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(Photo By Getty Images )

Nathan Rubin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl in his review of the film Elizabethtown in 2007:

"That bubbly, shallow, cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of the sensitive writer and directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."

Conjured up by directors and scriptwriters to help a male protagonist fulfil his dreams, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl possesses eccentric personality quirks and a "kooky" nature - the classic examples are Natalie Portman's character in Garden State and the love interest Zooey Deschanel plays in 500 Days of Summer.

On the surface, Greta Gerwig, in playing the part of Maggie in Rebecca Miller's film Maggie's Plan, seems to be the latest Manic Pixie Dream Girl to brace our screens.

Warning: contains spoilers.

Maggie's Plan is the story of a young woman, who about to embark on her own pregnancy falls in and then out of love with her married colleague John (Ethan Hawke). Overshadowed by his wife's (Julianne Moore) success, John falls for Maggie as she sits and reads his manuscript, giving him advice on his novel-in-progress. Scenes of Maggie and John reading his work together bring to life the image of Rubin's trope, who "teaches broodingly soulful young men to embrace life". Maggie is a platform that exists in order for John to fulfil his own dreams as a writer. She is the "kooky" young woman (just look at her mismatched knitwear and intriguing charm) and John is the brooding tortured soul who needs saving.

But Maggie's Plan offers a glimpse of the Manic Pixie, only to then shatter it. Maggie is not a one-dimensional cut-out of a young woman whose role is to save her lover from his unfulfilling relationship. Instead she is a character loaded with her own fears and faults.

"I'm terrified I'm falling out of love with him," she declares, in an honest moment of self-realisation about her relationship with her self-absorbed colleague. In this fear, she attempts to set up her new partner with his ex-wife. It's humorous, but it also reveals a human instinct to hold everything together when it seems as though everything is falling apart.

Maggie's Plan feels a lot like a sequel to Frances Ha, written by Gerwig and partner Noah Baumbach and released in 2013. Frances (played by Gerwig) is an eccentric and warm twenty-something who dances and leaps through the streets of New York City to Bowie's "Modern Love". Her speech feels spontaneous and improvised (she describes herself and her best friend Sophie - played by Mickey Sumner - as "basically the same person. With different hair" and "a married lesbian couple that don't have sex anymore") and her character is someone we both laugh at, sympathise with, and relate to.

Frances makes mistakes (from shouting at her best friend in a bar to not having enough money to pay for the bill on a date) and like Maggie in Maggie's Plan, she knows exactly what it feels like to be alone. There is something about Frances' imperfections that make her an honest and truthful representation of a woman: a three-dimensional character, rather than a device.

It is easy to spot the influence of Woody Allen in many of the films starring and written by Gerwig. From their Manhattan settings, their eccentric characters, and the gritty black-and-white film of Frances Ha, there are hints of Allen everywhere. TIME magazine labelled Gerwig "a millennial Annie Hall" and yes, Gerwig possesses similar qualities to Diane Keaton's character in the Woody Allen classic. Both are "quirky", comic, intelligent and curious. Despite claims that Annie Hall fits the trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl , Keaton challenges this archetype as much as Gerwig. Both Gerwig and Keaton demonstrate that a female can be an oddball and simultaneously uphold her own independence and act as a character in her own right. She is not a device to help the male protagonist fulfil his aspirations, but a character with her own aspirations and desires.

What unites much of Gerwig's work is the absence of men in her films. In their writing of Mistress America and Frances Ha, Gerwig and Baumbach evade the stifling trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl by practically writing romantic relationships out of their script. Frances Ha and Mistress America are both stories of relationships, and yet the most significant relationships on screen are those between women. Men are the supporting act to the women's story. Mistress America, released in cinemas last summer, captures this method. It tells the story of a friendship between two sisters, where 18-year-old freshman Tracy (Lola Kirke), is taken under the wing of her stepsister, Brooke (Gerwig). Frances Ha achieves the same. It is the tale of two best friends and what happens to a friendship when relationships, jobs and life get in the way.

Maggie's Plan subverts the conventional "romantic comedy". The most interesting relationship is that between Maggie and her lover's ex-wife Georgette (Julianne Moore). They both overcome the resentment that is assumed to exist between ex-wife and new partner, and seem to enjoy each other's company. "I can't help it - I like you", Georgette tells Maggie.

There is something refreshing in these films that demonstrates the power and intricacies of female friendship. And with men being notably absent, there isn't a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in sight.

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How Greta Gerwig challenges the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope by brushing with it

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Nathan Rubin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl in his review of the film Elizabethtown in 2007: "That bubbly, shallow, cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of the sensitive writer and directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."

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Why the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ is Problematic AF ⋆ Bombshell By Bleu

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Traits of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl seep into the psyche of everyday people, causing mental illness to become highly romanticized, and in a way, trendy.

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That rich interior life we sometimes don't see.

Photo by Julia Caesar on Unsplash

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin to describe a stock female character who "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite...

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Deconstructing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She Always Had Something to Say

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The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin to describe a stock female character who "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite...

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The Misuse of the Term - Manic Pixie Dream Girl

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midsommar?
Young promising woman
jennifers body
Carrie

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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/oct/01/geena-davis-damaging-stereotypes-on-screen-limit-womens-aspirations

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The promises of positive change for women on screen that followed her role in the groundbreaking film Thelma and Louise have failed to materialise, leaving girls today with few role models, according to the actor Geena Davis.

The media continue to have a huge influence on how the world views women and girls, and how they view themselves, she said. But few current roles show women in powerful positions, and continue to reinforce damaging gender stereotypes.

Davis was speaking to the Guardian as research into the film industry showed that of characters in leadership positions, women were four times more likely than men to be shown completely naked. The study also found that 42% of men were shown in leadership roles, compared with 27% of women.

"We know from many examples that media images can be incredibly powerful in a positive way if you bother to do that," Davis told the Guardian. "My theory is we don't have enough real-life role models of women in important positions and occupations to inspire change, and so we need to have them in fiction so that life will imitate art.

"I believed all the press reaction about Thelma and Louise, that it was going to change everything and that there were now going to be far more female lead characters in movies, and I was thrilled.

"And actually the next move I made, A League of Their Own, the press announced the same thing, that now absolutely for sure everything is going to change. There'll be so many sports movies now. And none of those things happened.

"Over the 25 years since, there have been a number of times that movies have come out and people [have said], 'This is going to change things,' and it didn't," added Davis, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as Thelma in the 1991 film.

"It's incredibly disappointing how little progress has been made."

Research published on Tuesday analysed the film industry's portrayal of women and its impact on the lives of girls, carried out by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which the actor founded in 2004, and the NGO Plan International.

It analysed the 56 top-grossing films of 2018 in 20 countries in North America, Scandinavia, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Of the characters in leadership positions, it found that women and girls were four times more likely than men to be shown wearing revealing clothing; nearly twice as likely to be shown as partially nude; and four times more likely to be shown completely naked. It also found that when a slow motion focus was used on lead characters' bodies, nearly twice as many female leads were sexually objectified than men.

Research also revealed that twice as many men appeared in the 56 films and they spoke twice as much as women.

Male characters were shown as being more effective and more respected when in leadership positions, while female presidents and prime ministers were portrayed as struggling with the job. Where female characters were portrayed as strong, it was in the home.

Almost half of the characters across the films analysed, which collectively earned $21bn (£17bn) at the box office, were white. Only one of the 60 female leaders in the films was LGBTQ+. None of the films was directed by a woman, only a quarter had at least one female producer and one in 10 had at least one woman on the writing team.
Commonwealth ministers look to revitalise progress on gender equality
In the report, Rewrite her Story, 10,000 girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 25, in 19 countries, were polled about the role media played in shaping their aspirations and view of themselves.

The vast majority of those interviewed said they were influenced by what they saw on screen and wanted more role models. More than 90% said they believed women in leadership roles were treated less well because of their gender.

"Of course it hurts me because ... even if I know I could be a leader, I won't do it because I see it is just for men, not for women," a 22-year-old Ugandan woman told researchers. "So that affects me. I'll have to sit back and watch men doing it, even though I am capable of doing it too."

Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of Plan International, said while "a woman 007 or superhero in film is welcome ... our research shows they are exceptions and not the rule".

"The bigger picture is that gender discrimination and harmful stereotypes still dominate on screen. This undermines girls and young women and has a negative impact on their aspirations to leadership in all walks of life."

Davis said she remained optimistic that things would improve. The #MeToo and Time's Up movements have had a "remarkable" impact on the industry. "We can feel change in the air," she said.

"I feel the easiest way to bring change in our culture is on-screen representation. And if you make it happen there, it will happen in real life."

Davis, who this year joined Netflix wrestling drama Glow, played the ultimate leadership role - that of a female US president in the 2005 TV show Commander in Chief. It was axed by ABC after one series. But, she said, a study found that 58% of people said they were more likely to vote for a female candidate for president "after seeing me behind the desk".

She added: "Imagine if I had stayed on air for eight years, what would be happening now?"
Topics

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Geena Davis: 'damaging stereotypes' on screen limit women's aspirations

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The promises of positive change for women on screen that followed her role in the groundbreaking film Thelma and Louise have failed to materialise, leaving girls today with few role models, according to the actor Geena Davis. The media continue to have a huge influence on how the world views women and girls, and how they view themselves, she said.

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"Young invisible women" - a look into women directors and why they arent being hired.

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"Young invisible women" - a look into women directors and why they arent being hired.

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https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/invisible-woman-film-gender-bias-laid-bare

https://directors.uk.com/news/cut-out-of-the-picture

https://d3gujhbyl1boep.cloudfront.net/uploads%2F1461930983739-erk37ak82v20lnpl-0dacf96122678073f64e99c9b75e90bf%2FCut+Out+of+The+Picture+-+Report.pdf

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It's now impossible to claim ignorance of the gender inequality that runs rife through the film industry. Campaigning on the issue has been intensifying, with luminaries such as Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence speaking out about their own experiences, and the yearly problem of a lack of female directors at Cannes brings with it a fresh round of debate. Yet while Cannes 2016's 21-title Competition lineup features just three female directors, and only seven women amongst its 56 Official Selection films, to point the finger at such festivals is to ignore the fact that their decisions are a consequence, not a cause, of the industry's inherent problem with women.

Published in early May, Directors UK's extensive report on the current state of female directors confronts this issue head on, exploring how - and, more importantly, why - female filmmakers are being shortchanged by the industry. It not only confirms that the situation is dire but highlights the fact that, in some areas, things are getting progressively worse.

These dispiriting findings are compounded by two further reports, one carried out by a European Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded team at the University of Southampton and one by the European Women's Audiovisual Network (EWA), which reveal that that the dismal state of affairs is replicated across all sectors of the industry, and throughout Europe.

Cut out of picture

The Directors UK report, entitled Cut Out of the Picture: A study into the gender and inequality amongst directors within the UK film industry and authored by industry analyst Stephen Follows, examines a decade's-worth of data to understand how female filmmakers are faring in the industry at large. Looking at all 2,591 films made in the UK between 2005 and 2014, and taking in data from BFI, HMRC and box-office revenues along with critical and audience reception from the IMDb and review-aggregate sites, it paints a pretty bleak picture.

While the report's top line finding that just 13.6 per cent of working film directors in the UK over the decade of study were women may be unsurprising, other revelations are more eye-opening. It systematically picks apart the arguments often used to explain the lack of female directors, finding that audiences and critics tend to prefer female-directed films, that such films don't fare any worse at the box office and that, crucially, women are actively pursuing top level careers in the industry - proven by the finding that women make up 50.1 per cent of film students in the UK, and account for 49.4 per cent of entry-level runners and production assistants.

No lack of ambition

The fact that women are actively pursuing film-industry education and careers in equal numbers as men is also correlated by the EWA report Where are the women directors in European films? Published in February 2016, the report is a result of two years' research across seven European countries (Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and UK), and finds that there is a significant shortfall from the proportion of women entering the industry (44 per cent) to that of female directors actually working within it (just 24 per cent).

The resulting observation is clear: the lack of female filmmakers cannot be attributed to a lack of drive, but to the fact that they are being overlooked by the industry once they are working within it.

