the upbeat Vagabond by Wolfmother, has Tom drawing, reading books at the café, making lists and dropping off his portfolio at architecture firms.

This scene has always felt heartwarming to me—encouraging even—and I have often thought back to it when I too have had to get my shit together, playing Vagabond in my head, imagining myself covering my own wall with photographs and book outlines. It is now clear to me that what I love about the lock-in montage is the opportunity to witness a character take control of their story and push their own narrative arc forward. Maybe it's because I am closer in age to Tom than I ever was, but rewatching the movie this time around, it shocked me to see just how depressed he is. Not only after he finds out Summer is engaged, but even before that—we meet him on Day 1, unfulfilled by his job, longing for the love he believes will save him from his own pain. It is satisfying to see him finally confront himself, face what he truly desires and (hopefully!) builds the resilience he needs to care for himself sustainably.

There is something strange, however, about rewatching my most beloved lock-in montage in 2025—the era of self-optimisation. For the past five months or so, I have been bombarded with a new era of optimisation content, from wellness publications to Instagram reels to YouTube recommendations (I am, thankfully, no longer on TikTok). I am invited to enter my Winter Arc, do a 90-Day Challenge, or a 75 Hard, or a 75 Soft… Social media's newest trends are telling me that I too, can change my life with a single, heavily regimented, time-constrained challenge. In other words, they're saying that I too, am only one lock-in montage away from perfection.

In her now cult 2019 essay Always Be Optimising, writer Jia Tolentino describes the atmosphere of the late 2010s as one of perpetual improvement which, she argues, is a direct reaction to the increasing pressures of the acceleration of capitalism. Speaking specifically to the relationship between gender and athleisure, she explains, 'Figuring out how to 'get better' at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. […] Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.' In an uncontrollable world, optimisation has given us control, a way to regain what little agency we have left from the constantly escalating demands of our modern era. 'But the worse things get,' Tolentino warns, 'the more a person is compelled to optimize,' and in the six years since the publication of the essay, the world has only become more incomprehensible and unpredictable. Starting over, then, becomes the ultimate control. We have moved beyond optimisation—we want rebirth. Finally, you may achieve the life you truly desire, with nothing standing in the way to becoming your 'best self' but the hard work you are willing to put into reinvention. In this fantasy, hard work is the singular key to liberation. All we need is to work on ourselves to improve our lives and never feel out of control again. And because decades of neoliberal politics have conditioned us to believe that hard work is virtuous and always pays off, then, if we fail, we simply did not try hard enough. 

In this social media climate, the (500) Days of Summer lock-in montage was a refreshing alternative to the self-optimisation craze the algorithm has targeted me with. The work of changing your life is repetitive and often thankless; it involves a lot of failure, crying, and staring at the wall, frozen with anxiety. This is something the (500) Days of Summer montage manages, to some extent, to depict. Tom both figuratively and physically faces the wall before drawing over it. We see him crossing out firm after firm off his list as he gets rejected from jobs. There is frustration and sadness, as much as there is hope and determination. And in the end, whether the hard work we see Tom put in will truly change his life in a tangible way is left open to interpretation. We don’t know if this final job interview will go well, or if his date with Autumn, the other interviewee he asks out before going in, will go anywhere. The point here is progress not perfection I guess: at least he tried to figure out what he wants for himself, beyond a romantic partner, and he is trying to find fulfilment in his life - and you know what, that becomes more comforting to me as a viewer with every rewatch.

Work cited:

Tolentino, Jia, Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-delusion. Random House, 2019.

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