"This place, you know, it's not for you. It is a fucking dream. It is an anecdote you'll bore your fat kids with at Christmas. Oliver's Once-in-a-Lifetime, Hand-job-on-a-hay-bale, golden, big-boy summer... And you'll cling onto it and comb over it and jerk off to it and you’ll wonder how you could ever, ever, ever, ever get it back. But you don't get it back, because your summer's over."
— Farleigh, Saltburn
Summer is a special time. School's out. The sun is out. But it's also a short time. It's the Best Years of Your Life, and a variety of events are going to happen that will change everything.
Congratulations. You just experienced that one summer.
It will be the Nostalgia Filter for the rest of your life. It may ruin your life, but hey, that's the agony and ecstasy of summer.
The summer may involve a Forever Fling, where the character meets The One That Got Away, or The Lost Lenore that proves Unrequited Love Lasts Forever. It will almost certainly involve some combination of Empathic Environment, where the baking sun mirrors the pain, lust, agony, and ecstasy of the characters. A supertrope to Summer Romance, so examples that are purely romantic would be better suited there.
That One Summer is not always a wholly positive experience. In fact, in general, it will sour, usually right at the end, as the clouds build, and the brilliant summer comes to an end just as fall begins. This can lead to Scenery Dissonance or Mood Dissonance as the characters realize Nothing Is the Same Anymore.
Contrast Sucky Summer for when summer is depicted in a negative way.
A hallmark in the Coming of Age Story, though it doesn't necessarily need to involve kids or teens.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- Universe Falls: Like Gravity Falls, the fanfic takes place over a single summer Dipper and Mabel spend with their Grunkle Stan, solving supernatural mysteries in Gravity Falls, Oregon. With the addition of going on Gem-related adventures with their new friend Steven and the Crystal Gems.
Films — Live-Action
- Aftersun is structured around adult Sophie looking back at camcorder footage taken of her last (and likely only) summer vacation in Turkey with her beloved father, Calum, who is not in her adult life. Her memories are colored by this deep love and sadness. It's not said explicitly, but it's heavily implied that Calum died by suicide sometime after this trip, and that this trip was his attempt at saying goodbye to Sophie.
Sophie: I wish we could stay for longer.
Calum: Me too. - Age of Summerhood: It’s not just a random collection of summer stories—this summer matters. Fetus’s whole outlook on life starts to shift. The movie closes with a feeling that something ended—childhood—and something new is beginning.
- Call Me by Your Name: The summer of 1983 becomes this for Elio: the year he was seventeen and had a relationship with Oliver, his father's student. Its effect is spelled out more in the book, as it has a Distant Finale that depicts the lingering effects of their relationship on both Elio and Oliver for twenty years after the effects of 1983. It's downplayed in the film, which features a flash-forward to that Hanukkah and ends with Elio crying after learning that Oliver will marry a woman. Elio and his father both seem aware of the effect it will have on him, though, with Elio's father telling him not to be afraid of the heartbreak he feels as it's proof he has truly lived.
- Dirty Dancing: Takes place in the Catskills in the summer of 1963 where sheltered daddy's girl Frances "Baby" Houseman loses her innocence and has a Summer Romance with Johnny Castle, the older dance instructor who leads a more rough-and-tumble life. As Frances notes in the opening narration:
Frances: That was the summer of 1963 — when everybody called me Baby, and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad.
- Last Summer (1969): The Tagline is "Last summer was too beautiful to forget... and too painful to remember." The summer is the basis for the formation of a deeply intense friendship between Sandy, Peter, Dan, and uncool newcomer Rhoda as they try to teach Rhoda to swim. It culminates in Dan violently raping Rhoda while Sandy and Peter hold her down. The film ends with Rhoda seeming near-catatonic or even dead in the sand.
- My Old Ass: The entire movie is set over Elliott's last summer in her small town before she moves to the city, at which point she meets her older self and falls in love with Chad, who is revealed to be her One True Love, and learns that her family is selling their farm.