This is further validated by Directors UK statistics regarding the number of female directors at each stage of a career, from shorts and low-budget films to mid-range movies and studio blockbusters. The report's statistics on the disappearance of women are stark: while 16.1 per cent of directors of films budgeted at less than £150,000 were female, women accounted for just 3.3 per cent of films with a budget of £30 million.

"The workforce is 50/50 at the point where people enter the industry," Directors UK Andrew Chowns explained to Screen International. "But at every stage of their career as a director, women are being removed to such a progressive extent that by the time you get to major features [the number of women] is absolutely negligible."

Public funding support

It's not only on major features where women are being sidelined, however, The Directors UK report makes the surprising discovery that they are also being increasingly overlooked in favour of their male counterparts by the UK's major public funders.

In the decade of study, just 21.7 per cent of films receiving public funding had a female director. Worse, public funding support for films with female directors decreased significantly over that period, from 32.9 per cent in 2008 to just 17 per cent in 2014.

It's worth noting, however, that the report looks at films in production up until summer 2014, before the BFI introduced their Three Ticks diversity initiative, since been revised and refocused as the BFI Diversity Standards.

"In the 2015-16 full funding year the number of BFI-supported feature films directed by women rose to 34 per cent, or 11 out of the 32 directors across the films we funded, our aim being that with further effort this will continue to rise," said BFI Film Fund director Ben Roberts in response to the findings.

This lack of public funding support for female filmmakers isn't confined to the UK, however. The EWA report highlights a similar trend across the seven countries studied, finding that 84 per cent of available public funding resources go into films that are directed by men.

Sector-wide problem

While the prime focus of the gender debate may be female directors, women are woefully underrepresented across all sectors of the industry. This has been highlighted in both the Directors UK report, which finds that the majority of women can be found within artistic departments such as costume, production and make-up design, and a new report funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose authors, based at the University of Southampton, are spending four years researching the contemporary history of women working in the UK film industry.

Their most recent research, Calling the Shots, looks at the numbers of men and women working in the key roles of director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor across all films produced in the UK during 2015. They found that women made up only 20 per cent of individuals across all of these roles and that, shockingly, 25 per cent of all films studied had no women at all in any of those roles.

When women were present in those key roles during 2015, they accounted for very small numbers, making up just 13 per cent of directors, 20 per cent of screenwriters, 27 per cent of producers, 18 per cent of executive producers, 17 per cent of editors and 7 per cent of cinematographers.

The report also finds that just 7 per cent of those women were of Black, Asian or Ethnic Minority identity, meaning that BAME women made up less than 1.5 per cent of all key personnel on UK films in production in 2015.

Both Directors UK and the University of Southampton agree that films with women in senior decision-making roles, such as directors or producers, are far more likely to have females in other key positions. The latter report, for example, found that 74 per cent of films with a female director also had a female producer, and that 69 per cent of female screenwriters worked on a film with at least one female producer.

Call to action

There surely can be no arguing with the findings of all three reports or, indeed, the many other similar studies. The European Audiovisual Observatory's 2014 Female Directors in European Film Productions, for example, found that just 16.3 per cent of European films made between 2003 and 2012 were directed by a woman. And recent research from the Center for the Study of Women in Television in Film at San Diego State University found that women accounted for just 19 per cent of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers across the 250 top-grossing movies in the USA during 2015.

In the face of such shocking, and oft-replicated, numbers there can also be no arguing with their shared assertion that proactive change is needed to redress the balance, particularly as it's becoming increasingly clear that the industry is unable - if not unwilling - to course correct on its own.

Despite the fact the awareness of gender equality has been widespread, and much discussed, for well over a decade, the status quo has remained resolutely unchanging. The Directors UK report attributes this to the industry's 'unconscious systemic bias' towards men, which is subscribed to by its primary gatekeepers and decision-makers and results in a perpetual skewing towards male filmmakers behind the camera and male stories in front of it.

That report is bold in its claim that only institutional change can make a difference, suggesting a target of 50 per cent gender parity for all public funding of film by 2020 and the development of UK tax relief to establish formalised diversity requirements. These recommendations have been met with widespread support, with many pointing to the success of the Swedish Film Institute which achieved its target gender parity in public funding in 2014 and have been reaping the rewards at festivals and the box office ever since.

"Equal numbers of men and women enter this industry, but women are relentlessly squeezed out," says Kate Kinninmont, Chief Executive of Women in Film and Television UK in response to Calling the Shots. "Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women have the hardest time of all. It's the film industry itself which suffers from this, with narrowing of its vision and an impoverishment of its creativity. Sweden has acted successfully to remedy this by ensuring that public money in the industry is divided fairly. Canada and Australia are following suit. It's time for the UK to act. What are we waiting for?"

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The invisible woman: film's gender bias laid bare | Sight & Sound

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It's now impossible to claim ignorance of the gender inequality that runs rife through the film industry. Campaigning on the issue has been intensifying, with luminaries such as Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence speaking out about their own experiences, and the yearly problem of a lack of female directors at Cannes brings with it a fresh round of debate.

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sexism in the music industry, the sexualization and slut shaming of taylor swift and other young female artists

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The March sisters in Greta Gerwig's "Little Women." (© 2019 CTMG, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)

However many cinematic versions have come before, it seems that "Little Women," the Civil War-era classic by Louisa May Alcott, was begging for a modern feminist take.

A strong-willed mother raising four girls almost entirely on her own, an ambitious female writer who longs to make a name for herself rather than get married, and not one but rejected marriage proposals, even when the suitors were both fabulously wealthy: What more could a director ask for to showcase the self-asserting power of women?

There is no doubt that director Greta Gerwig's remake of the long-loved tale of growing up in 19th-century New England has plenty to express via feminist undertones. The very first scene shows an encounter with the peppery Jo March vying to get her story published in a New York City publication.

Later, she screams out a line that could be made into a feminist anthem: "I'm sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for!"

Such details might suggest another postmodern film depicting women who discover they don't need marriage and family life to be happy. But fortunately, Gerwig does not forget the story she's interpreting; or at least she does not avoid it.

All the additions, rearrangements, and modern flavors of the film, combined with stellar acting that retained the core spirit of the novel, hit a sweet spot between two realities that are often portrayed as at odds: that women are smart, talented, hardworking, and visionary, that they have a particular genius for fostering love with their relationships and their homes.

To drive home this paradox, Gerwig's approach is to draw out the dynamic personalities of of the March women. Of course, Jo most readily embodies the progressive dimension of the female persona through her drive for greatness and fiery audacity to assert herself before anyone, man or woman.

But the film also draws attention to the other sisters' individualities and decisions.

Beth is a magnificent pianist who is committed to helping others even when no one else will. Amy is a skilled artist who also displays assertiveness, passion, and wit. Meg has a knack for acting and wants a more affluent life. Even Marmee shows some layers by engaging in the war effort and, as she confides in Jo, choosing to confront and control her anger daily in order to transform it into patience.

None of the March women are boring characters, which immediately sets Gerwig up for a film with a strong pro-woman message.

Plus, the film makes sure to emphasize the societal struggles females faced at the time: Several characters acknowledge a woman's inability to make a decent living for herself without marriage or inherited wealth, and lament that marriage would make herself, her income, and her children entirely the property of her husband.

The centrality of home for the sisters continues into adulthood, and Gerwig is able to convey this convincingly through her brilliant decision to tell the story through flashbacks. Although the film opens with almost all of the sisters away from home, the crisis instantly draws them back, and the scenes that look back upon their childhood reveal why.

Through this scenic structure as well as the captivating character development, the film demonstrates that their attachment to home does not dilute them as female characters, but on the contrary enriches them.

The film also shows how the sisters wrestle with societal expectations and the concept of marriage. None of their lives end up very far from the social norm, but the key is that none of them succumb to some inevitable female fate. Rather, each of their paths involves a conscious, independent, and free choice.

In a key scene in which Jo begs Meg not to get married, Meg assures her that she to marry the man she loves and work through life with him. In fact, for her marriage is no mundane life decision but the fulfillment of her life's dream. It's a pursuit of a dream, the film shows, that's no less important than Jo's unorthodox one.

Ultimately, even Jo cannot resist the powerful draw of companionship. After all, she has spent her whole life immersed in the joys of family life, and even her dream to be an independent, self-supporting writer cannot erase the longing for love in relationships at home.

This whole tumultuous process reaches its climax precisely when Jo has her glorious feminist outburst: After her explosive line, "I'm sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for!" she pauses and admits with a sigh, "But I'm so lonely."

While at first Jo (and perhaps many women today) might see that yearning for love a sign of weakness, Gerwig's "Little Women" makes clear that this need not be the case. Jo finds a man who is just as blunt as she is, chases after him in her own Jo March way, and launches on the adventure of building and running a bustling school with him.

The final scene reveals a Jo who is exactly herself - still a passionate and driven author, still a firecracker - having given herself in love to another and built a home of her own.

This is the key of Gerwig's "Little Women." Each of the March sisters is her own person, and she makes her own decisions. She does not cower in the face of social challenges, but neither does she shun the life of marriage and the home simply because they are what has always been done.

Each sister makes the life of the home her own, showing that it need not be oppressive but can be empowering.

The message of women's ingenuity both as members of society and as family members has always been embedded in the novel "Little Women," and it is what has made the story so enduring for over 150 years.

But by highlighting the characters with renewed energy, and by blending in the best of the modern women's movement, the latest "Little Women" presents an inspiring, refreshing work of art that must not be overlooked.

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'Little Women' is not a typical feminist movie

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However many cinematic versions have come before, it seems that "Little Women," the Civil War-era classic by Louisa May Alcott, was begging for a modern feminist take.

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The characters are ambitious, angry and they have agency. How Greta Gerwig adapted a 150-year-old text for our time.

Saoirse Ronan in "Little Women." Credit... Wilson Webb/Columbia Pictures

I've always sort of wondered what I wasn't getting about "Little Women."

I'm pretty sure I read it in school, though I would be hard-pressed to recall a single scene. I know I saw at least part of the 1994 film - the one with Winona Ryder, Claire Danes and Christian Bale - but I remember walking out of the room midway through and never returning, much to my mother's dismay.

Nothing about the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott's perennial best seller particularly stuck with me, and as an adult, annoyance overshadowed apathy as I tried to understand how the literary heroine of so many women I admired - the spunky, independent writer Jo March - would, by the end of the novel, relinquish her art for marriage, and then proclaim that she is the happiest she'd ever been.

What was I missing?

It appears that what I was missing was Greta Gerwig - along with the real-life story of Alcott, on whose life the book was based, with a few major differences.

Of course, Gerwig isn't the first to change the way "Little Women" gets told. People have been adapting, and then critiquing, and then adapting, and then critiquing it for decades - each iteration a kind of Rorschach test for how the world feels about women at the time.

So is it any surprise that Gerwig's "Little Women," at the end of a decade in which we confronted female power in a whole new way, feels positively radical?

It still has the cozy fireplace scenes and the long dresses. But the characters question social mores ("I'm sick of being told that love is all a woman is fit for," says Jo, played by Saoirse Ronan), deliver critical context about the structural barriers limiting women (the economics of marriage, for instance, in which a woman's earnings became property of her husband) and are at times flat-out angry at a world that, as the book puts it, in the words of the youngest character, Amy, "is hard on ambitious girls." (It still is.)

"I think 'Little Women' is always a secretly subversive story," Amy Pascal, a producer on the film, said in an interview.

"Little Women" tells the story of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, who live in Concord, Mass., during and after the Civil War. Depending on whom you ask (and when), it is a girls' coming-of-age narrative, a New England family saga, a war story, a love story, a heartwarming Christmas tale, or a feminist text about women's choices (or lack thereof).

In Gerwig's version, which opened on Christmas Day, it is also the story of Alcott, perhaps the real heroine of the Marches, who never married ("I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe," she said), built a fortune on the "Little Women" books, and on whose life and letters Gerwig said she relied upon as a guide.

"As a child, my hero was Jo March," Gerwig has said. "But as an adult, it's Louisa May Alcott."

Alcott would write feverishly, locked in a room - she taught herself to be ambidextrous when her hand got tired - and was known for losing her temper. She was raised in a progressive family of Transcendentalists and became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Mass., in 1879, years before the 19th amendment was passed.

