The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Throughout the Years
By: Arushi Rajesh
Tags: Tropes, Culture, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Film History, Film

In 2007, A.V. Club film critic Nathan Rabin wrote an article reviewing the movie Elizabethtown, wherein he described Kirsten Dunst’s character as a “manic pixie dream girl”, a term he coined for a woman who “exists solely in the fevered imagination of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”. It meant to portray a female character who was created with the sole intention of furthering the character development of her male counterpart.

The main features of a manic pixie dream girl include being whimsical and substantially quirky but only to a likeable amount. However, a salient feature of a manic pixie dream girl that seems to go over people’s heads is the fact that we never really find out much about them. We never delve into them as a person and into their characteristics, aside from the quirks that make them likeable in the eyes of the male protagonist.

In Elizabethtown, the female protagonist, Claire, is a happy-go-lucky air hostess whose sole purpose is to constantly entice Drew, the male protagonist. She seems to have no problems of her own and her personality appears significant only towards the end when Drew fulfils his wishes. Although the phrase was only coined in 2007, many examples of the trope have existed if we look back on film history.

Elizabethtown

Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is often cited as the “pioneer” for the trope. In fact, she had often taken roles in films that could be considered manic pixie dream girls. However, at that point in the film industry, being part of the trope seemed to be a default characteristic of female characters and no one really cared to question it. Clara Bow in the 1927 movie, It, is the first known manic pixie dream girl in film history, but actresses like Katherine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn truly spearheaded the concept.

Few other famous examples of manic pixie dream girls include Sam from Garden State who shared uncannily similar traits to Claire in Elizabethtown as well as Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs The World. It’s not uncommon to see these names in multiple tabloid articles on the trope. The reason the recognition of it has significantly risen in the past few years is due to the realization of sexist and harmful connotations that the trope projects.

From the late 2000s to the present time, we’ve seen a surge in movies deconstructing the trope rather than perpetuating it. 500 Days of Summer attempted to point out the misconstrued nature of this trope and its possible effects on people. The movie narrates the story of a man named Tom, who is convinced he will never be happy until he meets “the one”. On the other hand, the female protagonist, Summer, refuses to believe in the idea of eternal love and marriage due to the divorce of her parents. Tom meets Summer one day at work and is instantly entranced by her beauty as well as her bubbly personality and immediately decides that she’s the one. The movie follows them doing activities reminiscent of many rom-com cliches, although Summer makes it very clear that she wasn’t looking for anything serious nor did she really care to be in a relationship. Now, if this were any other love story, the protagonists would probably go through a series of events and overcome obstacles, eventually living happily ever after. However, in a seemingly anti-climactic twist, Summer ends up marrying another man in the end.

500 Days of Summer

In a broader perspective, the movie meant to point out how the concept of “the one” is an inherently selfish concept: it puts a huge burden of expectations on the other person’s shoulder and sub-consciously expects them to put up their end of a bargain they never consented to. Although, when we read between the lines, the movie wants to shed light on the problems of projecting your idea of a person onto them. It doesn’t help that 500 Days of Summer is entirely shot from Tom’s perspective, which initially garners sympathy from the viewers and turns them against Summer. From Tom’s perspective, Summer seems like the perfect manic pixie dream girl: she’s outgoing, likes the same music as him, has strange idiosyncrasies, and is willing to push Tom beyond his capabilities to achieve his goals. This is where the fantasizing should have stopped though, because the more Tom perceived Summer as his manic pixie dream girl, the more he seemed to forget that she was a real person with problems, dreams, aspirations, and interests of her own. Assuming that she would somehow “fix” his broken self, entirely disregards her emotional capacities.

The reason the trope has received so much scrutiny, to begin with, is due to the obvious lack of effort in wanting to develop a female character. In fact, Nathan Rabin himself later wrote an article for Salon, apologizing for coining the term, calling it “fundamentally sexist” This is true in the sense that manic pixie dream girls don’t exactly have a concrete role in the film and are usually created with the intention of improving someone else. In this context, it is fair to say that they were not created with the intention of accepting quirkiness or indifference, but rather to be used as a catalyst to encourage the development of their male counterpart.

The evolution of this trope throughout history has taken multiple turns, be it good or bad. However, this particular trope seems to fall into a grey area where it is difficult to assess its level of morality. It is also important to note the trope is harmful to all genders. If the trope told women about the lack of development in female characters, then it also told men that they couldn’t achieve their long-term goals without needing someone to help them discover it. To bring any kind of change to this trope, referring to theoretical frameworks of feminism is crucial for widening our perspective on the roles of women in film. We’ve seen a significant amount of progress in this respect in the past couple of years, but to dismantle this trope entirely, writers and directors will have to stop using female characters as mere vessels to be discarded and start portraying them as individuals with complex stories of their own.