The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the apparent scourge of modern cinema, a term coined by the Onion A.V Club to define every modern male in the midst of a quarter-life-crisis' Dream girl.
"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."Natalie Portman's character, Sam, from Garden State, has long been the poster girl-child for the MPDG's but she is joined now by Zooey Dechannel's charmingly vacant eyed Summer from this years indie rom-com hit 500 Days of Summer.
These quirky, charmingly eccentric and entirely docile creatures with their big eyes and cute outfits are essentially stock pile characters cursed to live upon the pedestal of lost little boys with Peter Pan complexes, forever denied a life of their own outside of the protagonist's own imagining.
Needless to say she is a character largely despised by the female population. She is unconventional, adorably fucked up, yet inspiring and leaves a trail of guys in her wake, all of whom are hopelessly in love with her. Every modern woman's worst nightmare. Her only purpose is to gently lift the male protagonist out of the rut he has single hand-idly driven his life into and to remind him that life is sweet, to stroke his ego and set him on the right path to realise his dreams. Never mind her own happiness. Such characters do not, never have existed in real life. They have their prototypes, true, the dreamy eyed poet, the oh-so-quirky art school chick, always upbeat, with never a bad word to say about anyone, clad in their vintage dresses with long flowing locks they seem born to make men fall hopelessly in love with them and put women's teeth on edge.
Perhaps this is an unfair characterisation of the MPDG. After all take a look at Clementine's character from Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a subtle and perhaps unintentional deconstructing of the MPDG. Joel and Clementine's relationship quickly falls apart once he realises that Clementine is not this insatiable magical creature who will come and stroke his ego and fix his life as he had imagined. The close of the film has both Joel and Clementine looking at each other without the rose-tinted glasses and realising for the first time that they are both equally fucked up and capable of making mistakes.
500 Days of Summer does this too, though subtly, perhaps too subtly, as everyone seems to have come out of the cinema with the conclusion that Summer is -of course- a bitch.
"How dare she not be the idealised version of herself that he thought her to be! How dare she have flaws! How dare she have her own dreams for life that don't directly involve Tom! That Cow!"We hate, not the girl herself, but the realisation that the girl is not whom we initially thought her to be, we feel as though we have been duped, played, lied to, betrayed.
Why hate the girl, why not instead hate the men who create them? These hopelessly lost individuals too lazy to change their own lives and find meaning in it, who instead place all their unrealistic expectations and childish notions of romantic attachments onto one girl's fragile shoulders.
As the character of Clementine so aptly put it:
"Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's looking' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours."Don't hate the player kids, hate the game.
