The manic pixie dream girl is a character that was a staple of films from the 2000s and 2010s, made most recognizable by Zooey Deschanel and John Green. However, despite their optimistic and uplifting nature, the writing of their characters was anything but. Manic pixie dream girls were often one-dimensional and completely lacked any nuance, their lives and passions getting shoved to the wayside in favor of their sad and boring male counterparts.
What is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl(mpdg)?
Film critic Nathan Rabin first coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or MPDG, in 2007, after watching the film “Elizabethtown.” He defines a manic pixie dream girl as a female character who “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.”
In simple terms, the manic pixie dream girl is a stock character that exists solely for the purpose of the male lead. She’s cool, confident and carefree, living life to the fullest and not caring what anyone else thinks. She is often synonymous with the word quirky, which can refer to anything from her sense of style to her hobbies to her personality. Popular examples of this character trope include “500 Days of Summer,” “Elizabethtown,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Looking for Alaska,” “Almost Famous” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”
Although depictions of the manic pixie dream girl peaked in the 2000s and early 2010s, iterations have existed in film for nearly a century. Back in the day, the character would have been known as a flibbertigibbet, meaning an excessively talkative and excitable person. Early examples include “Bringing Up Baby,” “The Palm Beach Story” and “The Seven Year Itch.”Â
Manic pixie dream girls are often paired up with men who are awkward, introverted and can’t make sense of their world. When they attempt to pursue others romantically, they are rarely successful. That’s where the manic pixie dream girl comes in to save the day. She is everything he isn’t, and almost instantly, she makes it her mission to show him how to live life to the fullest. She’s totally selfless to the point that she has no sense of self. She only exists to inspire him and cheer him on.Â
The manic pixie dream girl cannot exist without her mediocre, boring man; she is tasked with being the interesting one. She plays the harmonica, dances in the rain and has an endless supply of quirky hats. However, in spite of this individuality, she can never be the main character because that would provide her with too much depth and direction.
In short, the manic pixie dream girl isn’t so much a person as she is a plot device. One of the key traits of the manic pixie dream girl is that the relationship between her and the main character does not last. She’s simply there to teach the male lead a lesson and/or to change him for the better. Once he has gone through this transformation, he no longer needs a manic pixie dream girl, and as a result, she disappears from the story and from his life. The audience never gets to see her story, her desires or what motivates her.Â
The problem with the character
The problem with the manic pixie dream girl is not the character itself, but rather the person perceiving her as one-dimensional. Characters like Summer from “500 Days of Summer” and Clementine from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” clearly have lives and passions outside of what the audience sees. But because their story is being filtered through the lens of their male counterpart, the audience only sees them the way the male lead sees them, which is as a manic pixie dream girl who is only there to serve their needs.Â
Additionally, the term has snowballed from being a valid film critique to a blatant misuse of the term in film discussion. Just because the film has a male lead with a quirky female love interest, that does not automatically make her a manic pixie dream girl. But that’s what many people seem to think. Any person, particularly any woman, on screen who bore even a passing resemblance in appearance or personality to a manic pixie dream girl became a target of ridicule. Fully realized characters were dismissed as boring retreads of a tired trope.Â
Nathan Rabin himself has apologized for coining the term, due to how it often leads to people completely writing off female characters with remotely quirky interests and labelling them as manic pixie dream girls—even when they might actually be quite complex. The trope was increasingly used in sexist ways, rather than calling out sexism, as it was originally intended to do.Â
It is clear that the manic pixie dream girl trope isn’t just bad writing, but is a byproduct of misogyny, and is extremely harmful to how women are perceived both in film and in real life. There is nothing wrong with female characters who are quirky and exhibit traits of a manic pixie dream girl, but that defining quirkiness needs to be accompanied by true depth of character.