- The plot of Now and Then follows four preteen girls during the summer of 1970 fixating on the murder of a 12-year-old boy named Johnny Simms while going through the trials and tribulations of puberty.
- Saltburn: In the script, Oliver's summer at Saltburn is described as "a blur of golden moments". Farleigh calls him out on this trope after Oliver's failed attempt to throw him out by framing him for stealing. It goes sour at the end of summer, on Oliver's birthday, where Felix tells him he'll see him back at Oxford in the new term. Knowing that he'll lose Felix and Saltburn after the summer likely motivates Oliver to kill Felix and Venetia, and then return to Saltburn over a decade later.
- The Sandlot begins with Scotty moving to the San Fernando Valley near the end of the school year as a lonely "egghead". He spends the summer trying to make friends with the Sandlot kids, learning how to play baseball, and getting into "the biggest pickle any of us have ever seen". While adult Scotty narrates that he and the Sandlot kids have a number of great summers together after this, nothing would beat that first summer.
- Summer of '84: A very dark riff. It starts as a summer adventure about a group of boys and Davey's conviction that his next-door neighbor is a serial killer. Most of the movie takes place over relatively lighthearted attempts to find out if Mr. Mackey is indeed the Cape May slayer, and Nicki's relationship with Davey before she's due to go off for college. That summer comes to an end with Woody dead. Mackey is on the run from the police and has ruined the rest of Davey's life by telling him that he will come back for him and kill him, even if it takes him years, and he will never be happy again. Woody's death also ends the friendship between the other boys (represented by the destruction of their treehouse) and their friendship is never repaired. It's clear that this is the end of their youth.
- The Way, Way Back is about a distant, reserved 14-year-old boy named Duncan who's dragged along by his inattentive mom Pam and her jerky new boyfriend Trent to the latter's beach house for the summer. While the vacation is initially immensely unsatisfying due to Trent's bullying and Pam paying far more attention to Trent and his friends over her own son, Duncan finds solace in Susanna, the attractive Girl Next Door similarly stuck with apathetic family members, and Owen, the Manchild owner of a local waterpark called Water Wizz, who offers Duncan a part-time job. As the summer progresses, Duncan's time at the waterpark brings him out of his shell and molds him into a far more assertive and confident young man while also giving him some of his happiest memories yet.
Literature
- Different Seasons: "The Body" and its film adaptation Stand by Me are about the summer weekend when a group of boys went on an adventure to find the body of a young man who'd been killed by a train. It ends with this line:
The Writer/Gordie: I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
- The Go-Between is structured around Leo, now an old man, finding his diary which recounts the summer of 1900, which he has repressed. During it, he becomes the go-between in the burgeoning relationship between the wealthy lady Marian and a farmer she's attracted to, Ted. Throughout the summer, Leo goes from thinking these messages are innocent and practical to realizing their true sexual and romantic content. Ted commits suicide, Marian is forced to marry Hugh (an aristocratic war veteran) despite not loving him, and Leo ultimately concludes that these traumatic events have resulted in him never being able to grow up or form a relationship with a woman, even some seventy-plus years after the events happened.
- Haruhi Suzumiya: "Endless Eight" an infamous story arc, has Haruhi, Kyon, and the rest of the S.O.S. Brigade repeating the same two weeks in August because Haruhi wants an endless summer of fun. By the end of the loop, they had done the same summer vacation for over 500 years worth of time. And Nagato was aware of every iteration.
- Hearts in Atlantis: "Low Men In Yellow Coats" follows Bobby Garfield over a fateful summer in 1960, when he is befriended by the mysterious clairvoyant Ted Brautigan, falls for his friend Carol, begins to learn unpleasant truths about his single mother, and faces a horde of humanoid creatures hunting for Ted. The summer's Bittersweet Ending affects Bobby for years after, causing him to become a juvenile delinquent, but memories of Ted help pull him onto a better path.
- It is based around a group of adults in 1985 who reunite in their hometown of Derry, Maine where a good chunk of the story is about them reminiscing about the summer of 1958 where they came together as True Companions to fight the titular monster for the first time and referring themselves as the Losers Club.