She hadn't initially wanted to write a book for girls, but when the publisher asked, she obliged, basing it on her own life. Though she remained single - it was simply not realistic to want to be a writer and a wife and a mother at the time - she married off her literary heroine because her publisher and readers demanded it. As Alcott wrote in a letter to a friend: "Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn't dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her." (That funny match was Professor Bhaer.)

There have been a variety of iterations since then: two silent films, radio versions, plays, an opera, a 1933 film starring Katharine Hepburn as Jo and a Technicolor version with Elizabeth Taylor as Amy that proclaimed on its movie poster: "World's greatest love story!"

A BBC mini-series, which aired in 1970, should perhaps have been the first feminist adaptation, writes Anne Boyd Rioux, the author of " Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of 'Little Women' and Why It Still Matters" - as it emerged amid the height of the second wave women's movement. But its reception was the opposite: A 1973 review in The Times, " Does 'Little Women' Belittle Women? " noted that the story "might understandably strike a contemporary woman" as "a disgusting, banal and craven service to male supremacy" in which marriage is presented as the "sweetest chapter" and motherhood "the deepest and tenderest [experience] of a woman's life."

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A scene from the 1994 movie "Little Women." Credit... Columbia Pictures

It was not until 1994 that "Little Women" got the woman treatment - the first adaptation by a female director (Gillian Armstrong), writer (Robin Swicord) and shepherded by Pascal, then a junior executive. This was the Winona Ryder "Little Women," and the producers needed her to get the film greenlit - Pascal, who had been trying to get that film made for more than a decade, said that when she presented the script to Sony executives, one of them told her "he read it holding his nose."

"People just weren't that interested in a movie with a lot of women in it, especially women wearing long dresses," Swicord said recently. (It was 15 men in suits who watched the rough cut.)

The film was a success, perhaps in part because of low expectations - but also because of Ryder, it-actress of the moment, who played Jo (and was nominated for an Oscar). But it was marketed as a family film, not one expressly for girls. Pascal, Swicord and Armstrong worried about it being portrayed as "feminist."

"This was the era of family values, remember?" Barbara Berg, a historian and author who grew up acting out scenes from Alcott's book in her own "Little Women Club," reminded me. She noted how Hillary Clinton, then first lady, had been vilified because she worked, wanted to keep her maiden name and refused to bake cookies. Two years prior, during his re-election campaign, then-Vice President Dan Quayle had chided Murphy Brown - the fictional character played on the CBS television series by Candice Bergen, who has a child outside of marriage - for contributing to America's "poverty of values."

"When the '94 film was made, there was so much backlash against the idea that women could be independent," said Rioux, the "Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy" author, and an English professor at the University of New Orleans. "It was this all or nothing proposition - this idea that if they had careers, they would leave their families behind."

Which isn't to say that the '90s adaptation was entirely tame: Marmee, the girls' mother, played by a Susan Sarandon fresh off "Thelma & Louise," lectured on the negative health effects of corsets and the benefits of girls' education. Jo made the case for women's right to vote, which isn't in the book.

But the film still ends on the love scene, and it is Professor Bhaer, whom Jo ultimately marries, who takes her book to the publisher, not Jo herself - making him, not her, the instrument of her success, noted Rioux. The girls' choices, in other words, are delivered as individual, not structural.

"I so wish I could give my girls a more just world, but I know you'll make it a better place," Marmee tells them.

Twenty-five years later, that seeming resignation wouldn't fly. And neither would the standard end to the story.

"One of the first things Greta said to me was, 'You know we can't actually have her marry Professor Bhaer,'" said Pascal.

In this interpretation, the characters take on more dimensions. Meg's story does not end when she gets married - her struggles continue as she raises twins and buys nice things she can't afford. Beth, destined for death, is depicted as an artist in her own right. Amy, long viewed as the bratty younger sister, develops into a young woman whose clarity in her ambition is enviable.

"I think the world has caught up in the sense that a girl or a woman who speaks her mind, whether we like what she says or not, is a character we can now cheer," said Pascal.

And Marmee is not simply "a downtrodden mother," as Pascal put it, raising her girls while her husband is away. She is pissed off.

In one of the film's most poignant scenes - one that was plucked from the book but has not made it into most previous adaptations - Jo confides her own anger to Marmee.

"You remind me of myself," Marmee tells her.

"But you're never angry," Jo replies.

"I'm angry nearly every day of my life," Marmee says.

"You are?" Jo whispers back.

But it is the film's ending, at least for me, that was the most satisfying. In it, the character Jo (or is it Alcott? Part of the brilliance of Gerwig's interpretation is that she melds the two women) gets the satisfaction of watching her book be "born" - its pages bound and leather stamped by the printer. We also see her negotiate to retain the copyright to her work - something Alcott did in real life, allowing her to support her family for years to come.

"What I was trying to reverse-engineer was this moment that Jo getting her book would make the audience feel like you usually feel when the heroine is chosen by the hero," Gerwig said after a film screening in New York. "I wanted to see if I could create that feeling, but with a girl and her book."

That's an ending I wouldn't walk out on.
Correction Correction Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. : Jan. 2, 2020
An earlier version of this article misidentified the director of the 1994 adaptation of "Little Women." It is Gillian Armstrong, not Gillian Anderson. In addition, Amy Pascal's role in the 2019 adaptation was misstated. She is a producer, not the executive producer. : Jan. 6, 2020
An earlier version of this article misstated when Dan Quayle commented on Murphy Brown. It was during his re-election campaign, not his campaign for president.

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The characters are ambitious, angry and they have agency. How Greta Gerwig adapted a 150-year-old text for our time. I've always sort of wondered what I wasn't getting about "Little Women." I'm pretty sure I read it in school, though I would be hard-pressed to recall a single scene.

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Little Women is a feminist novel-right? Before this week, I thought the answer to this question was an obvious yes. But an essay at Vulture has made me rethink one of my favorite classic novels.

was published in 1868. It quickly became a huge success, and readers clamoured for a sequel. Alcott hadn't even wanted to write the book in the first place. Her true literary tastes were more akin to Jo's passion for scandalous sensation fiction, like her novel Little Women A Long Fatal Love Chase, which wasn't published until long after her death. Alcott had been pressured by her publisher to write something about girls, though, so she based the characters on her sisters and wrote the novel in just ten weeks.

This was only half of the book we know today as Little Women , which originally ended with Meg engaged but her three sisters still unmarried (and poor Beth still alive). The second half was published separately in 1869 as It's this half of the book that Hillary Kelly, writing for Vulture, calls "dismal." Beth dies and her surviving sisters are all married, their childhood dreams to become an artist (Amy) and a writer (Jo) and rich (oh, Meg) all but forgotten. In most modern editions, these two halves are yoked together to make one novel (except in the UK, where the books are still published separately).

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I present this publication history because the fact that this was once two books had a definite impact on how the sisters' stories would end. Before the sequel was published, Alcott wrote in her journal, "Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman's life." She goes on to write that she refuses to marry Jo off to Laurie just to please readers. This perversity is apparently what led her to marry Jo to an older German academic named Professor Bhaer, a marriage which has long divided the Little Women fan community.

I don't find Professor Bhaer all that strange a choice-in fact, he might even be the more feminist choice for Jo. Let's face it, there was no way the sequel was going to end with Jo unmarried. Despite Alcott's desire to leave her heroine unwed and independent, that's simply not how popular 19th-century novels end. Heroines in 19th-century novels get married because the marriage plot was one of the most important driving influences in 19th-century literature. Many female authors worked within this plot structure to criticize the system, but in novels by authors from Austen to Wharton, female characters who remain unmarried work as governesses or subsist on the charitable handouts of wealthy friends and family. Alcott didn't get married herself, but she knew what her readers expected.

But while those readers were begging for Jo to marry Laurie, a wealthy, young, attractive, conventional hero, Alcott went in an totally unexpected direction: an older German professor with no money. The mere fact that Bhaer isn't a traditional 19th-century romantic hero shows that Jo can still be unconventional even when she's doing the conventional thing and getting married.

Professor Bhaer is the first man to really take Jo's writing seriously-and he demands that she take it seriously, too. You can tell that something in Jo thrills to be thought of as a real writer first and foremost, not as someone's sister or daughter or niece, or the doer of unpleasant household chores. Even though we modern-day readers bristle when Professor Bhaer demeans Jo's commercial, sensationalized writing and gently scolds her into focusing on more wholesome fare, it's historically accurate. That's what literary culture was like in the 19th century.

Like Alcott before she wrote Little Women , Jo is writing in the tradition of sensation fiction, a genre popular in the 1860s and 70s that drew on the Gothic and Romantic literary traditions. What is sensation fiction? You know it when you read it. It strains belief by using high-stakes twists and dramatic plot elements-forgery, adultery, murder, seduction, disguise and mistaken identity-to evoke heightened sensations in its reader.

Sensation fiction was a, well, sensation, especially in Britain, but there are many sensation novels by female writers that never achieved literary acclaim or respect. Authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood aren't household names today. Even the most famous man to write sensation novels, Wilkie Collins, is much less famous than his friend and counterpart Charles Dickens (whose novels have some elements of sensation fiction, yet are taken very seriously).

Is it surprising, given this context, that an older male German professor would tell Jo she isn't taking her writing seriously, if she's writing about pirates and kidnapping? No. It's definitely disappointing, even enraging.

But given what we know about Alcott's feelings about marriage-for both herself and her characters-and the literary context, I read Jo's marriage to Professor Bhaer as a feminist commentary on the choices available to women at that time. To be taken seriously as a writer-something she desperately wants-Jo is forced to face the sexist literary standards of her day. And as a character in a 19th-century novel, Jo is basically doomed to head to the altar, but Alcott makes her choice as subversive as she can.

There are many other 19th-century novels where women make disappointing (by modern standards) marriages. There's the title character in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Maggie in and Dorothea in . And perhaps the most famous of them all: 's Charlotte Lucas, who marries the odious Mr. Collins.

I agree that these marriages are disappointing. Yes, it's terrible that Meg March ends up basically chained to her stove trying to feed an unsupportive husband. It's sad that Jo feels she has to choose family over literary ambitions (although her ambitions come back in Alcott's sequels, and ). It's tragic that an intelligent character like Charlotte ends up with a total buffoon.

But these beloved female characters are making the best of their incredibly limited options. For Charlotte, marriage is a form of independence, in a way-a chance to manage her own household and stop being a burden on her parents. I think it's reductive to read books like these and conclude that the mere fact that they got married means we have nothing more to learn from these characters. In fact, we can learn that it was pretty terrible to be a woman in the 19th century, even if -as Jo does-you end up with a kind man you love.

Kelly writes, "It feels good to nestle deep in the bosom of the March sisters' beloved Marmee, the most hardworking woman in literature. But is comfort what we need right now? Young girls drawn within the confines of the male-dominated hierarchy? I don't know about you, but I need more fire than that."

The past few weeks have shown that many young girls are unfortunately still trapped within the confines of a male-dominated hierarchy. We have more choices than Jo, but that doesn't mean we aren't part of a stupidly sexist world. Why can't we find both comfort and fire in Little Women?

Sometimes, we get a window into what Alcott might have thought and felt herself. "I've been angry almost every day of my life," Marmee says. That anger (fire, if you like) is present in Little Women , lurking underneath the knitting and kittens and cozy family singalongs. Anger at Jo having to get married at all. Anger for women like Beth, who have no real place outside marriage and motherhood, who die from the world's neglect. Anger that Mr. March is away doing what he feels is right but neglecting his own family (as Alcott's own father apparently did).

Little Women argues that women's lives are worthy of examination. Women's stories deserve to be heard. Even when beloved female characters make disappointing choices, writing and sharing their stories is a feminist act.

For more Book Riot opinions on Little Women, see our archives.

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Yes, LITTLE WOMEN Is a Feminist Novel - And Here's Why | Book Riot

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Little Women is a feminist novel-right? Before this week, I thought the answer to this question was an obvious yes. But an essay at Vulture has made me rethink one of my favorite classic novels. was published in 1868. It quickly became a huge success, and readers clamoured for a sequel.

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‘Little Women’, Little Change - Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal

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If the radical potential of adaptation lies in its ability to harness the energy of an established text for new...

