What does the Manic Pixie Dream Girl tell us about relationships and how men see women?
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a well-known pop-culture cliché. The term was coined by critic Nathan Rabin in his review of 2005′s Elizabethtown to describe the cheerful, bubbly flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst. Since then, this character type has been analyzed everywhere, from XoJane to Slate to theGuardian. A list of film examples of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” includes roles played by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Natalie Portman to both Hepburns (Audrey and Katharine) Rabin claimed that the MPDG “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries.” In a recent exploration of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon, though, the New Statesman‘s Laurie Penny argued that the ubiquity of this stock character in mainstream movies has real-world implications. “Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story,” Penny writes. “Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s.” In Penny’s view, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is not just an onscreen fantasy–she’s a template for young women’s lives. “Fiction creates real life,” Penny notes; “Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men.” For Penny (and for many who commented on her piece), Manic Pixie Dream Girlhood served as a model for how to live as a teen and early 20-something. This is a problem, according to Penny, because women “deserve to be able to write our own stories rather than exist as supporting characters in the stories for men.” The Atlantic | Read the Full Article
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a well-known pop-culture cliché. The term was coined by critic Nathan Rabin in his review of 2005′s Elizabethtown to describe the cheerful, bubbly flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst. Since then, this character type has been analyzed everywhere, from XoJane to Slate to theGuardian. A list of film examples of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” includes roles played by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Natalie Portman to both Hepburns (Audrey and Katharine)
Rabin claimed that the MPDG “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries.” In a recent exploration of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon, though, the New Statesman‘s Laurie Penny argued that the ubiquity of this stock character in mainstream movies has real-world implications. “Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story,” Penny writes. “Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s.”
In Penny’s view, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is not just an onscreen fantasy–she’s a template for young women’s lives. “Fiction creates real life,” Penny notes; “Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men.” For Penny (and for many who commented on her piece), Manic Pixie Dream Girlhood served as a model for how to live as a teen and early 20-something.
This is a problem, according to Penny, because women “deserve to be able to write our own stories rather than exist as supporting characters in the stories for men.”
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