Source: Allure
There’s a laundry list of tropes and archetypes that constrain female characters in the media, but none have been as damaging as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
The term, coined in 2007 by critic Nathan Rabin, describes one-dimensional female characters that serve as hollow agents of romantic fulfillment for male protagonists.
MPDGs are hot. MPDGs are cool. MPDGs can be broken but may only splinter into beautifully performative pieces.
While the trope began as a critique of shallow writing and harmful depictions of women in film, it has garnered a cult following that conflates poorly written characters with real people.
With a simple online search, one can find full rubrics and checklists for MPDGs that attempt to categorize real women rather than fictional characters.
Suppose you have dyed hair, a unique style or subversive aesthetic, and/or the vaguest inclination of a free spirit. Chances are you’ll be watered down to a MPDG by hordes of men that fancy themselves Scott Pilgrim reincarnate.
By attributing a character archetype to a living being, you depersonalize them to nothing more than an idea of a person. You remove the layer between reality and fiction, blurring a line that was never meant to be crossed.
Yet, even in fiction, the phrase has become corrupted as a result of poor analysis and lazy sexism.
One of the most damning examples of the trope’s misattribution is Clementine Kruczynski of 2004’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Kruczynski, infamously portrayed by Kate Winslet, is often said to be a paradigm of Manic Pixie Dream Girlhood.
In actuality, the character is antithetical to the trope. As Clementine says herself in the film, “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive.” She admits that she is just a “girl who’s lookin’ for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours.”
The diminutive lens this trope has morphed into only serves to ignore the nuance of women in film and reduce them all to static love interests.
Not every female character that stands opposite a male protagonist is there solely as his support system. To cast a wide net over all female deuteragonists diminishes the efforts of screenwriters and filmmakers who aim to avoid clichés.
If you bulldoze past the complexity of female characters, it only perpetuates the misconception that women, even in fiction, are a monolith.
Rather than imposing the phrase as a malicious moniker for real women or misunderstood characters, audiences and producers alike should let the term remain what it was meant to be: a criticism.
Writers should not strive to create Manic Pixie Dream Girls. People should not search for Manic Pixie Dream Girls as prospective partners.
Above all else, Manic Pixie Dream Girls should not be lauded or seen as valuable characters. Their whimsy and low maintenance does not make them better than a “real” woman; it makes them nothing more than an empty outline of one.
Rabin acquiesces that the idea of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl has become an “unstoppable monster” that’s spiraled far away from the realm of film criticism.
When even the originator himself has realized how corrupted and pervasive the term has become, why haven’t we, as a society, let it die?
If we are to answer the question, it requires some deep self-reflection. But it can’t be found through a camera’s lens.
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