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A manic pixie dream girl is a, typically young, female character, aged from late teen's to early twenty's. A manic pixie dream girl is usually juvenile in appearance and in mind, giving an air whimsy. found in pop culture, these characters on their own would be traditionally seen as helpless in the real world but are useful tools to their main character counter part(s).

The manic pixie dream girl can be seen as a tool for : comic relief, emotional support, and,emotional uplifting.

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Urban Dictionary: Manic Pixie Dream Girl

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A Manic Pixie Dream Girl or MPDG, is a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin after seeing Elizabethtown. It refers to "that 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."

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Let's say you're a soulful, brooding male hero, living a sheltered, emotionless existence. If only someone could come along and open your heart to the great, wondrous adventure of life... Have no fear, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is here to give ...

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Manic Pixie Dream Girl (n.): "That 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."

Ten years deep into the term's origination, the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" stereotype has become a well-known character trope, a hack plot shortcut a la the White Savior. The phrase has been popularized and eventually retracted by its creator Nathan Rabin, but it's too late - the MPDG has not only become something close to the desk that lazy writers everywhere can reach for, it's also become a bizarre ideal for a certain subset of young, hip females.

So get your hair bow-aligned and your Belle and Sebastian mixtape in hand. Here's the worst, the best, and the mislabeled.

The MPDG Scale:
"I'm a normal human woman."
"I have played a ukulele."
"Let's go on an adventure!"
"My hairstyle can fix you!"
"I WILL CHANGE YOU!!!!!!"

***

Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown
Sensitive Male Creator: Directed/Written by Cameron Crowe MPDG-o-meter:

Even though the Crowe film itself is unmemorable, Dunst's airline stewardess Claire -who lives to solve a still-hot, fresh-off-Legolas Orlando Bloom's problems- ranks because her character originally inspired the MPDG term's origination in 2005.

There's no better example of the MDPG than Claire, who is nearly too quirky to function.

Important: PAULA DEEN IS IN THIS MOVIE.

Natalie Portman in Garden State
Sensitive Male Creator: Directed/Written by Zach Braff MDPG-o-meter:

It's impossible to look at Natalie Portman in this movie without squealing over how cute she is, but that's where her function ends. Constantly spewing lines that empower the protagonist, and act as little more than nonstop reinforcement of his cool originality, Portman's Sam character is epileptic and adorable. And that's about it.

Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer
Sensitive Male Creator: Director Marc Webb, Writers Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber
MPDG-o-meter:
One of the iconic triptych of Deschanel, Portman and Dunst (attorneys at law), the character of Summer is installed into this painfully cute film to help Joseph Gordon-Levitt discover that he should be an architect instead of a greeting card writer. To be clear, this is a trope character showing another trope character that he should be doing this trope job, not that trope job.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Sensitive Male Creator: Directed and Written by Edgar Wright, Character by Bryan Lee O'Malley MPDG-o-meter:
There's no doubt that the Ramona Flowers character is a damsel in distress, cleverly disguised as a "weird girl": she's there to change the life of Scott Pilgrim. In spite of her inherent coolness, the film makes it clear that Ramona isn't going to be the one to save herself, but Scott finds new purpose with her cool girl depth and constant change of hair color. That's all it takes to date a shleppy 22-year-old Canadian, guys!

Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks
Sensitive Male Creator: Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Written by Zoe Kazan (twist!)MPDG-o-meter:
On its surface, this seems like just another white man in his 20's finding himself through the magic of a polka-dot clad vagina. Great. However, Kazan's story makes this an interesting study - this 2012 film presents the audience with a one-dimensional MPDG and singlehandedly dissects it and builds her into a fully realized character throughout the course of the movie. Sure, the Paul Dano protagonist tries to force his own fantasy on her to keep her in check. But Ruby ultimately insists on being her own person, even if that person was willed to life by some sort of lonely novelist magic in the first act.

Diane Keaton in Annie Hall
Sensitive Male Creator: Directed/Written by Woody Allen MPDG-o-meter:
This one, it would appear, is a common misconception. Allen went on the record repeatedly as saying that the Annie character was largely based on what he knew of Keaton himself- a fact the actress attested to. Sure, Annie changed Alvy's perspective on almost everything, but she was flawed and based in reality.

Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Sabrina, Roman Holiday
Sensitive Male Creator: Various MPDG-o-meter:

Audrey was a quintessential manic pixie before the term even existed, and it's evident in some of her most famous works. Whether Holly Golightly is showing writer Paul what New York is all about in Breakfast, Sabrina is transforming to impress the Larrabee brothers, or Ann is giving journalist Joe Bradley the scoop of his life in Roman Holiday, her lovable portrayals of sometimes complicated, always flighty characters is classic MPDG.

Does it make any of these films less fun to watch? Not necessarily, but it's a staple trope of its time.
Sensitive Male Creator: Written by Cameron Crowe MPDG-o-meter:
Kate Hudson in Almost Famous

Sweet teenage groupie Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson) won audiences over when Crowe's film was released in 2000. But the writer ultimately demonstrated a downward spiral in quality work that would end in his most recent release, 2011's We Bought a Zoo.

Upon further inspection, Penny is a character who is defined by the men around her - first by a band, and then by leading man and awkward boy journalist William. Sure, she's addicted to quaaludes, but it's nothing the love of a teenager can't solve. Crowe has half of the plot to thank Penny for, and doesn't give her a satisfactory background in return.
Sensitive Male Creator: Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, Written by Linda Wolverton, Character by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont MPDG-o-meter:
Belle (Paige O'Hara) in Beauty and the Beast

Not the first example you'd think of, but the case is strong. If we're defining the MPDG as a female character whose ultimate narrative goal is to give dimension to a central male character, what could be more iconic of that than her function (i.e. true love's kiss) actually changing him from an unidentified he-beast into an Aryan prince? The defense rests.
Sensitive Male Creator: Seth MacFarlane MPDG-o-meter:
Charlize Theron in A Million Ways to Die in the West

As Theron no doubt glows from her recent Razzie nomination for the same film, cartoon mogul Seth MacFarlane attempted to pen his first vehicle this past summer with flop A Million Ways to Die in the West. Theron's character Anna, is "so unlike the other girls" and is, for some reason, the only other character in this world that shares MacFarlane's 2014 perspective on an 1800s world. And boy can she sling a gun! Save it for your fan fic, Peter Griffin.
Sensitive Male Creator: Directed/Written by Stuart Beattie, Character by Kevin Grevioux MPDG-o-meter:
Yvonne Strahovski in I, Frankenstein

OK, this one is just straight up lazy. Adapted from the comic book of the same name, I, Frankenstein is an across-the-board failure following character Adam Frankenstein (why?) as he traverses the war between gargoyles and demons (what?) with the plot-furthering help of a sex bomb scientist named Terra (how?). Terra appears only to show villain Bill Nighy the vague science she is creating, and there's a scene where we are led to believe that Terra and Adam fall in love when she stitches a creepy wound on his dead flesh with an unsterilized needle.
Sensitive Male Creator: Spike Jonze MPDG-o-meter:
Scarlett Johansson in Her

Scarlett Johansson's voicing of Samantha, the computer program everyman Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with in Her is a seemingly self-aware depiction of the MPDG trope, because the audience knows it's doomed from the start. Samantha begins to discover herself as a unique entity as the plot progresses, expressing curiosity and choosing to explore. Though her presence in the narrative is the primary force that shapes and changes its male protagonist, Samantha makes enough changes in her own digital life to justify herself.
Sensitive Male Creator: Director David Fincher and author Chuck Palahniuk MPDG-o-meter:
Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club

There's no greater regressive male fantasy (that you secretly admit to watching over and over) than Palahniuk's Fight Club, brought to the screen by David Fincher in 1999. Helena Bonham Carter plays the female lead of Marla Singer, the death-obsessed addict who quirks around, attending group therapy for things she's not suffering from and becoming the driving force behind Tyler Durden's self-imposed destruction. Is there any other point to her character, other than to further the plot for Norton and Pitt? Not really, making her more of a manic pixie goth prop than anything else. Cool hair, though.
Sensitive Male Creator: Matthew Weiner MPDG-o-meter:
Every Woman Don Draper Cheats on His Wives With, the First Time They Have Sex
SPOILER ALERT:
In a TV era marked by dark, troubled protagonists, Mad Men often used the gender norms of the time period to demonstrate the inner turmoil of everyone's favorite advertising exec. This culminated in too many affairs to count, and though many of the show's fierce female characters came equipped with a well-developed backstory and temperament, Don's first roll in the hay with his newest lady always connected to the MPDG fantasy.

The second time, we realize something else - she's harbored feelings for him forever (what's up Allison?), she's also married (what's up Bobbie?), she was taking it less serious than he was (what's up Midge?). That first time, though? She's totally gonna be the one to "fix" him.

(For every woman Don hooked up with on the series, The Daily Beast has a terrifyingly comprehensive list here.)
Sensitive Male Creator: MPDG-o-meter: Amy Sherman-Palladino (twist!)
Anna and April on "Gilmore Girls"

Kind of a deep cut, but an important one nonetheless - GG was famous for introducing characters who were too cool to deny. Jury's out on whether Anna, who held out on poor backwards baseball cap Luke about his daughter April for thirteen years, would actually go for him. Since "absentee father" points to a major jumping of the shark for Gilmore Girls, there's no denying that the introduction of Luke's daughter was a failed experiment in character development.
You can check out some other hotly debated lists of MPDGs here and here.
Honorable Mentions: Barbara Streisand in What's Up, Doc?, Zooey Deschanel in Yes Man, Juliette Lewis is What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky, Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot.

The Takeaway: every poorly written female character isn't an MPDG, but every full-fleged MPDG is a poorly written female character. Rectangles and squares, y'all.

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The Definitive List of Manic Pixie Dream Girls | BDCWire

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Manic Pixie Dream Girl (n.): "That 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." Ten years deep into the term's origination, the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" stereotype has become a well-known character trope, a hack plot shortcut a la the White Savior.

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The term wasn't meant to be an insult: it's a callout to lazy content creators.
I hate romance tropes as much as the next gal, but the misuse of the term "manic pixie dream girl" is making it more difficult to call out certain strains of underdeveloped female characters. There's a bigger reason why the term was coined (and it's not to poke fun at any literally any female character with short hair).

The term manic pixie dream girl was originally coined by film critic Nathan Rabin...

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The Misuse of "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" is Only Furthering Sexism in Media

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The term wasn't meant to be an insult: it's a callout to lazy content creators. I hate romance tropes as much as the next gal, but the misuse of the term "manic pixie dream girl" is making it more difficult to call out certain strains of underdeveloped female characters.

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It's one of the most mendacious tropes in Hollywood: the female character who throws new light onto a male character's life through her Birkenstocked free spiritedness, while having absolutely no interests or agency of her own.

She's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a coinage by film critic Nathan Rabin in 2007, and famous examples include Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, whose stewardess devotes herself to repaving a dope's life path, or Natalie Portman in Garden State, reversing existential inertia via the music of the Shins and being real pretty. The MPDG is an example of a sexism in Hollywood that in some ways is more troubling than Michael Bay's latest denim-shorted cypher in the Transformers franchise - it says women are beautiful, inspiring and have valuable perspectives on life, but those qualities are best deployed in the service of saving a man.

But now Rabin is disowning the term. "I'm sorry for creating this unstoppable monster," he wrote in a Salon essay this week. "I feel deeply weird, if not downright ashamed, at having created a cliche that has been trotted out again and again in an infinite Internet feedback loop."

Similarly, Zoe Kazan - a young, hip actor who has no doubt been offered MPDG parts - has voiced her distaste with the term, calling it "reductive and diminutive, and I think basically misogynist", and saying it gets applied to female characters who don't actually fit the trope.

But while people might certainly reach for the term a little too quickly, a backlash against the cliche shouldn't be conflated with a backlash against the trope itself. Because this is where film criticism can really be useful: calling out the industry for its bullshit. Kazan and Rabin are rightly uncomfortable in thinking about women in terms of stock subgroups, and yet this is exactly how a male-dominated film industry thinks about them - and after a trickle-down process, how ordinary men will end up thinking about them. By lampooning it in a tangy phrase like MPDG, a trope which has creeped along suddenly gets the light shined on it, and its ridiculousness becomes so well articulated that it's difficult to get away with it again.

