She comes in a variety of colours. Whether she’s an angsty shock of pink hair or Natalie Portman wearing a rucksack, we all know the manic pixie dream girl as a fixture of the 2000-2010’s indie rom-com. And yet a recent shift in film has seemingly marked the end of the trope, with filmmakers throwing out the MPDG in favour of more rounded female characters. Hasthis marked the death of the manic pixie dream girl? And did she need killing off in the first place?
The term was coined in 2007 by Nathan Rabin in his article called ‘The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown’. It was created to describe the unreasonably quirky love interest to the gawky male protagonists that dominated contemporary romantic comedies, classic examples including Sam in Garden State, Claire in Elizabethtown, and Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. “You don’t understand,” our screenwriter cries through the screen at every opportunity, “she’s different from all the other girls! Yes, she’s still white, skinny, button nosed and never past the age of 25, but she has definable character traits.” Like plaits and seismic commitment issues, apparently.
The trope is problematic for several reasons. Why these male protagonists are so drawn to what is essentially a child-woman is beyond meAside from the MPDG’s zaniness and exhausting zest for life, her most defining trait is her immaturity. Fortunately for our stunted male hero, our MPDG stays young, fun and free forever, never challenging him in any serious way or expecting anything in return. What he needed all along was – no, not therapy – but a flighty ball of fun with no depth of character, who can teach him to love life, give his ego a little boost and then disappear forever.
Obviously, in order for this trope to work the MDPG has to be just that – a dream girl who exists only in the imagination of her writers. Because if we’re going to talk about MPDGs, we need to talk about the men who write them. MPDGs are not, and never have been, a reflection of real women at the time they were written, but of male writer directors appealing to their audience of brooding men in want of some validation.
So, where is she now? Thankfully, once the archetype had been coined, filmmakers were eager to drop it. By 2012 we were seeing a more complex iteration in Tiffany from Silver Linings Playbook with more inner life than all of her predecessors put together, thus avoiding tipping into MPDG territory. But even earlier came 2009’s 500 Days of Summer, an often unjustly criticised example of the trope which actually attempts to challenge it – and back in 2004, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind recognized the archetype with Kate Winslet’s rousing speech: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive.” Apparently, MPDG was on her way out even before the 2010’s.
Since then, there has been an onslaught of more progressive female characters in film. Heroines, like Katniss Everdeen, Rey and Black Widow, have proved wildly popular, along with more sensitive character portrayals from directors Greta Gerwig (Little Women, Ladybird) and Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace). Even Bond girls are having a better time in recent years.
But a special mention goes out to the infamous ‘Cool Girl’ monologue from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which effectively rips the MPDG a new one: “You are not dating a woman,” Amy sneers. “You are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them.” Amy Dunne, as ludicrous as she is, was a welcome antithesis.
As always, however, it’s about what sells. If quirky girl-women are what sold twenty years ago, it’s certainly not what sells now. Not with the emergence of deriding terms like “pick-me”, and mockery of women both real and fictional who define themselves by not behaving “like other girls”. This specific brand of misogyny seems to be getting it’s reckoning, thanks to an increasingly media-critical, young audience which filmmakers have to appeal to now.
It is probably for this reason alone that we’ve seen the MPDG vanish off our screens. One may worry that she has evolved into something more insidious, or given way to another problematic archetype altogether – almost certainly, we will see remnants of her in the odd poorly written love interest. But the height of this trope has safely passed. The manic pixie dream girl has, quite fittingly, sprinkled her magic and flitted away.