Manic Pixie Dream Girl: When A Patriarchal Trope Becomes Your Teenage Role Model
Film Still ℅ 500 Days of Summer
I have not the slightest idea how many times I have seen 500 Days of Summer since it was released a decade ago.
Shortly after it came out, I chose the title from a long list of On Demand movies and watched it with my mother on an old TV in our living room. I must have been 11 or 12; I thought it was brilliant. I was mystified by the film’s way of portraying time, I was mystified by the soundtrack, and, most of all, I was mystified by the title character, Summer Finn.
For those who aren’t familiar with what once seemed to me the most formative movie of all time, Summer, played by Zooey Deschanel, is the love interest of the central character Tom, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The pair meet when Summer starts working in the same office as Tom, a greeting card writer in LA. Tom is instantly smitten, and it’s easy to understand why. Summer is beautiful, with long dark hair and a wardrobe that seems more fitting for an Audrey Hepburn character than a woman in LA in the ‘00s. She is playful, but guarded in a way that presents itself like a puzzle. Perhaps most importantly, she knows the lyrics to “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths. She was everything I wanted to be.
As I stumbled into teendom, the film became a clutch. I turned to it as an escape and as a promise of things to come. I reblogged countless stills from the film on my Tumblr page, I found a clip of the scene of Tom drunkenly singing “Here Comes Your Man” by The Pixies at karaoke and watched it on a loop, and I streamed the movie online before my best friend bought it for me on DVD.
It’s difficult for me to say what I wanted more as a fifteen year old: to be like Summer or to be loved in the way Tom loved her. Although Summer ultimately leaves Tom and marries another man, leaving him heartbroken and confused, their romance, best portrayed in an iconic frolic around Ikea, was a beacon of possibility.
What is clear to me now is that I misunderstood the film entirely.
The term “manic pixie dream girl” was penned in 2005 by critic Nathan Rabin. Rabin was specifically describing Kirsten Dunst’s character in the film Elisabethtown, but the archetype is found in plenty of other films as well. Think Dianne Keaton in Annie Hall, Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and, infamously, Natalie Portman in Garden State.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, the manic pixie dream girl is defined as “a type of female character depicted as vivacious and appealingly quirky, whose main purpose within the narrative is to inspire a greater appreciation for life in a male protagonist.”
So, the manic pixie dream girl is the result of women’s underrepresentation in the film industry. There are too many men making movies, and too many of those men don’t understand how to write complex female characters with their own purpose and agency. The problem stops there, right? Not exactly.
Representation in media is crucial because media does not only reflect the world, it creates it. As Laurie Penny points out in this brilliant column in The Statesman, manic pixie dream girls do not only exist in fiction, even if they originated there, because we look to film for ideas of what we can and will become. I watched a manic pixie dream girl, and a manic pixie dream girl was what I hoped to become.
It has been said that you can tell what kind of person one is after watching (500) Days. Is Summer a bitch for dumping Tom and finding someone else? Or is Tom an idiot for not hearing Summer’s many indications that she did not want to be with him? Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Tom, has made it clear that his character is not the victim.
The film makes this known in the first moments. As the opening monologue closes, the narrator reiterates, “This is a story of boy meets girl but, you should know up front, this is not a love story.” Moreover, Summer tells Tom, who the narrator says “grew believing that he’d never truly be happy until he met ‘the one,’” that she doesn’t believe true love exists. Yet, as the entire story is told through Tom’s hopeless romantic perspective, and because we are so used to the male point-of-view, many of us side with him on first watch.
I never sided with one character or the other. I just wanted what they had, or what I thought they had, while they were together. By the time I truly understood the film and the toxicity of the manic pixie dream girl trope, I was in my late teens and it was, in some ways, too late.
I have seen people misunderstand the criticism of the trope and attack the characters themselves. I wholly believe this is wrong. The problem is not with whimsical, adventurous, artistic and unconventional women; the problem is with writers who think these women only exist to further the storylines of men. The problem is that these women deserve better and, as a teen, I didn’t realize it. I knew these types of characters were the on-screen-women I identified with the most, and I thought that what they were valued for, the way they were seen in the eyes of the men who loved them, unfortunately in a transactional way, was what I must be valued for as well.
The transaction made between manic pixie dream girls and the men that love them is not immediately apparent, as the transaction being made is one of emotional, rather than physical, intimacy. This is clear in a scene from (500) Days in which Summer lays atop her bed with Tom and tells him about the recurring dream in which she ultimately ends up “completely alone.” She pauses and says, “I’ve never told anybody that before.” Summer continues to speak, but Tom is not listening. He doesn’t truly care about Summer’s deepest feelings; rather, he objectifies the moment of emotional intimacy as a part of her that only he has.
This scene had a sneakily large impact on me, though I only realized it in the last year. Through this scene, I was led to believe that secrets, especially those of the traumatic variety, were something that women kept as a gift for men they would someday love. I was led to believe that my own trauma and sadness was not to be shared with my girl friends or my mother or my therapist, but with a man who would someday value me more because of it.
As I have begun to understand that the archetype I most identified with is a product of patriarchy, I’ve been left to evaluate what really is me. The results include a shame and a self-deprecation about my genuine interests. I have become defensive about my inherent personality and whether it will come off as a performance to get a certain kind of male attention.
I feel like shouting, “Yes, I do like sad indie music and have unnaturally colored hair and an unconventional upbringing and associated baggage and I do wear vintage and brightly colored clothing and approach life with a certain unconventional wit and whimsy, but I’m self aware in doing so! I’m not naive to the associations!”
This reaction is due to what I’d call a “post-manic pixie dream girl” state. Now that girls like me are aware of the trope, we do our best to disaffiliate ourselves from it. More than that, the trope can be used as yet another means of invalidating women’s interests. If your interests are mainstream, you’re basic. If they’re unconventional, you’re a manic pixie dream girl. Women are patronized for enjoying things that men find trivial, like pop music and reality TV, and women are belittled for enjoying things that men enjoy, like sports and rock music. Either way, you’re apt to find yourself as a punchline or left to prove the things you like are somehow valid.
I have learned many things about women from movies written by men that are worth forgetting.
However, if we turn away from these characters entirely, we are at risk of losing what we genuinely identified with to begin with. I’ve decided I’m okay with being cast as a manic pixie, as long as she is the one writing the script.
About the Author
Victoria Middleton (she/her) is a third year student at The George Washington University studying journalism and mass communication with a minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies. She discovered her love for writing as a little girl, typing fairytale stories on her parents old Dell and printing them out before taping them into glitter-glue-encrusted cardboard covers. These days, she thinks honest and fully developed stories about women are even better than fairy tales. When she’s not scheming against the male hegemony of the media industry, she can be found thrifting, watching cult films and TV and badly dancing to good music. She has been known to get overly excited about intersectional feminism, astrology and David Lynch.