Zooey Deschanel in New Girl - the self knowing MPDG. Photo: Channel 4 Photograph: Channel 4

And it's getting increasingly difficult to write an MPDG. Seth Macfarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West, with its whore and Manic Pixie Dream Cowboy characters, felt cartoonishly reductive even for him - it stalled at the box office. Meanwhile New Girl, the hit TV sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel, has succeeded because it takes the MPDG trope and subverts it. Deschanel's Jess seems to see herself as a MPDG - only to find that her dreaminess is irritating and her mania prevents her from saving anyone. In so doing she becomes a rounded character; likeable and quirky but not reductively so.

So where should critics be turning their lances next? Hollywood is still littered with tropes ripes for skewering. Leslie Felperin coined "arthouse stud monkey" for the hirsute chaps (Michael Fassbender chief among them) who pleasure the women of publicly-funded movies. Or you could cite the Plaid Gastronome, seen in Chef and Drinking Buddies, who covers up emotional uncertainty with hipster food trends and Urban Outfitters clothing; Bleak Origin Story Man, where all subsequent heroic endeavours are revealed to be thanks to not getting hugged enough as a kid; and Black Comedy Ivory, the actor who pops up to soothe white audiences that, y'know, it's still a film for them. Perhaps if enough noise is made about these characters-by-committee, there might finally be room for more people that actually reflect our lives.

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Why the Manic Pixie Dream Girl must never return

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It's one of the most mendacious tropes in Hollywood: the female character who throws new light onto a male character's life through her Birkenstocked free spiritedness, while having absolutely no interests or agency of her own.

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In a satirical new video, a suit-clad man clandestinely meets with a prostitute in a hotel room, hoping that she will fulfill the fantasy that his wife can't give him. But it's not a kinky sexual tryst he's looking for: "I want you to turn my life upside down with your whimsical joie de vivre," he confesses. " Manic Pixie Prostitute" is a subversive spin on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype: The phrase, coined by Nathin Rabin in 2007, refers to female characters who "teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." The prostitute role-plays with the man's "bedroom toys," including giant headphones and a zip-up hoodie.

The MPDG has been teasing and torturing male characters for years, bringing excitement to their lives with infantile eccentricity and then breaking their hearts with their emotional aloofness. Famous examples mentioned in the video above include Natalie Portman in Garden State, Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, and "Zooey Deschanel in everything." You may have noticed, though, that the more recent of those two films is nearly a decade old-and that, having moved her quirk to the small screen with , Deschanel hasn't done much lately for the MPDG's big-screen legacy. She may even have tired of such roles. Earlier this year, she said, "When you get sent scripts and you see you're always playing someone's girlfriend when you want to be the central role, it's so depressing."

In fact, critiques of the MPDG may have become more common than the archetype itself. Another popular video from earlier this year skewered the trope by imagining an institution devoted to harboring women who fit the type. Parker Posey's complex character on last season was, as Slate's David Haglund pointed out, a critique of the MPDG as well, demonstrating that "someone with that kind of crazy energy would be exhausting, pushy, and quite possibly deeply troubled," as Haglund put it. In the romantic comedy Ruby Sparks, Zoe Kazan turned the MPDG on its head, depicting a writer (Paul Dano) whose idealistic, winsome female character comes to life and challenges patriarchal notions of what women actually want.

So is the archetype over? It's probably too soon to say. Among recent films, Jennifer Lawrence's character in Silver Linings Playbook could be considered another iteration of the MPDG, though the movie's relatively frank handling of mental illness (not to mention the character's promiscuity) make her a bit more complicated than that. (Not to mention that co-star Bradley Cooper's character is more manic than she is.) Still, five years after the term was coined, filmmakers seem to have at least become self-aware about such characters, and videos like the one above-and the one below-may kill them off yet.

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In a satirical new video, a suit-clad man clandestinely meets with a prostitute in a hotel room, hoping that she will fulfill the fantasy that his wife can't give him. But it's not a kinky sexual tryst he's looking for: "I want you to turn my life upside down with your whimsical joie de vivre," he confesses.

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I don't mean to be cynical-and I should state that I haven't read the book written by Krystal Sutherland, which possibly lends much more nuance to Grace. However, in this adaptation by screenwriter and director Richard Tanne, she simply feels like another piece of clay Henry fails to mend.

One could argue that Grace is not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl because she has her own history: Before joining Henry's class, she was-spoiler-in an accident that took the life of her long-term boyfriend and left her with a severe injury. I'm sure many would point out the story is a warning against Henry's mounting obsession with a girl who has her own life and trauma to work through. The problem is that we never get to see the world through her eyes.

In 2019, Josh Schwartz, the creator of and Gossip Girl, faced a similar dilemma when he adapted the John Green Y.A. novel Looking For Alaska for television. Alaska Young (played by Kristine Froseth) is another emotionally scarred young woman battling clinical depression while a painfully average classmate seeks his own "great perhaps" by panting after her at every turn.

Though the novel was beloved by many, it was also criticized for invoking the MPDG archetype. At least with episodic television, Schwartz was able to devote significantly more time to Alaska and added in many scenes solely from her perspective. "The audience is able to follow these characters in hopefully more fulfilling ways and understand Alaska's journey, why she is the way she is and seeing her in private, not only as Miles sees her," Schwartz explained to Cosmopolitan at the time. This added point of view made all the difference, I think.

But Chemical Hearts never found a way to explore Grace's worldview-despite strong performances from Reinhart and Abrams. In the end, Grace and Henry part: She's taking a gap year to focus on her mental health, while he's suddenly wiser, completed his college essay, and is ready to take on the world-all thanks to Grace but without her.

And just like that, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has risen from the grave.

Emily Tannenbaum is a freelance contributor and the weekend editor at Glamour. Follow her on

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The 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' Didn't Die-She Was Just Given a Tragic Backstory

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I don't mean to be cynical-and I should state that I haven't read the book written by Krystal Sutherland, which possibly lends much more nuance to Grace. However, in this adaptation by screenwriter and director Richard Tanne, she simply feels like another piece of clay Henry fails to mend.

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Ah, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that sentient ray of sunshine sent from heaven to warm the heart and readjust the attitude of even the broodiest, most uptight male protagonist. In his My Year Of Flops entry on Elizabethtown, Nathan Rabin coined the phrase "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" to describe that 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." In Elizabethtown,Kirsten Dunst plays the archetypal Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a flirty, flighty chatterbox stewardess who razzles and dazzles brooding sensitive guy Orlando Bloom. Coked up, or merely high on life? You be the judge. Though Dunst in Elizabethtown and Natalie Portman in Garden State epitomize the contemporary Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the strangely resilient archetype has its roots in the nutty dames of screwball comedy. For every era, there's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl perfectly suited to the times.
2. I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (Leigh Taylor-Young)
Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. In the late '60s and early '70s, MPDGs often took the comely form of spacey hippie chicks burdened with getting grim establishment types to kick back and smell the flowers. In that respect, they mirrored mainstream culture's simultaneous suspicion and fascination with the open sexuality of the emergent counterculture. With the help of pot-laced brownies, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas' groovy free spirit Leigh Taylor-Young helps transform uptight Jew Peter Sellers from a stone-cold square to a swinging proponent of free love and sense derangement. But what does Taylor-Young ultimately want? As is usual with Manic Pixie Dream Girls, the filmmakers don't seem to have given the matter much thought.
3. Garden State (Natalie Portman)
Pharmaceutical companies have made billions peddling antidepressants to twentysomething white people who are, like, totally stressin' over people not appreciating them enough. Zach Braff did similarly well peddling two unusual but no less popular antidepressants in Garden State: The Shins and Natalie Portman. Braff's character is completely transformed when the latter introduces him to the former in a doctor's waiting room, with the plucky, annoying promise, "It'll change your life, I swear." Of course, anything sounds profound coming from such a dreamy woman. Oh, Natalie, your unconventional ways are so inspiring, and your beauty is surprisingly non-threatening! In Garden State,she's a loveably eccentric little angel in the body of a smokin'-hot goddess, spreading good cheer and tuneful indie rock to depressed boys everywhere.
4. Butterflies Are Free (Goldie Hawn)
Hawn began her acting career playing the ditz on TV comedies like Good Morning World and Laugh-In, but by the end of the '60s, her bubble-headed persona became less a figure of fun and more a love-generation ideal. She was the uncomplicated free spirit, unduly hassled by the establishment. Hawn won an Oscar for bringing that character to film in 1969's Cactus Flower, and then in 1972's Butterflies Are Free, she played a happy hippie who helps blind lawyer Edward Albert learn to live on his own and stand up to his fretful, frightful mother. Hawn's boyfriend doesn't care for her friendship with Albert, but what can he do? Hawn is a butterfly, man.
5. Almost Famous (Kate Hudson)
In Cameron Crowe's gilded memories of being a teenage rock critic on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine, his protagonist's muse is an idealistic groupie named Penny Lane. With blinkered idealism, the boy-critic gets all starry-eyed at her visions of the power of music, the freedom of life on the road, and the fantasy of staying young and beautiful forever. Even though Penny's incandescent charisma gets tarnished by that sex she claims she isn't having, not to mention an overdose that might not have been accidental, Crowe's stand-in has been transformed enough to defend her version of rock 'n' roll against the cynicism, infighting, and weariness of the band who won't return her devotion.
6. Joe Versus The Volcano (Meg Ryan)
Ryan plays three roles in 1990's Joe Versus The Volcano, only one of whom is a self-described "flibbertigibbet" (a sort of antiquated version of the MPDG). But since all Ryan's characters are aspects of the same dream woman, they all sport a little flibber. Their collective goal? To get mopey, nebbishy Tom Hanks to overcome his fears-including his concern that he's about to die from a fatal "brain cloud"-and enjoy life for a change. But if Hanks doesn't make it out of the film alive, no worries. The chipper, ever-life-altering Ryan will be waiting for him in Sleepless In Seattle and You've Got Mail, too.
7. The Apartment (Shirley MacLaine)
All Jack Lemmon wants to do is ascend the corporate ladder, even if that means loaning his bosses his terrific bachelor pad for their illicit trysts. Then one day he comes home to find that the peppy elevator operator he likes is lying comatose on his sofa, feeling suicidal after an affair gone wrong. He nurses her back to health and she turns his life upside down, talking a blue streak until she convinces him to adjust his values. This kind of troubled, worldly, yet surprisingly ebullient character became Shirley MacLaine's stock in trade throughout the late '50s and early '60s, in films like Some Came Running and Two For The Seesaw. Three years after 1960's The Apartment, she reunited with Lemmon and director Billy Wilder for Irma La Douce, in which she played the ultimate MPDG: a prostitute who corrupts the policeman trying to save her from the streets.
8. Bringing Up Baby (Katharine Hepburn)
For the bulk of her career, Katharine Hepburn played strong-willed patrician types who defied convention, but still maintained a baseline gravity. But in Howard Hawks' 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn let gravity go, playing a giggly, scatterbrained heiress who torments stuffy scientist Cary Grant with her crazy demands and pet leopard. By the end of the film, Hepburn has turned Grant as nutty as she is, and as they hang from a crumbling dinosaur skeleton, he confesses that following her manic whims has led to the best day of his life.

