Manic Pixie Dream Girls

I've been sitting on this piece for ages because I'm not happy with it (it's too negative and not very articulate about alternatives), but it's dating so fast now I figured I might as well publish it. I'd love to hear people's thoughts. 

Manic Pixie Dream Girls (MPDGs) remain a popular archetype owing to the popularity of Zoe Deschanel and a recent film, Ruby Sparks, which makes liberal use of the character type. I’d like to take a moment to investigate the MPDG concept, as it annoys me a great deal, but perhaps not for the conventional reasons.

First, an attempt at definition, from tvtropes.org: ‘she’s stunningly attractive, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including child-like playfulness and a tendency towards petty crime), often with a touch of wild hair dye’. I would add a few things, like spontaneous, happy-go-lucky and unpredictable. MPDGs also tend to have a rather specific dress code that I would describe as retro-feminine or op-shop chic. The most famous MPDGs are Kirsten Dunst in ‘Elizabethtown’, Zoe Deschanel in ‘500 days of Summer’ and now ‘The New Girl’, and Natalie Portman in ‘Garden State’. There are others. For a satirical take on the trope, see here.  

A bit of history from wikipedia: ‘Film critic Nathan Rabin, who coined the term after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), describes the MPDG as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”. MPDGs are said to help their men without pursuing their own happiness, and as such characters never grow up, thus their men never grow up’.

I will return to the point about never growing up a little later. First I’d like to take a quick tour through the feminist reaction to the MPDG archetype. Following on from Rabin’s comments the initial response to MPDGs from the feminist collective was negative. By way of extreme example, see here. Most commentators at this time were offended by the notion that a female character type should exist whose sole purpose is to drag the male protagonist out of his stupor.

I am sympathetic to this line of criticism, but at the same time, I feel that male writers are entitled to express their fantasy archetypes. That’s not something we should be policing. I certainly think it is disappointing that the fantasy of supposedly sensitive, creatively inclined men in contemporary society is the MPDG, that’s the main thrust of this piece, but leaving that to one side, if something like this is manifesting in the unconscious mind of someone who fancies themself an artist, they ought to write about it. Women are entitled to produce Edward Cullen, Captain Jack Sparrow, Television’s Mark Darcy, Chuck from gossip girl and all the other ludicrously unrealistic and female oriented male archetypes out there, and men are entitled to produce MPDGs.

The feminist narrative took a turn around the release of Ruby Sparks, which is an MPDG twist on the myth of Pygmalion—the sculptor who falls in love with his work and brings it to life. In it a sensitive, brooding young man brings to life his MPDG literary creation. Zoe Kazan, who wrote, directs and stars as Ruby Sparks publicly expressed a distaste for the term MPDG, saying that it was sexist. She argued that it marginalised a legitimate female character type, one that is increasingly present in real life. Her comments were picked up and elaborated in an interesting article on Daily Life arguing against the brainless criticism of Manic Pixie dream girls (MPDGs).

I found the piece compelling, but for me, it misses the point of why MPDGs are mega-lame. Namely, most MPDGs are shallow and weak, and the popularity of the archetype says a lot about how far men have come in terms of what they look for in women, and what women aspire to be. I agree with the author’s claim that using the term MPDG derisively excessively devalues a legitimate character type, and I also agree that there are some real MPDGs out there. At the very least, there are stacks of indie girls trying to be MPDGs with varying degrees of success. What I want to talk about is the popularity of MPDGs, among men and women, as representations of vivacious, meaningful people despite the fact that they are none of these things.

MPDGs are superficial. They are an archetype of the indie generation who have grown up too comfortably in existentially impoverished cultures. Perhaps they should be celebrated as the first awkward steps of these (anglosphere) cultures towards a more rigorous engagement with life post materialism, but their complexity and significance should not be overstated. MPDGs are only slightly removed from the utter vacuousness of mainstream western culture. The reason why you want to throw something at the TV is not because MPDGs are too 'cutesy', but because many are just so utterly hollow, insipid and fake.

