Time To Put Down The Pixie?

Nice to see the patriarchal lie of the manic pixie dream girl is still alive and well in student films #yaaaaaay http://t.co/N2goexAxd9—
Aaron Lockman (@TheLockPerson) March 12, 2014

Nathan Rabin, who coined the term “manic pixie dream girl” in a 2007 essay, regrets it and wants to retire the term:

In an interview with Vulture, “Ruby Sparks” writer-star Zoe Kazan answered a question about whether her character was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl by asserting: “I think it’s basically misogynist.” … Here’s the thing: I completely agree with Kazan. And at this point in my life, I honestly hate the term too. I feel deeply weird, if not downright ashamed, at having created a cliché that has been trotted out again and again in an infinite Internet feedback loop. I understand how someone could read the A.V. Club list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls and be offended by the assertion that a character they deeply love and have an enduring affection for, whether it’s Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall or Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” is nothing more than a representation of a sexist trope or some sad dude’s regressive fantasy.

But Lisa Knisley defends the term as an “intensely useful and important” way of describing a real element of our culture, not just movies and TV:

The ability to shorthand what seemed to be a pervasive and powerful cultural ideal of white femininity embodied by the on-screen MPDG has been invaluable as I came to feminist consciousness and began to more deeply analyze the representations of femininity marketed to my generation. But, more than that, the concept of the MPGD doesn’t just describe a gendered film trope—it helps me make sense of non-fictional gender relations as well.

I’d be hard-pressed to say I’ve ever met a real-life MPDG, of course. Flesh and blood women, no matter how they come off at first, are inevitably more complex and substantial than the superficial waifs of our collective pop culture fantasies. Still, for women of my generation, perhaps especially middle-class, heterosexual, white women, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is one powerful version of our ideal selves and many of us have found ourselves emulating her, wanting to become her.

Elisabeth Donnelly stakes out a middle position, arguing that Rabin’s initial diagnosis of the MPDG was valuable but agreeing with him now that it has become an cliché catch-all for lazy critics:

Where Rabin’s trope started to feel cruel was in the semi-pointless appellation of “manic pixie.” Perhaps it was applicable to the female characters in Garden State and Elizabethtown, but would you really call anyone else a manic pixie, beyond, say, Tinkerbell? In all honesty, when it comes to writing about half-baked, terrible characters in art, we need to use a broader range of terms beyond just slotting all wispy girlfriends into the Natalie Portman-in-Garden State slot. Go deeper. Write with more eloquence about why the character is underwritten, why the lack of an interesting woman in a movie is a problem. Pin it on the follies of the art.

Previous Dish on the MPDG here, here, and here.