blink-182, When Harry Met Sally, and Fate Reprised

Maybe I was wrong.  I know, I’m surprised I admitted it too.

A little over a year ago I wrote a short essay titled “blink-182, 500 Days of Summer, and the Shortfalls of Fate.”  At the time I only shared it with close friends and family; in part because I was too lazy to find a way to share it in any public way, but also because it was very, terribly personal.

I’m still proud of that essay.  Even over a year later I still consider it an example of my best work.  In the middle of senior year I pulled it out, blew the dust off, and submitted it for college applications.  But as I was reading and rewriting, I realized maybe that essay didn’t capture the whole story.  The quote I discussed, “Fate fell short this time,” has five words.  I wrote about the first three.

I drew from personal experience to write that essay.  I related “Feeling This” and 500 Days of Summer to my own encounters with love, loss, and fate.  The basis, the ‘meat’ of that essay didn’t come from blink-182’s words and ideas; it came from my own.  And that’s why it was so personal to me.  That’s why it’s still so personal to me.  But a year later, when I was watching When Harry Met Sally with my arm around a then-girlfriend, I couldn’t help but wonder if I missed something.

I certainly missed plenty of lines from the song.  I even ignored forty percent of the original quote.  Purposefully so, as I had no idea how to address it.  It threw a wrench into my entire thesis.

After all, if fate fell short this time, it can be implied there are some times when fate doesn’t fall short.  Sometimes we aren’t Tom Hansen.  Sometimes life isn’t 500 Days of Summer.  Sometimes we’re Harry Burns.  Sometimes life is When Harry Met Sally.

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” suggests perhaps life can be a Hallmark movie.  But it isn’t that simple.  Oscar Wilde forgot that life is far more complex than an hour-and-a-half movie (or even a seven hundred page novel) could hope to scratch the surface of.

For unlike art, life does not exist in a narrative vacuum.  Rather than a single work of art, life is a tapestry woven from many, many works of art.  To perceive it as a single piece of art would defy comprehension.  For life is made up of countless stories, messily bookended with beginnings and endings, colliding off of and into each other every single day.

The quote subtly acknowledges this.  Fate fell short this time.  Some stories may end bittersweetly, but some don’t.

After all, as discussed in my previous essay, fate never really “falls short.”  Fate, if you believe in it, is unchangeable; a higher force that dictates life's every happenstance.  We pin our own expectations onto a construct of “fate;” our expectations of true love, happily ever after, and a white picket fence.  And sometimes fate falls short of our expectation.

And sometimes it’s a good thing.

In the final scene of 500 Days of Summer, after finally moving on from Summer, Tom meets Autumn while waiting for a job interview.  The film leaves the outcome between the two open ended; it closes after Autumn agrees to coffee with Tom.  But it’s the start of the next story.  It’s the next square in the tapestry.

Tom meets Summer while working at a dead-end job designing greeting cards.  He takes little joy in his work until his relationship with Summer - and when she leaves, everyone around him notices his drop in productivity.  Tom meets Autumn while interviewing for a career he spends the whole movie dreaming about.  He doodles architectural diagrams at his old job, he waxes poetic about architecture to Summer, and in their final exchange, she finds him drawing the Los Angeles skyline.

So maybe fate didn’t fall short after all.  Tom’s breakup with Summer helped him realize just how hollow his old job was for him.  Autumn represents the beginning of his next story; in a stroke of heavy-handed symbolism, she is the next season in his life.  The beginning of his dream career path and a potential new love interest.

And blink-182 summed all of this up, the cautious optimism of seasons' change amidst throes of heartbreak, in a two word afterthought:

Fate fell short this time.

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