Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Film critic Nathan Rabin coined the term in 2007. In his series of columns "My Year of Flops" (some fifty of which were released in a book of the same name) for The A.V. Club, he reviewed the 2005 film Elizabethtown;[1] talking about Kirsten Dunst's character, he said "Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. [This character] 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."[1]

A year later, The A.V. Club ran a piece listing 16 characters they deemed MPDGs, and the new term was quickly referenced by other popular culture media.[2]

Katharine Hepburn's role as Susan Vance in the 1938 screwball comedy film Bringing Up Baby has been described as an early example of the character.

MPDGs are usually static characters who have eccentric personality quirks and are unabashedly girlish. They invariably serve as the romantic interest for a (most often brooding or depressed) male protagonist. Notable examples of female characters described as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl follow:

• The A.V. Club points to Katharine Hepburn's character in Bringing Up Baby (1938) as one of the earliest examples of the archetype.[3]
• Clarisse in the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. Critic Jimmy Maher of The Digital Antiquarian wrote: "Bradbury has been credited, with some truth, with foreshadowing or even inspiring everything from 24-hour news as entertainment to the Sony Walkman in Fahrenheit 451. I've never, however, seen him properly credited for his most insidious creation: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl."[4]
• Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film, is an example of a vintage Manic Pixie Dream Girl, according to Grace Smith, writing for The Hollywood Insider: "The effortlessly eccentric Holly Golightly balances out the brooding writer Paul Varjack."[5]
• Goldie Hawn's character, Jill, in Butterflies Are Free is "a happy hippie who helps blind lawyer Edward Albert learn to live on his own and stand up to his fretful, frightful mother."[6]
• In Autumn in New York, "the square dude in question is uptight businessman Richard Gere, and the charming minx who breathes life into his sorry existence and reawakens his libido is delightful pixie/crazy free spirit Winona Ryder".[6]
• Penélope Cruz's character in the movie Vanilla Sky (2001) is included on Jamie Loftus' list of MPDGs, published by BDCWire.[7]
• Natalie Portman's character in the movie Garden State (2004), written and directed by Zach Braff.[1] In his review of Garden State, Roger Ebert described this kind of rather unbelievable "movie creature" as "a girl who is completely available, absolutely desirable and really likes you." He notes, "we learn almost nothing about her, except that she's great to look at and has those positive attributes".[8]
• In asking whether the stock character's popularity has peaked, Aisha Harris in writing for Slate, considers Jennifer Lawrence's character in the movie Silver Linings Playbook (2012). She finds that Lawrence's character could be considered another iteration of the MPDG, but ultimately decides she is a bit more complicated.[9]
• Margot Robbie's character in Amsterdam (2022) is characterized by Christy Lemire writing for RogerEbert.com as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.[10]
• Riley Keough's titular character in Daisy Jones & The Six has been described by Caroline Kraft of The New Yorker as akin to the MPDG: "A sexually liberated woman, she exists as a foil to male responsibility: she'll teach Billy the value of an unfettered approach while also instructing him in the risks of his own desires. He is drawn to her because she helps him understand himself. She is the caretaker of his catharsis and little else".[11]

In an interview in New York about her 2012 film Ruby Sparks, actress and screenwriter Zoe Kazan noted that the term should only be used to criticize writers who create one-dimensional female characters, not actresses. She ultimately expressed skepticism over the use of the term, noting that its use could be reductive, diminutive, and misogynistic. She disagreed that Hepburn's character in Bringing Up Baby is a MPDG: "I think that to lump together all individual, original quirky women under that rubric is to erase all difference."[17]

In a December 2012 video, AllMovie critic Cammila Collar embraced the term as an effective description of one-dimensional female characters who seek only the happiness of the male protagonist, and who do not deal with any complex issues of their own. She noted that the pejorative use of the term, then, is mainly directed at writers who do not give these female characters more to do than bolster the spirits of their male partners.[18]

In December 2012, Slate's Aisha Harris posited that "critiques of the MPDG may have become more common than the archetype itself," suggesting that filmmakers had been forced to become "self-aware about such characters" in the years since Rabin's coining of the phrase and that the trope had largely disappeared from film.[19]

In July 2013, Kat Stoeffel, for The Cut, argued that the term has its uses, but that it has sometimes been deployed in ways that are sexist. For example, she noted that "it was levied, criminally, at Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Zooey Deschanel, the actual person. How could a real person's defining trait be a lack of interior life?".[20]

Similar sentiments were elucidated by Monika Bartyzel for The Week in April 2013, who wrote "this once-useful piece of critical shorthand has devolved into laziness and sexism". Bartyzel argues that "[The term] 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' was useful when it commented on the superficiality of female characterizations in male-dominated journeys, but it has since devolved into a pejorative way to deride unique women in fiction and reality".

In July 2014, writing for Salon, Rabin stated that the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" had frequently been deployed in ways that are sexist and had become as much of a cliché as the MPDG-trope itself.

Rabin acknowledged that the phrase has its uses in specific, limited contexts, saying that "the phrase was useful precisely because, while still fairly flexible, it also benefited from a certain specificity". However, he continued by stating that the overwhelming popularity of the term, coupled with the oversimplified definition he gave when coining it, had led to it becoming a kind of "unstoppable monster". He wrote "by giving an idea a name and a fuzzy definition, you apparently also give it power. And in my case, that power spun out of control".

Rabin asserted that it had gotten to the point where people were commonly using the term to critique real women and actresses (instead of fictitious, one-dimensional characters) and to describe things that don't actually fall under the rubric of the MPDG. In his conclusion, Rabin noted that many nuanced female characters cannot be classified in such an all-encompassing, restricted nature and apologized to pop culture for coining a term that is so pervasive and ambiguous, and he stated that the term should be retired and "put to rest."[21]

Despite Rabin's calls, some film critics continue to use the term, and writers continue to produce explanatory articles and videos that attempt to define it.[22][23][24]

A possible male version of this trope, the Manic Pixie Dream Boy or Manic Pixie Dream Guy, was found in Augustus Waters from the film version of The Fault in Our Stars (2014); he was given this title in a 2014 Vulture article, in which Matt Patches stated, "he's a bad boy, he's a sweetheart, he's a dumb jock, he's a nerd, he's a philosopher, he's a poet, he's a victim, he's a survivor, he's everything everyone wants in their lives, and he's a fallacious notion of what we can actually have in our lives."[25]

The Manic Pixie Dream Boy trope has also been pointed out in sitcoms such as Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock. The female protagonists of these shows marry men (Adam Scott's Ben Wyatt and James Marsden's Criss Chros, respectively), who, according to a 2012 Grantland article, "patiently [tamp] down her stubbornness and temper while appreciating her quirks, helping her to become her best possible self."[26]

• Damsel in distress
• Foil (fiction)
• Gamine
• Golden fantasy
• Johanson analysis
• Mary Sue
• Smurfette principle