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9. What's Up, Doc? (Barbra Streisand)
In Peter Bogdanovich's 1972 homage to Bringing Up Baby and Looney Tunes cartoons, Streisand plays a pesky chatterbox who endeavors to help dreary musicologist Ryan O'Neal get the grant he's after, but instead succeeds in driving a wedge between O'Neal and his fiancée, and getting him embroiled in espionage and jewel thievery. Streisand's character never really has any plausible motivation: She's just an anarchic change agent, pitched halfway between a screwball heroine and a cartoon character. Yet after spending a weekend with her, O'Neal is in a better place financially, romantically, and career-wise. Funny how things work out.
10. Annie Hall (Diane Keaton)
The grand champion of the MPDG fighting league, '70s division, just might be Diane Keaton as the title character in Woody Allen's most good-natured film. The fact that she pulled this off in a world that let Goldie Hawn run around loose is just a further testament to how completely Keaton filled out the role of what otherwise could have been a shallow wish-fulfillment fantasy. Her character certainly does have wish-fulfillment elements. But while it's hard to believe such a woman could exist, it's very easy to believe that if she did, she'd be a perfect match for Allen's prototypically nebbishy character, Alvy Singer. If ever there was a comedian who needed to lighten up, it was him, and if there was ever a woman who could make him do it with just a "la-di-dah," it was her.
11. Breakfast At Tiffany's (Audrey Hepburn)
In Truman Capote's short novel Breakfast At Tiffany's, Holly Golightly is a sexually adventurous woman who jumps from man to man, living off the gifts she extorts from them, and changing casually with the seasons. In the film version, Audrey Hepburn plays Holly as a chaste party girl who shares her opinions easily, but keeps her affections to herself (and her cat). Nevertheless, Hepburn-Holly charms writer George Peppard to such an extent that he's able to give up the rich older woman who helps subsidize his work, and instead offer his devotion to his erratic dream woman-who improbably, in contradiction to Capote's book, accepts.
12. Something Wild (Melanie Griffith)
Straitlaced corporate drone Jeff Daniels desperately needs some screws loosened: His life sucks, and his family is suffocating him. But in the movies, there's always a MPDG around to show the buttoned-up bores how to live. In this case, it's crazy Lulu-later transformed into demure Audrey-who kidnaps him and pushes him into a road trip, complete with assumed identities and murderous mobsters. For a generation of young urban professionals, the indelible image of Griffith ripping her tank top apart while straddling a mortified but excited Daniels forever defined what kind of mania they wanted to see in their pixie dream girls.
13. Sweet November (Charlize Theron)
Terminally ill Earth mother Charlize Theron makes things easy for uptight business-dude Keanu Reeves in 2001's Sweet November, an appropriately maudlin remake of the 1968 tearjerker. She enters Reeves' life, imbues it with meaning, then leaves, saving her new beau from the agony of watching her perish. Theron promises to change Reeves' life in a single month, and through highs, lows, and rampant quirkiness, she does just that. By the time she's exited his life, he's regained his joie de vivre and has been blessed with a haunted, vulnerable look that will be catnip to future MPDGs looking for a man to inspire.
14. Autumn In New York (Winona Ryder)
See above. Joan Chen's directorial debut, Autumn In New York,is a strange cross between Sweet November and the culture-clash square-dude-meets-hippie-chick romantic subgenre of the Woodstock era. In 2000's 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, who, like Theron, nurses the tragic secret that she's terminally ill. They live, they love, and then that whole tragic-early-death thing enters the equation. Bummer city.
15. The Last Kiss (Rachel Bilson)
Noted MPDG magnet Zach Braff went to the wedding in the pivotal scene of The Last Kiss soaked through with 30s ennui, and with the oppressive, leaden weights of adulthood, responsibility, and attractive, utterly devoted girlfriend Jacinda Barrett hanging around his neck. Clearly, he needed an escape from his prison of a life. Trailed by a cloud of flowing brunette hair, in walks Rachel Bilson, a chatty, smiley, flirty college student who is actually so diminutive that she's technically a regulation-size pixie. They laugh, they chat, they exchange meaningful glances, and Braff discovers that she's everything his girlfriend isn't: short, 22 years old, and carefree. Unfortunately, Bilson is also manic, and her mania doesn't surface until after they have sex in her dorm room, once Braff's regret is in full, watery-eyed bloom.
16. My Sassy Girl (Elisha Cuthbert)
We're speculating here, since this forthcoming MPDG movie is currently only available in trailer form, but if there were an assembly line for Manic Pixie Dream Girls-and there probably is somewhere-Elisha Cuthbert went straight from the manufacturing facility and onto a subway railing to be saved by Jesse Bradford in My Sassy Girl. From the endearing way she slaps him without provocation to the adorable voices she seems to hear in her head, Cuthbert puts the "charming" in "charmingly mentally impaired." She's just the dash of acute manic depression that a staid, sensible-sweater-wearing guy like Bradford needs. As Bradford's token chubby best friend reminds him, "She's a nutjob!" Bradford's response, "But I love her." Those lines fully sum up the plot of any movie featuring a MPDG.

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Wild things: 16 films featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls

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Ah, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that sentient ray of sunshine sent from heaven to warm the heart and readjust the attitude of even the broodiest, most uptight male protagonist.

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Dream Girls: (500) Days of Summer - Nathan Rabin's Happy Place

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A new feature on Manic Pixie Dream Girls kicks off with (500) Days of Summer, which manages to be at once the ultimate Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie and an intermittently clever deconstruction of the ubiquitous trope.

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"As somebody once said: There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because. It. Didn't. Happen. To. Them." Orlando Bloom intones at the very beginning of Elizabethtown.

Elizabethtown then sets about illustrating by example just what a bona fide fiasco looks and feels like. The film was seemingly cursed from its inception. Ashton Kutcher and Jane Fonda were cast, then dropped out of the lead roles of a soulful superstar shoe designer-turned-suicidal pariah who travels to the South to bury his dead father and and his mother, an eccentric widow who devolves into a manic hysteria once her husband dies. Like Jerry Maguire, it's a morality play about a cocky young man humanized by failure who becomes a success as a human being only after failing spectacularly in business. After a disastrous early screening at the Toronto Film Festival, the film was drastically shortened and its ending altered.

So when Elizabethtown limped into theaters it was already a wounded duck, as queasily personal and intimate as a teenage girl's diary. Going into the film, I remember thinking, "How bad can a Cameron Crowe movie be?" Before Elizabethtown, I could say without reservation that Crowe was one of my favorite filmmakers. Hell, I don't just love many of Crowe's movies: I want to live in his world. For the universe of Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire and Say Anything is an infinitely humane realm ruled by an endlessly benevolent deity: Crowe himself. It's a world where no existential quandary is so great that it can't be solved by the perfect combination of pop song and dream girl, a world of giddy pop epiphanies and gentle humanism unencumbered by protective irony or sneering cynicism.

In Elizabethtown, all of Crowe's formidable virtues as a filmmaker work against him. His palpable affection for his characters-always one of his most admirable traits-morphs into a kind of pathological emotional neediness. "Love me, love me, love me!" screams every frame and every character. Elizabethtown feels like an X-ray of Crowe's soul set to the soundtrack of his life.

Crowe has never been afraid to go for big, pop-operatic moments that skip delirously past realism as they lunge for greatness. There's nothing remotely naturalistic about lines like Jerry Maguire's "You complete me," "You had me at hello," and "Show me the money," or John Cusack playing "In Your Eyes" on a boom box outside Ione Skye's window in Say Anything.

But in Elizabethtown the big setpieces and flashy lines couldn't have backfired more dramatically. For me, the definitive scene in Elizabethtown involves Susan Sarandon tap-dancing to "Moon River" at her husband's memorial service and delivering a mildly risqué stand-up comedy routine that climaxes with her reciting the word "boner" twice, a performance that has the white Southerners in attendance falling out of their seats with laughter and hooting and hollering like balcony-dwellers at laughing-gas night at The Apollo. It's an extraordinarily risky scene that encapsulates the film in a nutshell. If it works, it's the kind of showstopper people talk about for decades to come. But if it doesn't work, it just looks insane and wrong. And, oh Lordy, does Sarandon's big scene not work.

Then again, Sarandon's character is the very embodiment of gritty neo-realism compared to Kirsten Dunst's stewardess/love interest. Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example). The Manic Pixie Dream Girl 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 Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family. As for me, well, let's just say I'm not going to propose to Dunst's psychotically chipper waitress in the sky any time soon.

Elizabethtown shows what happens when a gifted writer-director lets his big ol' heart do his brain's work for him. Yet the film stuck with me in ways genuinely successful films haven't. I find myself talking and thinking about it all the time. Heck, the origins of this whole project began with Elizabethtown. By the time Bloom embarks on an epic road-trip set to a mix-tape of Crowe's favorite songs, Elizabethtown was starting to barrel its way through my formidable defenses. So is Elizabethtown a success? Fuck no, but it's a heartfelt debacle of rare ambition, sincerity and vision.

Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success?: Fiasco

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The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown

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"As somebody once said: There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fee-ass-scoe, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because.

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When I coined the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" in an essay about the movie "Elizabethtown" in 2007, I never could have imagined how that phrase would explode. Describing the film's adorably daffy love interest played by Kirsten Dunst, I defined the MPDG as a fantasy figure who "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."

That day in 2007, I remember watching "Elizabethtown" and being distracted by the preposterousness of its heroine, Claire. Dunst's psychotically bubbly stewardess seemed to belong in some magical, otherworldly realm -- hence the "pixie" -- offering up her phone number to strangers and drawing whimsical maps to help her man find his way. And as Dunst cavorted across the screen, I thought also of Natalie Portman in "Garden State," a similarly carefree nymphet who is the accessory to Zach Braff's character development. It's an archetype, I realized, that taps into a particular male fantasy: of being saved from depression and ennui by a fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done.

When I hit "publish" on that piece, the first entry in a column I called "My Year of Flops," I was pretty proud of myself. I felt as if I had tapped into something that had been a part of our culture for a long time and given it a catchy, descriptive name -- a name with what Malcolm Gladwell might call "stickiness."

But I should clarify a few things here. The trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a fundamentally sexist one, since it makes women seem less like autonomous, independent entities than appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize. Within that context, the phrase was useful precisely because, while still fairly flexible, it also benefited from a certain specificity. Claire was an unusually pure example of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl -- a fancifully if thinly conceived flibbertigibbet who has no reason to exist except to cheer up one miserable guy.

The response to my review was pretty positive but relatively sleepy. The A.V. Club was a whole lot smaller back then and the phrase didn't really gain traction until a year later, when my colleague Tasha Robinson proposed doing a list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls for the "Inventory" feature of our site. The list, published in 2008, was titled "16 films featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls," and featured, along with Dunst and Portman, Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall" and Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

I remember thinking, even back then, that a whole list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls might be stretching the conceit too far. The archetype of the free-spirited life-lover who cheers up a male sad-sack had existed in the culture for ages. But 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.

In the years since I wrote about the MPDG, I've been floored by how pervasive the trope has become. At first it was just a few scattered mentions in other critics' reviews. Then Zooey Deschanel strummed a ukulele and became a Hollywood It girl and suddenly the MPDG was everywhere. During one particularly strange day in 2011, I read that Cameron Crowe (the man behind "Elizabethtown," as well as "Almost Famous" and much else) was asked about the phrase and replied, "I dig it ... I keep thinking I'll run into Nathan Rabin and we'll have a great conversation about it." This blew my mind. I have been writing about pop culture for a long time but I could honestly not believe that Cameron Crowe knew my name and thought about meeting me someday.

But the more the cultural myth of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl expanded, the more my ambivalence about it grew. "Manicpixiedreamgirl" became the title of a young adult novel about a teenage boy obsessed with a free-spirited female classmate, something I only learned about when a reader directed me to the book's Amazon page. The author did not choose the book's title, I learned in my one exchange with him over Facebook; it was his publisher's idea. I couldn't bring myself to read it. Critics began coining spinoff tropes like the "manic pixie dream guy." Mindy Kaling name-dropped Manic Pixie Dream Girls in a New Yorker piece on female-centric films. And last year I had the surreal experience of watching a musical called Manic Pixie Dreamland, about a fantasy realm that produces Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Sitting in the dark theater, I thought: "What have I done?!"

Sure, part of it was that by that point, I had begun to feel a little like a one-hit wonder. But I also realized that I didn't recognize the manic pixie anymore. Clearly labels and definitions are inherently reductive. And if you are a critic, labels and names and definitions are a necessary evil. But it's a particular feature of the fast-paced, ephemeral world of online criticism that writers are always seeking quick reference points to contextualize their analysis -- so the rise of the MPDG was in large part a creation of the Internet as well.

At the film site the Dissolve, where I am a staff writer, my editor has gently discouraged me from using the phrase "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" in my writing, less because using a phrase I coined reeks of self-congratulation, but because in 2014 calling a character a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is nearly as much of a cliché as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.

