We’ve all had the moment.
‘The moment’, as I’m calling it, for lack of a better (or ruder) word, is the experience of watching the television, enjoying a film or t.v series, appreciating the writing, when suddenly, out of nowhere, it hits you: this woman was definitely written by a man.
It ranges from disastrously obvious -- waking up with makeup on, undergoing intense fight scenes in a completely useless piece of clothing, sadly eating ice cream from the tub with a spoon (why do they always use the spoon wrong?) -- to the more subtle. And most women have acclimated to the obvious ones; in fact, there’s something amusing about watching a female character be butchered by poor male writing. But it becomes more dangerous to the expectations of women and the projection of femininity we show to young girls when we consider the veiled male gaze, the gaze which hides itself behind a guise of ‘quirkiness’ and ‘attainability’: I’m talking about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
It should be said that the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’, or MPDG, was never intended to exist as an intentional stock character in film and television. In fact, the term was coined as part of a criticism of Elizabethtown by the critic Nathan Rabin, who commented that the character of Kirsten Dunst existed “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." And note the key words here -- the MPDG does not really exist. She is, in her entirety, a male construct, designed only to further his plot without having any real depth to her own.
Why, then, does she still find her way into today’s films?
I can attribute this to one main reason. The MPDG is an immensely clever -- and immensely irritating -- creation: she appears autonomous and lucid to an untrained eye. She deviates from the expected male-written characters because she has characteristics that pretend to make her independent and interesting. She is an archetype written by men pretending to be written by women.
In many ways, it’s surprising that the MPDG was able to exist for so long without being uprooted, especially as she has some continually present characteristics that make her little more than a repetition in every film she enters. These characteristics are, but not exhaustively:
She’s not like other girls and quirky -- and yes, the word is always “quirky”, because it makes her unique but not, dare I say it, actually different or odd in any way. This quirkiness leads to feminism, liking books, and allowing male writers to have a weak shield to stand behind under the pretence that she’s ‘empowered’.
She’s white. Always.
She probably has either a) dyed hair, or b) spiky bangs, and wears a style of clothing that could be called ‘eccentric’, but remains classically attractive.
She will take the lead male character on an adventure where she “changes him,” otherwise known as ‘becomes temporarily romantically involved with him so he sees the joy in life again before being brutally removed by the writers as she's served her purpose.’
She doesn’t have a personality. Occasionally she’ll have a single, ‘non-girly’ hobby, such as gaming, but if you try and name her ambitions in life or what her character arc is leading towards, you’ll quickly get stuck.
Having outlined a brief list of MPDG traits, it becomes easy to find them hiding in many of the movies we love. We can see her in Ramona Flower (hint: blue hair), Helena Bonham Carter’s character in Fight Club, Summer from 500 days of Summer, any female character written by John Green, and even Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly. They have no purpose in the story but to empower and attract the male protagonist, and exist, often moodily, on the sidelines. They might even die at the end of the film to teach the man an important lesson; something along the lines of “she could not last forever, but perhaps that was okay. Perhaps it would all be okay,” which makes every female viewer scream internally at the idiocy of discarding what could have been an interesting young woman for a man’s ego.
Without a doubt, the MPDG is fading. I know this because I know that in a world where young women are becoming increasingly aware of the falsities of the media, the MPDG is becoming outdated, offensive, and mostly just annoying. I hope that in reading this, you’ll learn how to spot and avoid them; after all, I briefly tried to base my personality off Alaska Young in year 9, and (spoiler) the book ends with her being hit by a car.
To the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, I say good riddance. In her absence, perhaps we will get the independent female characters that we deserve.
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