She is ethereal and girlish, with societal standards falling off her like the rain when she’s out puddle-jumping. Her quirky and offbeat behavior brings out the best both in people and in life. If she has any flaws, they only make her more endearing. She is the problematic and oh-so-cute Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG).
Film critic Nathan Rabin, who first coined the term, defined Manic Pixie Dream Girls as women who exist “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
She is a narrative device who stops the arrested development of the downtrodden and repressed male protagonist and convinces him to live a little.
The gendered implications of this are severe. The MPDG premise is more than just “quirky girl jumps into man’s life and makes it more magical”; it’s a timeworn plot tactic that idealizes a woman until she loses her human side, making her merely a tool.
While Rabin originally coined the term to describe Kirsten Dunst’s unbelievably chipper flight attendant in “Elizabethtown,” the trope has since been retroactively applied to tons of characters: Sam in “Garden State,” Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Allison in “Yes Man,” Susan Vance in “Bringing Up Baby,” and many more, depending on your definition.
In all these films we see women reduced to a catalyst for men’s changes rather than a personality in her own right — akin to the femme fatale of the noir era, but with laughs and a happy ending.
But the key word is “dream.” She’s not a real representation of a woman or romantic partner.
Ironically, many of these movies are aimed at a female audience, normally through a “romantic comedy” premise. But these movies are typically male-centric, only exploring the male side of the relationship in any depth. The consequence is that the audience identifies with the male protagonist, reinforcing and reestablishing the submissive female stereotype.
On the other side of this relationship we get equally uninspired characters in the leading men. They are bland, purposeless, and (often) depressed men, whose lives are only “completed” once they start dating an MPDG. Their relationships become the ultimate key to happiness in their lives, in which things only have meaning if they have girls on their arms.
“He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt said of his character in “(500) Days of Summer.” “A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.”
The archetype defines women by the ideas and images in the minds of others. She has no ups or downs, she never deals with the scary and more actual issues that real girls deal with; she is the idea of an ideal woman, the quirk without the context.
The people and relationships presented in these films are unsustainable, and the brief window captured in their life neglects to point this out. Recently there has been a push in films like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “(500) Days of Summer,” and “Ruby Sparks” with meta-exploration that exposes the essentially flawed trope.
Although similarly from the male perspective, they explore how one-sided the presentation of relationships in film can be. In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Joel states he still believed Clem would save his life, even though she specifically said, “Too many guys think I’m a concept or I’m going to complete them, or I’m going to make them alive.”
By the end of the film both Clem and Joel have grown as characters who now better accept each other, flaws and all. “Ruby Sparks” and “(500) Days of Summer” also show us how destructive and inconsiderate these relationships can become if both partners are portrayed two-dimensionally. No real person is as basic as the ones we find dancing through MPDG plot lines.
These unrealistic characters, in turn, create unreal standards for anyone who thinks that the perfect mate will fix your problems that easily. If life really does imitate art, then writers need to stop dreaming.
[illustration credit: Kay Kim]
Pulp Diction 