And I don't need much discouraging, even when writing about a fairly clear-cut instance of a Manic Pixie, like Charlize Theron's impossibly perfect, sexy, supportive gun-slinger in "A Million Ways to Die in the West." As is often the case in conversations about gender, or race, or class, or sexuality, things get cloudy and murky really quickly. I coined the phrase to call out cultural sexism and to make it harder for male writers to posit reductive, condescending male fantasies of ideal women as realistic characters. But I looked on queasily as the phrase was increasingly accused of being sexist itself.

John Green, for one, felt so passionately about the toxic nature of the trope that in a Tumblr post he declared that his novel "Paper Towns" "is devoted IN ITS ENTIRETY to destroying the lie of the manic pixie dream girl" before adding, "I do not know how I could have been less ambiguous about this without calling (Paper Towns) The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed." 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." In a later interview, when once again confronted with the dreaded MPDG label, Kazan continued, "I don't like that term ... I think it's turned into this unstoppable monster where people use it to describe things that don't really fall under that rubric."

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.

It doesn't make sense that a character as nuanced and unforgettable as Annie Hall could exist solely to cheer up Alvy Singer. As Kazan has noted, Allen based a lot of Annie Hall on Diane Keaton, who, as far as I know, is a real person and not a ridiculous male fantasy.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to pop culture: I'm sorry for creating this unstoppable monster. Seven years after I typed that fateful phrase, I'd like to join Kazan and Green in calling for the death of the "Patriarchal Lie" of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. I would welcome its erasure from public discourse. I'd applaud an end to articles about its countless different permutations. Let's all try to write better, more nuanced and multidimensional female characters: women with rich inner lives and complicated emotions and total autonomy, who might strum ukuleles or dance in the rain even when there are no men around to marvel at their free-spiritedness. But in the meantime, Manic Pixies, it's time to put you to rest.
Nathan Rabin is a staff writer for the Dissolve and the author of four books, most recently "You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me," about his experiences following Phish and Insane Clown Posse.

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I'm sorry for coining the phrase "Manic Pixie Dream Girl"

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When I coined the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" in an essay about the movie "Elizabethtown" in 2007, I never could have imagined how that phrase would explode. Describing the film's adorably daffy love interest played by Kirsten Dunst, I defined the MPDG as a fantasy figure who "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."

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The "manic pixie dream girl" is a well-known pop-culture cliché. The term was coined by critic Nathan Rabin in his review of 2005's Elizabethtown to describe the cheerful, bubbly flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst. Since then, this character type has been analyzed everywhere, from XoJane to Slate to the Guardian. A list of film examples of the manic pixie dream girl includes roles played by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Natalie Portman to both Hepburns (Audrey and Katharine).

Rabin claimed that the MPDG "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries." In a recent exploration of the manic-pixie-dream-girl phenomenon, though, the New Statesman's Laurie Penny argued that the ubiquity of this stock character in mainstream movies has real-world implications. "Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story," Penny writes. "Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's."

In Penny's view, the manic pixie dream girl is not just an onscreen fantasy-she's a template for young women's lives. "Fiction creates real life," Penny notes. "Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men." For Penny (and for many who commented on her piece), manic pixie dream girlhood served as a model for how to live as a teen and early 20-something.

This is a problem, according to Penny, because women "deserve to be able to write our own stories rather than exist as supporting characters in the stories for men."

The end of the MPDG would be good news for men too. The manic pixie dream girl may serve as a catalyst for male transformation, but in both her real and fictional manifestations, she sends the message that a bright and sensitive young man can learn to embrace life only by falling in love with a woman who sees the dazzling colors and rich complexities he can't. Just as the all-too familiar " Magical Negro " character uses mystical intuitive powers to help white folks tap their God-given potential, the MPDG reminds men that they need (and, more precisely, are entitled to) a women's inspiration and encouragement to reach their own true destiny.

"For me, Manic Pixie Dream Girl was the story that fit," writes Penny, admitting that she had the "basic physical and personality traits ... the raw materials" to live into the part. I, on the other hand, had the requisite qualities to be the boy who fell in love with MPDGs. I was shy, un-athletic, bookish, and pudgy. I was horny, lonely, and brooding. I fell for clever, impulsive, short-haired brunettes. I kept my longings to myself, wanting to spare them the awkwardness of making the "I'm flattered but I don't want to spoil our friendship" speech, and wanting to spare myself what I correctly imagined would be the excruciating humiliation of having to hear it. Not old enough to buy cigarettes or vote, I was well on my way to being one of what Penny calls the "mournful men-children" who attach themselves to the bright, the unconventionally pretty, the eager-to-please.

Decades before the term was coined, a manic pixie dream girl gave me my first proper kiss. Thirty years ago this month, while visiting relatives in Austria, my Viennese grandmother introduced me to Bettina, one of the many teens to whom she gave private English lessons. Bettina was six months older than I was; dark haired and impulsive. On our first date, we went to see La Cage aux Folles with German subtitles; on our second, we went skinny-dipping in the Old Danube; on our third, we smoked hash, listened to the Sex Pistols, and read Paul Celan aloud with her friends from an anarchist youth collective.

We didn't sleep together, but she taught me to open my mouth when I was kissing, and to cup her face in my hand as my tongue touched hers. After a fourth date and hours of hiking and making out in the Lainzer Tiergarten, I asked if I was her boyfriend. She laughed, shook her head, and decades ahead of her time, gave a short but impassioned speech about how monogamy was the enemy of true love.

By the time I left Vienna, I was utterly infatuated.

For the next two years, we wrote each other long letters two or three times a month. Feeling that my American education wasn't up to par, Bettina sent me reading, listening, and viewing lists in both German and English. She turned me on to the Lessings (Gotthold and Doris), the Velvet Underground, and Oskar Kokoschka. I read and listened to everything she suggested whether I liked it or not. I rarely reciprocated with my own offerings, fearful she'd find my own tastes (Stephen King, The Police) pedestrian, unimaginative, and thoroughly disappointing.

Rabin defined the manic pixie dream girl as a muse whose primary role is to teach and transform a young man. As contemporary a trope as it feels, it's as old as Dante with his vision of being guided through paradise by his saintly Beatrice. Bettina was my guide, and as much as my adolescent self thought it adored her, I thought less about her and more about how it was she made me feel. Though I questioned whether I was good enough for her, and I felt lucky that she'd chosen me, I didn't question her role as change agent in my life. It was a one-sided relationship not because I was any more selfish than your average teen boy, but because I took it for granted that this brilliant young woman knew the world better than I did. As unstable as she may be, the manic pixie dream girl not only senses a young man's potential in a way he can't, she intuitively knows how to lead him to his destiny. She knows him better than he knows himself, or so he believes. That convenient assumption allows the young man both to adore the MPDG and to avoid any responsibility for reciprocity. How can he be expected to give anything back when she has this magical intuition about the world that so vastly exceeds his own?

Not long after we both started at university in our respective countries, Bettina's letters stopped coming. I was in love with someone else, but I missed my exchanges with her. My notes went without reply; I only had an address; no phone number, and in the mid-1980s, of course no internet through which to follow up. I asked my grandmother, who said she'd also lost touch with Bettina. Finally, one day in 1987, a black-bordered card came in the mail. It was a Todesanzeige, a death announcement. Just 20, Bettina had committed suicide by jumping out of a fifth-floor window. I later learned from my grandmother that Bettina had suffered from depression for years, something she'd never told me. Something, of course, about which I'd never asked. I'd taken her self-sufficiency for granted.

Dante's Beatrice also died young, at 24. The great poet met her only three times in real life, but in his writing, transformed her into perhaps the original manic pixie dream girl. Dante was perhaps self-aware enough to recognize the gap between the real Beatrice Portinari and this icon whom he called his "beatitude" and his "salvation." He called her la gloriosa donna della mia mente: "the glorious lady of my mind." When I studied Dante in college, the semester after Bettina's death when I was still moping and ostentatiously mourning, I came across that line in a commentary. I realized that though I'd had far more intimacy with Bettina than Dante had had with Beatrice, I was doing the same thing.

"We're not fantasies, and we weren't made to save you." So Laurie Penny tells men on behalf of her fellow recovering manic pixie dream girls, those who unlike Beatrice or Bettina will live to become so much more interesting as they age and deepen. Becoming more interesting, however, will mean becoming less of the "submissive, exploitable, transcendent ideal" about whom so many young men fantasize.

Here's the challenge for men in general, filmmakers and writers in particular. We need women who are lead characters, but that's only part of the equation: We deserve to see men who love these women for the complicated, messy, decidedly non-ethereal people they are. That process has already started; as Clementine Ford points out in Daily Life, the growing influence of feminist writers and actresses like Lena Dunham, Ellen Page, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler means more girls than ever are growing up with inspiration to "become their own heroes."

In real life, men can and do learn to love women whose lives don't revolve around catalyzing male transformation. In art as well as life, the manic pixie dream girl ideal exists because too many men remain intimidated by women who will not revolve their lives around our needs and our growth. We need to let go of the glorious ladies of our minds, and start being fully present with very real women with minds of their own.

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recent exploration of the manic-pixie-dream

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The Real-World Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché

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The "manic pixie dream girl" is a well-known pop-culture cliché. The term was coined by critic Nathan Rabin in his review of 2005's Elizabethtown to describe the cheerful, bubbly flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst. Since then, this character type has been analyzed everywhere, from XoJane to Slate to the Guardian .

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I recently watched Crazy About Her, a film released in 2021. When I first saw this movie recommended, I expected it to be a cheesy, perhaps slightly unrealistic romantic comedy that might become a comfort movie for a rainy night. It came across like that for a couple of minutes. Then, the male protagonist runs into stunning woman at the bar. Not only stunning, but hyperactive and nameless for most of their encounter. This movie is probably intended to be humorous and far-fetched, but it's just a disappointing remake of the same tropes: a plain male protagonist thinks he can somehow save his wild love interest who changed his life with her quirkiness.

This movie, aside from being disappointing, made me think. It was the first movie I had watched in a while that seemed to revive the 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' archetype. In fact, I had thought that the trope had gone out of fashion now. You may even be totally unfamiliar with the term - it isn't something that comes up in everyday conversation. What is a 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl', and why is it something that needs to be discussed?

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl character (MPDG) refers to a particular type of female character who is often a whimsical romantic interest with no agency of her own. Most examples that spring to mind are not recent - think of Natalie Portman's character in Garden State, and Alaska in John Green's Looking for Alaska, just to name a few. Obviously, not all 'quirky' female characters are automatically labelled as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The same goes for any female love interest. Sometimes, the term can be sorely misused. But it has been a long time since I've watched a recent movie which struck me immediately as a reflection of the MPDG archetype.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl character (MPDG) refers to a particular type of female character who is often a whimsical romantic interest with no agency of her own

It raises the question - is this just a harmless character trope? Surely there is a high enough level of media literacy to understand that this is not a genuine reflection of women, but a stock character to spice things up a little. A fun-loving, quirky girl on-screen is arguably more interesting than a cast of characters with no real personality trying to reflect reality. Reality is boring. Movies exist for entertainment. When watching Crazy About Her, it certainly struck me as existing for this reason.

And yet it is incredibly difficult to see this trope as mere entertainment. Manic Pixie Dream Girls are never living their own story; the entire purpose of this character is to serve the male protagonist (who is also, usually, incredibly boring). Though she may teach him how to live, and how to have fun, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is 2D. That is the problem: women should not exist as supporting characters for men.

Women should not exist as supporting characters for men

On top of this, the MPDG is, typically, portrayed as suffering with mental illness. There is nothing wrong with the representation of mental health issues. In fact, I believe there should be far more positive representations of mentally ill people in movies - it's often romanticised, demonised or entirely overlooked. Frustratingly, Crazy About Her seems to romanticise mental illness and makes it an obstacle to what really matters: the romantic quest of the male protagonist. I wish this movie had reflected the reality of life within a mental institution. I also wish it had portrayed the complexities of maintaining relationships when dealing with mental illness, but the MPDG archetype doesn't reflect the struggle of mental illness or allow any significant character development. The MPDG is shallow and, quite frankly, uninteresting.

Of course, there are male characters who fit the Manic Pixie Dream character trope, serving little purpose aside from aiding the protagonist in their journey. But there are entirely different implications here. Stock characters are no harm - until this 'stock character' becomes the main form of representation for women in film. The MPDG stereotype may have faded out of relevance, with women taking more positive roles and a higher percentage of female protagonists in high-grossing films, but it doesn't change the fact that this trope exists, and is still being used.

