The Mapping of 500 Days of Summer: A processual approach to cinematic cartography

Keywords: Cinema, cartography, mapping, tour, Los Angeles
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 12

Abstract

500 Days of Summer is a cult classic, romantic comedy, featuring the manic-pixie-dream-girl Zooey Deschanel as Summer, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tom, the millennial-hipster-hopeless-romantic-aspiring-architect. In this paper, I engage in a cartographic analysis of 500 Days of Summer using de Certeau’s two modes of spatial narration, the map and the tour. With the former, one is seeing and ordering from above, with the later one is narrating the embodied practice of going and doing. I begin by touring what grounds the narrative of this film: the architectonics of downtown LA. The tour is guided by the mapping process of generalization, geocoding, ground truthing, and indexing. Indexing here is done through place across time and through different types of spaces including production, diegetic, and mediated. A cartographic analysis of a film, in contrast, has two foci: it can situate film within an era and place; and it can accentuate and sharpen textual analysis. Here, I show how the film is part of a broader discussion on the millennial era and millennial city as well as how the masculine gaze not only controls and dominates the stage of the mise en scene, but also how that gaze can be grounded to a spatial analysis of the locations of production in LA. Combined, the map and the tour, provides a processual approach to cinematic cartography.