My generation didn’t grow up with the significance of the Disney ideal of ‘Happily Ever After’, we were already war-torn and bitter. Our mothers wouldn’t buy us the licensed Toy Story Woody dolls that we wanted and we were only allowed Billy Bear ham — processed and the colour of bloated ankles — once a month as a treat. It was before social media cut a key and let itself into our bedrooms, when polyphonic ringtones were the height of sophistication. When the Crazy Frog was the gold standard for comedy.
I was melancholic and weighed down by the angst of the emo music that was blasting on my iPod Nano, searching for something outside the cookie cutter forms of Richard Curtis rom-coms and the problematic relationships on Waterloo Road. I found them in a character that seemingly sprung up in all the low-budget indie movies that I spent my teenage pocket money on and asked specifically for at Christmas. These women, or ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girls’ (MPDG), were beautiful but not unobtainable; they had the carefree joie-de-vivre of an eight-year-old let loose in Ikea, and yet they were a well of lessons and practicalities. They’d lived a life, they’d had their hearts broken and broken many others in return. And they knew what they wanted.
In 2007, film critic Nathan Rabin coined a term which took on a whole life of its own. The term has been weaponised ever since against storytellers and the women that embody the archetype. It’s an internet meme that went too far. That was wielded too widely. The famous portrayals used to exemplify the MPDG in all its ukulele-playing weirdness are Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer, Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, Natalie Portman in Garden State, but are also rife in most of the romantic comedies or dramas that plagued our screens in the mid-noughties. All petite women with pinched noses and sugar-sweet faces. Youthful. Flawless. If you were a teenage girl in the late noughties, you found yourself scrolling through Tumblr for hours at a time looking at these women. Using them as singular points of reference for how to be a quirky, likeable girl; how to style yourself perfectly; how to get a boyfriend. The philosophy of the MPDG doesn’t match ‘most girls’ and yet she is every girl.
This reductive term refers to a romantic ideal — a woman with perfect hair, an impeccable taste in music and a penchant for adventure. Its misogynistic qualities have been widely publicised: the MPDG is a heterosexual man’s perfect woman, she has no discernible goals and is simply happy to be the optimum support system for the man who loves her. The character encourages ingrained sexist ideologies, it relegates female characters to a place of servitude to benefit the hero. I can clearly see the problems, and I grumble under my breath at the Joseph Gordon-Levitts and Zach Braffs who tell these poor MPDGs that they’ve never met anyone like them before. I gag when they discover that anyone else, more so a woman, could ever have heard of The Smiths, or The Shins, or any other equally jangly, floppy-hair-fronted indie rock band. She is problematic and two-dimensional and yet there is still a part of me that yearns to be her.
Expectations are high enough for women as it is, but this strange, predictable archetype only makes them more unreachable. Not only were we now expected to keep our fringes blow-dried to within an inch of their lives; curate the most eclectic, yet cohesive vintage wardrobes — traipsing through charity shops and the pneumonia-inducing warehouses of overpriced kilo sales on the search for the perfect broderie anglaise Peter Pan collar — we were also expected to not have that much else going on in our lives. We didn’t need friends, jobs, interests outside of our tank top-wearing leads, for they would take up all our time as we taught them the very basics of what it’s like to be an empathic human being. We reminded them to call their mothers on their birthdays, we accompanied them unquestioningly to social events, we didn’t sit awkwardly when they serenaded us at a karaoke bar.
Hollywood used the MPDGs for one inciting purpose: to develop the male lead — to soften them against the hardness of a corporate world and to push them towards their childhood dreams. With sideways glances and vague tales of their own struggles (although never revealing too much), our girls manifested a man that any woman would be proud to call their own. Like Mary Poppins, the MPDG tended to only stay until the wind changed — her disposability absolute and necessary for the hero to eventually find something/someone that would make them completely, all-consumingly happy.
The romantic attachment of a woman to a man in such a supporting role can be toxic. The shift in trajectories hard to come back from. I spent my teen years wanting to be a MPDG — not just for the single streaks of pink Manic Panic hair dye, or the flippant attitudes to authority, but for the almost painful need to be needed. I wanted to be wanted and desired in a way that I could never have gained otherwise. I related to these women superficially, with a blunt fringe cut in just below my eyebrows, and I connected emotionally due to my girlish desire to please. I believed that interesting and exciting things would only happen to me if I was able to bring this excitement to someone else first. Why didn’t my scuffed Doc Martens or my polka dot dresses work as hard for me as they were for these women?
Since its coinage, the phrase has become its own beast, used frivolously to describe any woman with their own opinions or frantically dyed hair. Although it raised the case for sexism in Hollywood, it has also forced a pejorative label onto any unconventional or outrageous young woman. No longer just a masturbatory storytelling device, the MPDG has found a place living in the transoms of boring, unintelligent men’s minds. Why are young women problematic? Why is the ability to think for ourselves and emotionally support another person so off-putting?
During the last year I have re-visited these films that I loved so painfully and, even with the patriarchal awareness that I didn’t possess as an oblivious teen, I still fall for these women. I am still an unapologetic champion for the MPDG. I want to cradle Penny Lane from Almost Famous in my arms and tell her that everything will be alright. I want to let her know that she is worth more than the fifty bucks and a case of beer that she’s won for in a card game. I want to tell Summer Finn from (500) Days of Summer to run as far away from Tom as possible because it’s not love that he claims to feel for her, it’s ownership and obsession. I want to promise the eponymous Ruby Sparks that she is real and significant and needed. In my own way I have felt like all of these women at different times in my life. I get it.
These women encapsulate many things that I am and that I want to be: they are assertive, compassionate and interesting. They have boundaries. Some play the ukulele and others make strange, one-of-a-kind noises in their bedrooms, or type correspondence on their mechanical typewriters. Sometimes they are people pleasers and other times they don’t care what you think. They are flawed and cracked and have scars that run through them like a map of the London Underground, but so do most of the best people I know.
Expectations are illusions, stories made up by angry men in dark offices. The biggest lesson to be learnt from these romantic dramas is that expectations are a passion-killer. Your thoughts and ambitions are sacred and shouldn’t be dictated or guarded by another person. People shouldn’t grind themselves down to fit a narrative, to slip seamlessly into the pages of someone else’s book. If being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl means being unapologetically me then I think I’m okay with that.
