With this year's onslaught of 20
something media deigned “quirky girls” on television, the Manic
Pixie Dream Girl is back in the limelight, sowing more hatred than
ever before. “So what is a
Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, you might ask, “and why should I care?”
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin in 2007 as a response to Kirsten Dunst's character in Eizabethtown,
refers to a narrative trope wherein a bubbly female characters “exists solely in the fevered
imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodily soulful
young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
Feminists immediately took to this theory, critiquing the MPDG as a
blatantly problematic narrative tool that serves merely to provide a heightened self-awareness and enjoyment of life. (If you're like me
and dig feminism and watching far too many movies, check out this video which does a fantastic job of exposing how much this trope sucks) Gross, right? The trope is undeniably at work in a whole
slew of films wherein women are relegated to quirky stock characters
with little substance in male centric films. Since the publication of
Rabin's article, the likes of Annie Hall, Holly Golightly, and Kate
Hudson's Penny Lane have all been identified as MPDGs. Even a handful
of Katharine Hepburn characters from her stint in a series of
unforgettable 1930's screwball comedies have been placed in MPDG territory. Let's all just take a moment to meditate on that:
Katharine
Hepburn
functioning as a one-dimensional muse deterring a
male counterpart's existential crisis? She is rolling in her grave. Rolling. The term has been broadly applied to a number of
characters, some with questionable legitimacy. The term itself seems
largely arbitrary and easily manipulated, and at times seems to be a
way to delegitimize some awesome lady characters.
So the
Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope is problematic, if not sometimes a tad
misused. Awesome, I'm glad can now critically approach this kind of
character and assess how sexism may be functioning in this film I'm
watching! My Women's Studies professor would be proud! And now that
this trope has been voiced, maybe Hollywood will start serving up
some more complex lady characters. Well, not exactly. Instead, the manic pixie has been adopted into our cultural vernacular, becoming a
blanket term for 20-somethings with a penchant for indie singer-songwriters, Wes Anderson films, and shopping at Goodwill. NaturalDiastronaut's recent video does
a pretty good job of depicting this, and how MPDG has become a
reductive jab directed at real women, not just characters in films.
The video itself operates on some seriously sexist bullshit. (Thank
god the caring boyfriends of these MPDG are rehabilitating their
ridiculous lifestyle choices! I guess that's what happens once the
MPDG sprinkles her magic fairy dust and cures her broody boyfriend).
Just a quick gander through the comments on the video works as a
pretty comprehensive example of the visceral reaction to the Manic Pixie. A similar distaste is featured in countless online articles slamming the so-called manic pixie queen Zooey Deschanel,
but rather than calling for more developed representations of women
in media, it has essentially become an insult thrown at quirky female
characters and real women. No, seriously.
And
here lies the problem. By definition, the MPDG describes a deeply
sexist narrative trope, not some girl at your local coffee
shop rockin' Bettie Page bangs. Women, regardless of how they dress,
what music they sing in the shower, or how they choose to adorn their
bodies, are not narrative tropes. Nor should their lives or their
choices be reduced to a stock secondary character in a shoddily
written film. Real women are not one-dimensional muses inspiring
broody Zac Braff types. So next time you feel the urge to slam some
girl on the street as a manic pixie, consider what's coming out of
your mouth. So okay, you hate vintage dresses, Zooey Deschanel's bangs,
and devotees of French New Wave cinema, that's cool, but let's stop
calling each other manic pixies and participating in super
unproductive girl-on-girl hate. I's just another excuse
for the population as a whole to participate in sexist rhetoric. As
a girl known to rock my Grandma's hand-me-downs and an extensive
indie folk playlist routinely placed on repeat, maybe I'm a little
sensitive, but I refuse to be categorized as a trope, and I refuse to
see it done to other women. I am not the manic pixie in anyone's
film, I am not here to inspire your broody protagonist, and I will
not actively participate in reducing other women's lives to a
caricature. I'm here to live my life the way I choose to live it, and
sometimes that involves jamming out to The Smiths, but I'm not here to be anyone's muse but my own.