- Joyland: Devin starts working at Joyland in the summer of 1973. Grieving his mother, he becomes embroiled in the lives of Littlest Cancer Patient, Mike, and solving the mystery of the Carny Killer. It's clear how much of an impact the events had on him from the frame story set in 2013.
- Lolita merges this trope with the darkest interpretation of Summer Romance mixed with The First Cut Is the Deepest. Humbert Humbert had a short romance with the tween, then age-appropriate, Annabel Lee. She got sick and died. Nevertheless, their romance has solidified in his mind as the benchmark for all his other relationships, and he explicitly suggests that it's his Freudian Excuse for his pedophilia.
- The Summer I Turned Pretty: The central premise of the first book is that, after years of spending summers with the Fisher brothers and crushing on the older Conrad, it isn't until the summer before her junior year of high school that Belly Conklin is finally noticed by the boys, starting a love triangle that spans the rest of the trilogy.
- We Were Liars: Something vital and extreme happened during Cadence Sinclair's fifteenth summer on her family's private island, but she can't remember what. Whatever did happen left her with crippling migraines and intense depressive symptoms. What that was is the Driving Question of the book.
- Yes, Daddy: Richard invites Jonah to his summer house ("the compound") in upstate New York and convinces him to stay although it means Jonah having to quit his job and give up his lease (leaving him essentially homeless). The summer takes an extremely dark turn when Richard rapes Jonah, Jonah writes about it, and Richard finds his writing. Jonah is then forced to spend the rest of the summer in what is essentially servitude and being repeatedly raped and violently assaulted. It gets enforced since the other guys in the same position reassure Jonah that it's less bad in the winter, as Richard isn't there as often. It ends at the end of the summer. The horrific experience still traumatizes Jonah even years later.
Live-Action TV
- Cruel Summer:
- Season 1 revolves around three summers, but all have a pivotal moment that changes Kate or Jeanette's life (usually both). The earliest is the summer when Kate was kidnapped by Martin (or, in reality, ran away to stay with him after he'd groomed her). The second summer shows Jeanette on top of the world having essentially taken over Kate's life and then lost it all after Kate's accusation. For Kate, it's the summer when she escapes from Martin and he kills himself (or, rather, she kills him in order to flee). The third and final summer is the Kate/Jeanette court case, where Jeanette accuses Kate of libelling her and wins. But then it's revealed that Jeanette really did hear Kate.
- Season 2 has the summer of 1999 as the golden summer of Megan and Isabella's lives, as they become best friends and get pulled between Luke. By Christmas, Isabella and Luke's Summer Romance has burned out, Isabella and Megan's friendship has hit a rough patch, and Luke dies. The second summer (of 2000) is about the two girls reassembling what happened in between.
- Played for both drama and horror in the Netflix series Twee Zomers ("Two Summers") set in the present revolves around a group of friends, involving a dark secret about an incident during the summer of 1992: Mark (who died in a house fire the next night) and Peter were involved in Sofie's gang-rape while she was unconscious as a result of taking substances while being videotaped, causing a fallout between the group.
Music
- Kid Rock's "All Summer Long" chronicles the protagonist as a young adult and his crush spending summer together in 1989.
- The Central Theme of "The Brightest Days" by Origami Angel is the singer reminiscing on the amazing summers he had as a kid and trying to relive the feeling by going on a road trip. However, by the end, he realizes that Nothing Is the Same Anymore and the world has changed too much since then.
- The ABBA song "Our Last Summer" contrasts a sweet summer in Paris with the mundane present, and acknowledges that they were already fearing getting old during that summer.
I still see it all
Walks along the Seine
Laughing in the rain
Our last summer
Memories that remain. - Deanna Carter's "Strawberry Wine" is about a summer fling the singer had with a farm hand working for her grandfather, which involved losing her virginity. She returns to her grandfather's farm, now fallow, to reminisce about it — though she can't decide whether it's the guy she's missing or the person she used to be at 17.
- In "Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels, the main character reminisces about a Summer Romance with an older boy while on vacation when she was a teen with an ice truck passing by the protagonist's house at the beginning and end of the video.
