I feel like I must begin by justifying my love for romantic comedies. I really do—nothing brings me as much joy as a happily ever after in the tale of two star-crossed lovers, especially those with elements of comedy that seamlessly weave in and out of the script. I love seeing that everyone is capable of being saved and that there is someone they can rely on to do so. For that reason, I love Audrey Hepburn and her charming, vivacious characters which contrast the brooding young men who play her on-screen lovers. However, this brings me to something I don’t quite like—the online discourse about Audrey Hepburn’s role in her movies as a ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’.
I came across an article about much the same, criticizing her eccentric, ‘quirky’, characters and stating how her roles in her movies only seem to be to brighten up the life of the sulking semi-depressed men she comes across. The term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ (or MPDG) was coined by Nick Robinson in an article he wrote in 2007 about ‘Elizabethtown’. In the piece, he stated that such a cinematic character is a ‘bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that 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’. The characteristics of a manic pixie dream girl seem to be similar in almost every movie—they are unapologetically eccentric characters with an air of femininity that is enough to make the male protagonist nearly swoon at the sight of her.
The MPDG has become so common that she can almost be called a stock character; there’s no way to change her. The problem I see with this film archetype is the effect that it creates on its audience—especially when it comes from almost every young adult movie. I can’t even begin writing about the effects such tropes create when young men are taught to be the protagonists, or the stars of their stories, whereas young women are taught to be the supporting actresses to someone else.
Another problem that I see with this cinematic trope is the fact that the classification may itself be flawed. Femininity and quirkiness are common character traits, as are being vivacious, flirty and carefree. Does this mean that every whimsical female character in a movie is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? And for that matter, is every character with a bold personality, and an attractive face a manic pixie dream girl? Is the only purpose of the female characters in these films limited to ‘saving’ their men? This expectation imposed upon women to be magical ‘pixie-like’ characters, to be idiosyncratic yet entirely in sync with the life goals of the man is almost absurd, and incredibly outdated in the contemporary world.
Overall, I believe that there is something inherently flawed with the way we judge female cinematic characters. Who is the manic pixie dream girl? Why is she just a ‘manic dream’? I think that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl just wants to be treated like everyone else. Please, just let her be treated like everyone else.