You hate her. You want to be her. Your ex-boyfriend is dating her. She’s the girl who goes bra-less and chain-smokes immaculately on the patio of every bar. She bikes to her job at a vintage clothing store/record shop/unattended cafe in a sky blue mini dress, exposing her ridiculous, perfect tattoos of Chinese characters and aquatic starfish. She wants to go to back to school, or become a installation artist, or move to Scotland, but maybe she’ll just professionally model or something. And as much as you wish for the charm and charisma she possesses, you will never be anyone’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Dating back to a 2007 Onion article written by head writer Nathan Rabin after the unfortunate viewing of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, the MPDG is defined as a female cinematic archetype meant “to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (In return, Feminist blog Jezebel called them “the scourge of modern cinema.”)
Think of Kirsten Dunst’s gleeful Southern stewardess in Elizabethtown, making countrified mixtapes and snapping imaginary stills of Orlando Bloom as he walks away. Think of Natalie Portman cradling Zach Braff in an empty Jacuzzi in Garden State, catching his very first tear in a paper dixie cup. Or for a more recent example, think of Zooey Deschanel’s blissful cad in the recent (500) Days Of Summer (out on DVD next week) — a film that plays like porn for bangs-and-blue-eyes fetishists. Think of Audrey Hepburn strumming “Moon River” mournfully on an acoustic guitar, Diane Keaton’s “lah di dah” in Annie Hall, Katherine Hepburn singing to a snow leopard in Bringing Up Baby and Winona Ryder’s smeared eyeliner — not to mention every charming/crazy girl you’ve met in an English lit tutorial, co-operative housing unit or dive-bar bathroom.
All vaguely artistic, politically sensitive over-sharers, they lure in lost boys like the humane society for doomed relationships. But it’s their very irrationality that makes them irresistible. For the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, men (and women) can’t help but lose themselves in their sexy, aimless lifestyle. And compared to girls like them — with their boundless empathy, their emotional vulnerability, their vintage-purse collection — girls like us are totally screwed.
“I think that every male screenwriter wants to be saved,” admits Rabin, who’s dated his share of MPDGs who spent their days flying kites and dressing up like pirates while he went off to work.
“That’s [the male's] fantasy — that they will leave their cold, grey existence and one day meet this magical woman and their life will be transformed. In a way, the fantasy is about not taking responsibility for your actions. The men in these movies are forces of stasis, powered by inertia. It’s the idea of wanting your life to change, but not wanting to take responsibility for it, that makes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl a very appealing fantasy.”
But there’s a thin line between adorable anarchist bakery owner (Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger Than Fiction) and bat-shit crazy soul destroyer (Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). My frustrations with the cinematic archetype reflect my jealously (naturally) of the girls I know that embody it. Girls who wear leggings as pants and look stylishly disheveled instead of homeless and/or fat. Girl who tongue-kiss other girls on the floor of dance parties. Girls who should go to therapy but are too busy being oblivious. Being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl means willfully destroying your ego for love. Instead of walking around festering with the static-cling-hatred of the universe, they are a source of pure joy and light. The very definition of the term means that men will dream of you — and you will understand this when you watch Zooey Deschanel eat pancakes.
They are the free spirits, the completely guileless and redemption for the man who doesn’t know who he is, but definitely understands that he wants… something. Manic Pixie Dream Girls kiss you in the rain, help you quit your demanding job (thereby unlocking your secret passion) and inspire you to dump your bitch-ass girlfriend (always played by Parker Posey or Selma Blair). By practice, she is a woman who helps you deal with your shit as effervescently as a champagne bubble and — better yet! — expects absolutely nothing in return. In a relationship, MPDGs have no needs, no issues, drifting from man to man as sheer vessels of pleasure, joy and casual sex. What else could a dude embroiled in a quarter-life crisis want?
“You changed my life,” confesses Zach Braff’s sad-sack Garden State character by the film’s conclusion (typically, in an airport, minutes before boarding a plane). “I wasn’t living before but you taught me how to live.” Rabin admits there are very few films about rational romances that involve women who voice their concerns, desires and needs in a relationship: “There’s something very underrated about sane, functional women who act their age and do not try to be spirits of pure light and joy.”
I started becoming obsessed with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl soon after watching (500) Days of Summer. After the doomed affair between Deschanel’s casual cad and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s love struck paramour played itself out — the first “I love The Smiths too!” chance meeting in an elevator, a visit to Deschanel’s Anthropologie-styled studio apartment, the couple’s fateful meeting on a bench to discuss the lessons they learned after parting — I left the multiplex and went to Shopper’s Drug Mart for MPDG accessories. I bought red lip-gloss and sparkly hairpins and blue eye shadow. I took up the vocation of man-redeemer. But unlike Natalie Portman’s favourite band, The Shins, I was incapable of changing anyone’s life. Instead, I could only make theirs worse.
Local writer Stacey May Fowles understands the MPDG conundrum, an archetype she says contributes to a “continuing identity crisis for women.” In Fowles’ 2008 novel Fear of Fighting, the recently rejected Marnie wages war with her own MPDG in the form of Fiona, a vintage-heeled redheaded minx who hooks up with Marnie’s ex in the Horseshoe Tavern bathroom. It’s a long road to accepting that underneath Fiona’s hipster goddess lies a very sad and damaged person — maybe the same person as Marnie herself.
