You've seen her most recently on those annoying Apple Siri commercials (Is THAT rain? she whines). She's on a new sitcom called The New Girl, in which she appears to play mostly herself. You may also remember her from the Cotton commercials last year, or from a little movie called 500 Days of Summer. She is lesser known for her vocal talents with the group She&Him. She's named after the character in a J.D. Salinger novel, Franney & Zooey. She co-founded a website called--wait for it--HelloGiggles. If Zooey Deschanel has always been synonymous with doe-eyed hipster cuteness, now she defines it, it's her brand. And now I think I dislike her almost as much as I dislike Gwyneth Paltrow.
Until very recently, I tolerated her quite well. I have a couple of She&Him records, I liked her in Elf, and I don't find her voice too obnoxious. What changed, you ask? I blame that stupid Siri commercial, which makes her seem dimwitted at the same time that we are supposed to think she's quirky, cool, and pretty. And then I watched 500 Days of Summer last week, and now I see her as crystallized hipster fecal matter.
I really don't know why I put that movie in my queue--as a rule I detest RomComs, and will only watch them if I'm watching afternoon tv on a Saturday and am too bored to change the channel and/or fall asleep. But it arrived and I opened it and watched it quickly so I could send it back right away and get Disc 1 of True Blood Season 4. I could have just sent it back unwatched but that's just not me.
So in this movie she's a chick who doesn't want a relationship but gets with a guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who thinks she is 'the one,' tells him love doesn't exist, and he suffers badly when they break up, especially when he accidentally discovers that she's engaged to some other dude. Oh and they meet working at a greeting card company, writing inspirational messages, and work in an office that features decor from the most colorless greeting cards I've ever seen (think 'Some E-Cards' without the snarky one-liners). And they both dress like they're the perfect Boy and Girl paper dolls from the 1950s. But not the real 1950s, mind you, the 1950s as re-imagined by earnest millennium-age hipsters.
No one works at a greeting card company in the 'sympathy' or 'love' departments--that's just ridiculous. If I work in publishing and no one in-house edits stuff, then I'm fairly certain greeting card companies don't have different departments for emotions. When they first meet on the elevator, he is listening to the fucking Smiths on his headphones. When I was a teenager and obsessed with the Smiths, I had a particular fantasy that I would meet a perfectly-dressed Smiths-loving fanboy in some coffeeshop, and we would both bond over our mutual love of the Smiths. To my teenage mind, if a boy liked the Smiths it was shorthand that meant he liked to read serious books, think deeply about stuff, didn't follow "the crowd," and looked real cute in a cardigan. So are we to read these people and their encounter in similarly facile fashion? I'm sorry, did I accidentally pick from the 'movies for the lobotomized' section of Netflix? Oh wait, I forgot, this is a romantic comedy, they're all like this.
There is voice-over narration (a la Pushing Daisies, except devoid of charm) that sets the story for us, because otherwise it would be hard to keep up with the film's complicated premise. Since the title is 500 days of Summer, we see everything in a nonlinear fashion for no apparent reason--we jump ahead to day 346, back to day 1, forward to day 448, back to 67, and so on. Through it all, there she is, the perfect girl, in a perfectly color-coordinated world that perfectly offsets her penchant for retro clothing and odd tastes in music (Ringo Starr? Really?). When Gordon-Levitt visits her apartment, the decor is like what would happen if Martha Stewart and Grizzly Bear had a baby--the wallpaper is a china blue pattern, there are empty frames with artful things in them, a branch with crane origami--everything is cute, neat, deliberate, cool, original, different, eye-roll inducing. Gordon-Levitt's character says he feels like he's breaking down her walls, getting to know the 'real' Summer--but it turns out he was mistaken. Can a real Summer even exist underneath the thick patina of hipster artifice? Unfortunately, the film doesn't ask that question. Instead she comes off as a cold, selfish bitch who used this really cute, cool guy and then dumped him in favor of some mystery guy we never see, because he wasn't the "one" for her. Oh, and now she believes in love. As if we care.
Barf. It's not really Zooey that I hate, so much as this character she seems to play across different mediums. She's a paper doll girl who is just the right mix of everything. She's pretty but but not ostentatious, accessible yet remote, liberated yet modest, and has time to do things like shop vintage clothing stores, make cool origami shit, listen to the Smiths while maintaining a positive attitude about life, talks to her iPhone about playing hooky and dancing while it rains, and occasionally makes albums with the hippest hipster who ever lived, M. Ward. Oh, and she was married to Ben Gibbard, the emo king and lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie. Fuck you, Zooey Deschanel. You're not real, and you're ruining it for the rest of us.
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