As quoted above, Rabin says the MPDG ‘embraces life and its infinite mysteries and adventures’. Or at least, their creators think they do. Actually MPDGs embrace the surface of life. For example, they like to go dancing in the rain. What is so especially meaningful or otherwise deep about dancing in the rain? I understand that nature is beautiful, but rain is also cold and when a drop gets in your eyes it really sucks. In any case, what insight does one gain by dancing in the rain? What is memorable about it? What is unique about it? I understand the idea that mystery and adventure are a source of quality living, but I fail to see how dancing in the rain, and other the things MPDGs do, immerses you in mystery and adventure. Such behaviour actually strikes me as rather staid. Perhaps MPDGs do marvel at the infinite mystery of the world, but they never try to investigate it, or dig down into it. They’re too overwhelmed by the surface sensations.

Another example that I find instructive is the now infamous penis scene from 500 Days of Summer, which is, in many ways, the archetypal MPDG moment. In it, Deschanel’s character Summer plays ‘the penis game’ with her depressed boyfriend. It involves yelling penis loudly in a public park. How liberating. Obviously the penis game is meant to free the participants from the straightjacket of social norms, but it does so in a totally superficial way. The MPDG answer to the difficult process of deciding what you think is right and wrong and why is to yell penis. This is not 'being uninhibited', it is trivialising morality. 

The penis game leads us to the heart of the problem. The allegory of the MPDG is that all a sensitive, complex young man trying to make sense of the world needs is someone to make him be less serious. The male characters in MPDG works are thoughtful and typically depressed. Life strikes them as maybe pointless, and they feel themselves grasping for something real. They are a manifestation of the Western world's realisation that the world is ambiguous in its meaning, materialism is hollow and life is damn hard. Along comes the MPDG, not as something real, not as something to help them come to terms with these difficulties issues, but instead to convince them that random superficial acts like dancing in the rain or listening to the Smiths are perfectly adequate for getting through life. They encourage the protagonist to avoid answering their questions and focus on simple good feels instead. This is why such men ‘never grow up’. What such men need is someone who will challenge them to become pregnant with their thoughts instead of running from them to a life of flippant gestures. They need someone to expose them to more insightful material and more articulate thoughts, someone who encourages them to read more books, watch more films and express themselves more often and with greater vigour. 

The MPDG is another manifestation of our longstanding conflation of happiness and a good life, and our understanding of happiness as tranquillity. The male protagonist in these pieces is guilty of saying ‘I just want to be happy’ and understanding happiness as simply a state where he is free of his weighty feelings. The MPDG brings about this state, but it is empty. Sustained happiness requires projects and endeavours. It requires one to be mystified by an aspect of life and to seek to unravel that mystery, not giggle at its complexity and then go op-shopping. I can totally understand that a depressed author would see the antithesis of depression as happiness, but I think we do ourselves a great disservice when we conceive of happiness in this context as weightlessness. As Frankl noted, the human spirit requires a certain tension, a drive to life. The MPDG is the antithesis of this—it is essentially a lazy archetype. The MPDG stands in for the pleasant life, not the intense life. It represents wit, mirth, pranks and cuteness, all fine things, but not enough to make a life that wakes us up in the morning. Not the kind of things that makes us ‘care’ for life.  

So the problem with the MPDG, at least for me, is not about whether they represent progress in feminism or regression, but that they are just plain rubbish. I find it deeply ironic that the indie generation’s archetypal awesome chick who is ‘just so amazing’ is defined by pretending to be thoughtful, sensitive and substantial while actually being safe, superficial and materialist. That is our generation in a nutshell. As we move into the new millennium and towards a better balance between the sexes we need stronger, richer, more complex female role models (and male ones). Women need to want more from men that Mr Darcy, and men need to want more than Ruby Sparks. We can’t keep running from the challenge of life and pretending that being chirpy or rich is enough to fill the void. Life’s infinite mysteries and adventurers very much ought to be embraced, but that requires an openness to suffering, struggle, confusion and occasional misery, because these things are the essence of meaningful endeavour, and the inevitable price of life’s most glorious highs.