blink-182, 500 Days of Summer, and the Shortfalls of Fate

I was just watching the indie not-so-rom com hit 500 Days of Summer when blink-182’s 2003 single “Feeling This” lodged itself into my head. And I found some striking parallels between the two; both are about love and heartbreak, both can be read as tragic or happy, and both have the tone of a disillusioned hopeless romantic.

“Feeling This'' is surface-level sweet. It’s romantic enough to go on your girlfriend’s playlist and she’ll smile, but the heart of the song is rather sad. Tom DeLonge’s catchy guitar hooks and passion-driven verses spread a thin veneer over Mark Hoppus’s melodramatic musings of to have loved and lost. While DeLonge shouts simple, candid lines such as “Show me the way to bed,” Hoppus employs a certain emotional subtlety that had been previously lacking in blink’s work.

My favorite line in the song is the beginning of the chorus, “Fate fell short this time.” At first glance this sounds nice enough, just a bit of poetry in a pop punk song. But it’s certainly not special enough to warrant entire paragraphs of dissection.

In fact, many people maintain this line means nothing. It’s just another pseudo-poetic platitude the boys in blink cooked up. And that may very well be the case. But like any good English teacher, I will attempt to extract meaning the author may or may not have intended and pass it off as the genius of the original writer.

However, at second glance “Fate fell short” makes no sense at all. Fate, by definition, cannot fall short. Fate was written long before we were born and will keep guiding life long after we die. It’s our mortal expectations that fall short of fate, not the other way around.

But fate, to be frank, does not exist. It’s a human construct invented to explain the randomness of the world around us. And if we cannot control chaos ourselves, there certainly must be some higher force that can and does control it.

And so, we puny mortals often think of fate as a guarantee for a happy ending. We get the notion in our minds from fairy tales and Hallmark movies that love is somehow ‘meant to be.’ That life or fate owes us a happy ending, when really we aren’t owed anything by anyone, much less fate if it exists.

Hoppus was less referring to fate itself as to the idea of fate. That expectation of ‘happily ever after’ has wormed itself into our collective subconscious when real life simply doesn’t live up to the fantasy. Hearts get broken, people move on, and Tom Hansen loses Summer.

Reality, or actual fate if you believe in it, often falls short of our expectations of fate. The fact of the matter is, many of us don’t get our Hallmark movie ending; we get our 500 Days of Summer ending. And blink-182 summed all of that up in five words;

Fate fell short this time.

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