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My dream girl dont exist11/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Not old enough to buy cigarettes or vote, I was well on my way to being one of what Penny calls the “mournful men-children” who attach themselves to the bright, the unconventionally pretty, the eager-to-please.ĭecades before the term was coined, a manic pixie dream girl gave me my first proper kiss. ![]() I kept my longings to myself, wanting to spare them the awkwardness of making the “I’m flattered but I don’t want to spoil our friendship” speech, and wanting to spare myself what I correctly imagined would be the excruciating humiliation of having to hear it. I fell for clever, impulsive, short-haired brunettes. ![]() I was shy, un-athletic, bookish, and pudgy. ![]() I, on the other hand, had the requisite qualities to be the boy who fell in love with MPDGs. “For me, Manic Pixie Dream Girl was the story that fit,” writes Penny, admitting that she had the “basic physical and personality traits … the raw materials” to live into the part. Just as the all-too familiar “ Magical Negro” character uses mystical intuitive powers to help white folks tap their God-given potential, the MPDG reminds men that they need (and, more precisely, are entitled to) a women’s inspiration and encouragement to reach their own true destiny. The manic pixie dream girl may serve as a catalyst for male transformation, but in both her real and fictional manifestations, she sends the message that a bright and sensitive young man can learn to embrace life only by falling in love with a woman who sees the dazzling colors and rich complexities he can’t. The end of the MPDG would be good news for men too. 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.” “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. “Fiction creates real life,” Penny notes. In Penny’s view, the manic pixie dream girl is not just an onscreen fantasy-she’s a template for young women’s lives. “Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s.” “Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story,” Penny writes. 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. 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). Since then, this character type has been analyzed everywhere, from XoJane to Slate to the Guardian. 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. The “manic pixie dream girl” is a well-known pop-culture cliché. ![]()
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