- The Bryan Adams song Summer of '69 tells the fantastical tales of one such year.
- Garth Brooks' "That Summer" is less positive than songs of this genre are typically. The singer recalls one summer he spent as a teenager working on the farm of an older widow, who seduces him and takes his virginity. He remembers the summer with mixed feelings, but what he remembers as an adult is how haunted she was by her loneliness and her desperate need for human connection.
Theatre
- Heathers: The Musical: During "My Dead Gay Son", Kurt's dad is homophobic and speaks ill of his and Ram's dad's supposedly-gay sons. Ram's dad reminds him of something they did "in the summer of '83". Beat. Kurt's dad remarks that it was "one hell of a fishing trip." He then becomes fully supportive of his "dead gay son".
- Suddenly, Last Summer: The story is structured around Catharine's recollection of "last summer", when she was taken traveling by her wealthy Cousin Sebastian, and Sebastian's mother Violet's utopian memories of the previous summers they spent traveling, for which, she says, the other seven months of the year were only a preparation. The film adaptation adds flashbacks to Catharine and Sebastian's trip, which culminates in both versions in an Awful Truth that Violet wants to lobotomize Catherine to hide. Sebastian is a Depraved Homosexual who used Violet and then Catherine to pick up men/boys. He was ultimately torn apart by a group of boys he attempted to prey on.
- Tanz der Vampire: Graf Von Krolock's Eleven O'Clock Number, "Die Unstillbare Gier" ("The Insatiable Greed"), has him wallowing in the misery of his cursed existence. He then starts to remember his previous victims, and particularly recalls the first time he killed someone in his vampire state, during a summer in the year 1617:
Das Korn war golden und der Himmel klar
1617 als es Sommer war
Wir lagen im flüsternden Gras
Ihre Hand auf meiner Haut war zärtlich und warm
Sie ahnte nicht, dass ich verloren bin
Ich glaubte ja daran, dass ich gewinn
Doch an diesem Tag geschah's zum erstenmal
Sie starb in meinem Arm.note
Visual Novels
- Higurashi: When They Cry: The "Groundhog Day" Loop has the main cast repeating the summer of 1983 over endless cycles of friendship, paranoia, and brutal, bloody murder. The cycle ends when the group all learn to believe in and trust one another, and also learn the identity of the person conspiring against the town of Hinamizawa.
Websites
- Played for Horror in SCP Foundation with SCP-1423, "Summer of '76". On its own, it's a mundane Polaroid of a few teenagers believed to have been taken during the summer of 1976, with the phrase "We've had a great year, haven't we?" captioned in handwriting. However, whoever picks it up will begin having their memories warped — those affected begin reminiscing about the last summer vacation they experienced while in high school and for a nostalgic time that likely didn't happen, before gradually deteriorating into crazed possessiveness over the photo and compulsions to attempt to find said locations and individuals from their vacation. This artifact is tied to the "The Class of '76", a Myth Arc surrounding the various anomalies that plagued various schools from the 1940s to 1976, most of which are rooted in the memory-corrupting effects of nostalgia.
Web Videos
- The Nostalgia Critic: Parodied when Critic watches a commercial for Apple Jacksnote and points out how silly it is that the kids labeled their group picture "Apple Jacks '94," sarcastically reminiscing about a summer that was defined by a love for Apple Jacks. He then jokes about the kids in It (1990) writing "Apple Jacks '64" on their group photo at the end of their summer.
Critic: God. I remember that summer. That was the summer of Apple Jacks. The summer when anything was possible. The summer when boys became men and girls became women. That was Apple Jacks. I know. I wrote it on a picture.
Western Animation
- Played for (very dark) laughs in an episode of The Critic when Jay reminisces to Alice about a time his parents accidentally sent him away as a child, while dressed with curly blond locks and wearing a little boy blue pinafore outfit, to a prison camp for the Summer. The memory ends with Jay displaying an Thousand-Yard Stare in the present day and muttering, "In every boy's life, there's a Summer of '72."
