(Re)consider the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Hey all! While I figure out how to get my new Wordpress site to mail out posts, I’ve decided to switch the Substack to being a weekly roundup rather than the first source for essays. Starting next week, I’ll be sending out a once a week summary of posts, with links to everything I wrote that week. Want the daily newsletter? Sign up for my Patreon. It’s free! (Though if you join at the $5+ level, you get early access to posts.)

Also, if anyone can help me make the Wordpress site work better, great; I’m tech savvy but also busy and don’t have the time to navigate Wordpress (which weirdly seems way harder to use than it was 20 years ago, in making it more WYSIWYG they’ve made it so much more of a headache, sigh).

In 2007, while writing a review of Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, the film critic Nathan Rabin coined a term that would wind up taking on a life of its own: Manic Pixie Dream Girl. An MPDG, as you may already be aware, is a very particular female archetype that pops up in a wide range of male-helmed films: she's a quirky free spirit who pops up in a depressed man's life and devotes herself to getting him back on track; an otherworldly weirdo who seems to have no ambitions outside of injecting a little magic into the world of a struggling man who finds her alternately charming and mystifying.

It's Kirsten Dunst's character in Elizabethtown* who served as the prototype, but many other examples rapidly populated the list. Natalie Portman in Garden State. Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club. That lady who played Amelie in Amelie. Zoey Deschanel just, you know, as a general vibe.

The obsession with the MPDG, with talking about it and often expanding the definition past the point of recognition, got so fevered and intense that a decade ago (and seven years after penning his original essay), Nathan Rabin disavowed the very term, declaring it sexist and demeaning, a turn of phrase that had led people to dismiss and reduce complex female characters, considering them only as accessories to men.

And on the one hand... I see where he was coming from. I understand why people turn up their nose at the very utterance of those four little words. And yet I have never been willing to fully let go of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, not the least because there is part of me that deeply identifies with the archetype. The problem, I think, has never been with the classification of this kind of woman — a kind of woman who emphatically exists, a kind of woman a younger me and many of my peers aspired to be like.

The problem is that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has virtually always been considered from a man's perspective, and never from her own.

The other day, while bored and possibly on the subway, I tossed out a half-formed thought on Bluesky: "Plot twist: All the Manic Pixie Dream Girls were sapphic bisexuals."

It was, initially, just a little joke, but the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense. It is easy, I think, to develop a single-minded obsession with the well-being of struggling men when you are sexually but not romantically attracted to them, to fill the empty space that should be filled with mutual love and support with a devotion to someone who is incapable of supporting you back.

I cannot explain why this happens, I simply know that it does. I have seen it in myself, I have seen it in so many of my friends. You can't tell that something is wrong because whatever is lacking in the man you are obsessed with — the man you are devoting so much energy to — is also lacking in you; so what you cobble together is a facsimile of a relationship where you obsess over him and he admires you and you have great sex and you tell yourself that this is what love is.

I don't think it's a coincidence that many Manic Pixie Dream Girls are bisexual, or at least "bisexual coded." From the male perspective, I think that this detail is just tossed in to up the quirky and sexually free factor of the character. But I also think it's an example of a man accurately documenting a phenomenon without really understanding it himself.

Because, truly: so many bi women that I know have, at one point or another in their lives, been obsessed with these characters. And I think, in addition to everything I said above, it is also because, as bisexual women, we can also find ourselves in that complex space of wanting and wanting to be — the Manic Pixie Dream Girl appeals, both because she offers a quirky archetype to aspire to be, a readymade personality that men will apparently love; but also because, on some level, we are also able to slot ourselves into the role of the man who is the object of her obsession, to adore the Manic Pixie Dream Girl because we want to be with her, as well.

Or at least, that is how it feels to me now, at forty-one, long past my own MPDG heyday.

The Manic Pixie Girl is dead. Long live the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Let's bring her back — only this time, let's let her speak for herself.

* I must admit here that I have never seen Elizabethtown