“It’s funny,” says Fowles, “because I do think that girl [Fiona] is actually a small part of everyone. She’s not real, she doesn’t exist. But there are parts of ourselves where we want to be responsible and we want to have full-time jobs and we want to make the right decisions. And then there’s a part of us that wants to make out in a bed in IKEA [this scene happens in (500) Days Of Summer, the ultimate impoverished college-grad fantasy]. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is the ‘going-through-a-phase-girl.’ And she’s always been a figment of the collective female imagination.”
Part of my MPDG fantasy (and associated derision) relates to my confused feelings about feminism. The sad truth of sexual liberation is that you have feel liberated. My judgmental/never-getting-laid self believes that the girl who acts freely with her heart and vagina can’t possibly be free because she doesn’t understand the ramifications that come with sex. With relationships comes need, and intimacy, and loss. With a character like Deschanel’s Summer, a girl so impervious to hurt that she deems herself the Sid to her dude’s Nancy, sex is nothing but a cultural currency. Unlike me, the love interests of Elizabethtown and Garden State never have to question their own desirability. They simply are so goddamn adorable that their one-note characterizations (she wears a beret! She owns a hamster!) are enough. I wish I could give myself the allowance to be so contrived.
Naturally, things got only worse after reading writer Sadie Stein’s essay on the “Amazing Girl” — an adoring muse that dates as far back as the figure in Johannes Vermeer’s 1662 painting “Young Woman With a Water Pitcher” (a.k.a. the first Zooey Deschanel). Writes Stein:
"Normal women cannot compete with Amazing Girls. We lack the mystique, the ready sympathy, the soul. They're twice as threatening as any bombshell, for they promise great depth. Supportive and uncritical in a way no one with any judgment can be, they also offer a famed flexibility towards traditional commitment, and the promise of utter sexual abandon."
Well, shit. Stein had her own dealings with an Amazing Girl named Anne Weinstock, the boho babe in her high school who had been turning heads since seventh grade. For us “normal girls” (“sharp, mean, opinionated, decidedly lacking in mystery”), Amazing Girls are our Kryptonite, though they have issues of their own. Amazing Girls hope and allure with such a big full heart that they will always be disappointed in their admirers. (See: Kate Hudson’s incandescent groupie getting traded for a case of Heineken in Almost Famous.) As the Stone Roses sang, they just wanna be adored.
Yet Rabin says the gender stereotypes that befall post-’90s mopester cinema are one of necessity.
“Men want to be the listless protagonist who needs a woman to teach them how to be human,” he says. “And for men, I would advise to ‘be your own manic pixie dream girl.’ Free free to prance around and wear silly hats and fly kites all day. And while schizophrenia might ensue, at least you’ll be colourful.”
As for women, Fowles says the first step in confronting the MPDG is realizing, like all the scary creatures hiding under your bed, that she doesn’t exist.
“As long as you understand that this is entertainment, it’s OK to watch these movies, step back and think, ‘Why do we need these characters?’ I have no problem with escapism. I just have a problem with people watching these films and believing that the stereotypes are real.”
I believe in the MPDG because, like all cinema-goers, I am an easily impressionable human being who thinks that the pictures on the screen are real. The harsh truth of indie-mixtape cinema like Garden State is that terrified men and amazing girls are meant for each other. Everyone wants to be able to give and receive love, no matter how unready or undeserving they think they might be — and they want to do it minutes to boarding a flight, your name called over the airline speaker as your previously clueless boyfriend tells all those flying to Wichita that he’s made the “biggest mistake of his life.” (See Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming for a nice reversal of this fantasy — the man too traumatized to bring his passport.)
I hate it when the films marketed to my generation actually make an impact on me. MPDG love stories fetishize the agency of youth: male paralysis and female understanding. As the Amazing Girl guides the depressed dude from boy to manhood (usually through a winning combination of shower sex, Ryan Adams singles and peppy monologues), she teaches him how to grow the fuck up, though such instruction is certainly at the expense of her own development. For all the lovely quirks of Deschanel’s Summer (Ringo is her favourite Beatle! She accessorizes with colour-coordinating ribbons!), there’s no hint at an inner life. Due to male screenwriters’ fear of women, says Rabin, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl embodies infatuation but lacks a soul. Is it no wonder that the chief lines of dialogue for all French New Wave ingénues are “Je t’aime” and “Je ne sais pas”?
For now, I’m waiting for my Manic Pixie Dream Guy (Lloyd Dobbler?), a man no doubt reeling from the loss of a Juniper or Fawn or Audrina, the ex who decoupaged news clippings onto smashed television sets but totally changed his life. Though a romance of mixtapes, all-night phone conversations and post-coital brunching is nicely cinematic, real-life love is more complicated than the likes of Cameron Crowe allow for. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl fights for a man whose problems could be easily solved with Prozac, paying no mind to the fallout. She wins because her intuition trumps your rationality. She wins because she’s really, really pretty and really, really understanding. And she wins because she’s played by Zooey Deschanel.
So I beg of you Janeane Garafolo, call your agent, get Diablo Cody on the phone and star in a film way better than The Truth About Cats And Dogs. The situation might be dire, but when it comes to the anti-Manic Pixie Dream Girl, you might be our only hope.