Stock characters are no harm - until this 'stock character' becomes the main form of representation for women in film

There are countless ways to include female characters, even as love interests, without making them one-dimensional. Women in film shouldn't be reduced to shallow love interests, and young girls shouldn't see this as a template for their lives when growing up. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope should have been forgotten about long ago and I hope it's something I see less and less in the future.

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I recently watched Crazy About Her, a film released in 2021. When I first saw this movie recommended, I expected it to be a cheesy, perhaps slightly unrealistic romantic comedy that might become a comfort movie for a rainy night. It came across like that for a couple of minutes.

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Who was the pixie girl and where did she come from?

It's not always easy to let go of what is comfortable, for some of you, the Manic Pixie archetype might describe some of your favorite characters. If that's the case, I'm here for you during this difficult time.

So let's take a trip down memory lane and see where the pixie girl came from, and why she existed in the first place.

MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL DEFINITION

What is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a type of female character often depicted as a whimsical, quirky, sometimes eccentric, fantasy woman who saves the male protagonist from himself. She usually aides in his transformation without ever showing any real agency of her own. She is a vivacious character whose main purpose is to teach the male protagonist that life is worth embracing. Film critic Nathan Rabin writes in his original review of Elizabethtown that the MPDG "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."

MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL EXAMPLES

Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst) - Elizabethtown

Sam Feehan (Natalie Portman) - Garden State

Allison (Zooey Deschanel) - Yes Man

What the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is, comes from decades (really centuries in storytelling) of the same thing⏤male writers writing male characters...and/or male directors directing them.

And don't get me wrong, I enjoy all perspectives, male included. And any person, regardless of gender, is capable of writing these characters. But looking back in Hollywood history, male-dominated perspective often left us with underdeveloped female characters that offered nothing more than the idea that women are there to help men change, and men need women in order to change. Yikes. Watch a bit more about this below.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl Explained

Of course there are other archetypes in film that are quite literally built on supporting the protagonist regardless of genders on either end.

But the real criticism of the MPDG is that the mere existence of having a female archetype to help a man change IS actually sexist.

Let's take a look at some classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl examples, and maybe see why it's time to say goodbye.

And then we can talk about a few other characters that are falsely mistaken as pixie dream girls...maybe they can live.

Manic Pixie Dream Girl Examples

Examples of the pixie girl in film

Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown gives us our first, labeled, MPDG.

Nathan Rabin made up the phrase to describe the sort of ridiculous-ness of Kirsten Dunst's character. The fantastical, super bubbly, almost other-worldy character, hence "pixie" girl, who helps Orlando Bloom's character, find his way.

Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst) in Elizabethtown

I'm a big believer in just enjoying films, and not over analyzing every little thing. Especially lately, with the current climate---so I'll be the first to say, I love Garden State regardless of the fact that it employs one of the most obvious examples of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Zach Braff writes the film, directs it, stars in it, and has a hand in producing it. So it's not super surprising, though well-intentioned, that the love-interest, Sam Feehan, is there to serve him. Of course she serves the story, but the story is all about him. And I love Sam, she's smart, funny, experiences her own pain and struggles, (is also a pathological liar)⏤she isn't a flat character by any means. But there's no real transformation for her. Hopefully she'll stop lying...?

The plot shows the protagonist coming back home for his mother's funeral; grappling more with his complete indifference towards her death than the pain of it. He meets quirky Sam and finally feels something again. So, thanks for that Sam.

Sam Feehan (Natalie Portman) in Garden State

Unorthodox, spontaneous, moped riding, Allison from Yes Man, is hilarious and almost fully developed, but still serves one purpose. Written by Jarrad Paul, Nicholas Stoller, Andrew Mogel, and directed by Peyton Reed, the film uses the trope to serve Jim Carrey's natural ability to say "yes" to new things.

Deschanel expresses her frustration with the cliche by expressing on Slate: "When you get sent scripts and you see you're always playing someone's girlfriend when you want to be the central role, it's so depressing." She goes on to say that "...as a comedienne, it felt so frustrating to always be setting up someone else's comedic moment."

Not to mention, even these female characters that don't appear to have any agency in the film, do have nuances, but are somehow still lumped into this one category.

If they're pretty, eccentric, or depart even just a little from the mainstream heroine, they must be the same!

Allison (Zooey Desschanel) - Yes Man

The Mistaken Manic Pixie

There are plenty of female characters that may have offbeat, or even vivacious personalities, but that doesn't make them Manic Pixie Dream Girls. They serve a real purpose for the story. And regardless if they're completely put together, completely screwed up, or somewhere in the middle, their significance doesn't exist only in the mind of a male.

Luckily, many writers are getting it, and we're seeing more robust characters and narratives because of it.

Summer in (500) Days of Summer

One example of this mistaken MPDG is Zooey Deschanel's character in 500 Days of Summer. While she is often considered a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, here it's a little more complicated.

She does technically, help the protagonist, Tom, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character, see something new. But it's only because she is existing for herself, being true to herself and serving her own needs, shattering his fantasy of her, that he learns anything at all. This is a much more dynamic character that aids in the progression of the entire story rather than just Tom's ideas.

In the beginning of the film, she is a free-spirit, an unwilling-to-settle- down-kind-of-girl. And when they get together, Tom can't believe she's picked him, and hopes to change her perspective on love. He's inevitably crushed when she breaks it off. And even more so when he discovers that she's engaged⏤he can't believe it. Now, he knows for sure that love can't be real. But she again shatters his belief system by telling him love does exist, it just wasn't with him.

I just woke up one day and I knew⏤what I was never sure of with you.

So he does have a transformation because of her. But she doesn't exist in his fantasy world.

She actually breaks it open.

I'm a big fan of this character, and this story. She's real, and the film provides space for her to actually be who she is. Change her mind. And learn something new about herself, regardless of what the protagonist is doing.

Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Aside from writing one of the greatest scripts of all time, Charlie Kaufman can also create a female lead that is dripping with eccentricity, weirdness, and charm, while not being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl at all.

Clementine (played by Kate Winslet) is the agent of change in her life. The inciting incident of the entire movie is Joel (Jim Carrey), finding out that she has erased him from her memory.

In fact, all of her decisions throughout the film are solely for herself⏤whether that's staying out late when she's bored with Joel, ignoring her new, occasionally annoying, boyfriend, Patrick (played by Elijah Wood), she does what she wants. She even screams, what is now a famous quote that explicitly excludes her from the MPDG trope:

I remember that speech really well

Kaufman's scripts have some of the best lines, but it's clear that it's not just because they sound good, or read well. The character of Clementine is a fully realized human being, who doesn't exist for the purpose of anyone else but herself.

More characters like her, please.

So Long to the Pixie Girl

Why we won't miss pixie dream girl

Well, for starters, even Nathan Rabin wishes he could take it back.

He writes a letter of apology for creating the term. In it he reminisces how "[he] looked on queasily as the phrase was increasingly accused of being sexist itself."

Just to be clear, Nathan Rabin is not responsible for this remissive categorization. He simply gave the pre-existing sexism a name.

In fact, "[he] coined the phrase to call out cultural sexism and to make it harder for male writers to posit reductive, condescending male fantasies of ideal women as realistic characters."

But unfortunately, that's not what happened.

Screenwriters create more pixies, and even novelists write books about them. (author, Tom Leveen writes"Manicpixiedreamgirl").

In the years after Rabin's Elizabethtown review, there was a ton of criticism for a well-intentioned critique. From Zoe Kazaan labeling the trope as pure misogyny to the actual rise of the trope, giving the idea a home, he consequently, gave it a whole lot of power.

He admits "...power [that] spun out of control."

Rabin doesn't want it, and most of the filmmaking community is over it.

Thankfully, contemporary culture has brought us new female writers and directors with varying perspectives that this cliche is at its end.

Writing Better Characters

Moving on from the MPDG trope

Nowadays, as film and television competes in complexity with great literature, writing female characters (or "Manic Pixie Boys" because yes, that is also unfortunately a thing), without any agency, is really just bad writing.

And this applies to films that include same-sex couples too.

We want fully fleshed out characters with their own agency, regardless of gender, who are in conflict with other characters based on who they are and what they want. Not so one dimensional that they only serve a single purpose.

So witty, quirky, women aren't the problem. But making sure that their wittiness, their quirkiness, exist for some male fantasy, is dead.

UP NEXT

How to Write a Meet Cute

Now that you understand how important it is to write stronger, less-predictable women characters, let's read up on how to write that scene where she meets her partner for the first time. Do away with conventions and revitalize this plot point to make it less cringe-y.

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It's not always easy to let go of what is comfortable, for some of you, the Manic Pixie archetype might describe some of your favorite characters. If that's the case, I'm here for you during this difficult time. So let's take a trip down memory lane and see where the pixie girl came from, and why she existed in the first place.

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Clockwise from left: Chloë Grace Moretz (with Jamie Blackley) in "If I Stay"; Emma Roberts in "Palo Alto"; Jennifer Lawrence in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1"; Aubrey Plaza in "Life After Beth"; Elle Fanning in "Maleficent"; Quvenzhané Wallis in "Annie." Credit... Sean McCabe

Girls grow up on big and little screens, and sometimes the thinking about girls and girlhood grows, too. Inspired by Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" - a magnificent film that tells the story of a boy's life from 6 to 18 - we are taking a look at how girls are growing up in the movies. American mainstream cinema, a timid enterprise dependent on formulas and genres, can be mind-blowingly retrograde when it comes to women and girls. And while an occasional woman or girl rules the box office, too many of their on-screen sisters are sidelined or just left out of the picture.

Characters like Katniss Everdeen are changing girlhood and challenging tired stereotypes by not waiting for some guy to save the day: They're saving themselves and their worlds, too. Yet Katniss, her screen sisters and the industry have a very long way to go. In one study the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media looked at 5,554 "distinct speaking characters" in 122 family movies rated G, PG or PG-13 that were released between 2006 and 2009. The institute discovered that only 29.2 percent of those roles were female, while a whopping 70.8 percent were male. In other words, there were 2.42 male characters for every female one. Put another way, there was Harry and Ron and then there was Hermione, the smartest girl in the class. Hermione ruled, but not nearly enough.

In the past, some actresses had a measure of power or at least staying power in Hollywood, but too many more were typecast as bratty sisters, dutiful daughters or sexpots, and then cast aside. And some of their most memorable characters were, like their adult counterparts, defined by hypersexuality or asexuality. Such was the case in 1962, when Dolores Haze, better known as Lolita, was the barely pubescent object of her stepfather's lust in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the notorious Nabokov novel. That same year, Scout Finch was the object of her father's moral instruction in the movie version of "To Kill a Mockingbird." A year later, Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" rocked the country, becoming a best-selling portent of second-wave feminism.

What has changed in the years since? Quite a lot off screen, if not nearly enough on: Nymphets and tomboys still show up, as do brainy, funny, scary and tough girls. The picture of girlhood at the movies has become an increasingly diverse, sometimes contradictory array of identities, including bold revisions of age-old archetypes and brave new heroines. That said, the faces of these girls remain exasperatingly monochromatic. So all hail Quvenzhané Wallis, who after leading the charge (and earning an Oscar nod) in "Beasts of the Southern Wild," appears in December as Little Orphan Annie in a remake of the 1982 movie musical. The sun will come out tomorrow - but this time so will the daughter. Here, we take a look at some of the other pixies and powerhouses who are also changing movie girlhood.

THE WARRIORS
Katniss Everdeen, who returns this fall in "Mockingjay - Part 1," the third installment in the "Hunger Games" franchise, is so cool, so capable, so focused, with her archer's eye, on the task in front of her that it's easy to lose sight of just how revolutionary she is. Not only in the dystopian fictional universe she inhabits, where she has been radicalized by the cruelty of the Hunger Games and the iniquity of the society that supports them. In the world of mass entertainment, too, Katniss is a transformative figure: a solitary warrior, a heroine whose personal struggles for survival and dignity are joined to a larger fight for justice. And also, as played by Jennifer Lawrence, a potent force at the global box office - a blockbuster Joan of Arc.

On the movie landscape, Katniss is not entirely alone, though she is still very much outnumbered. In recent years, there have been a handful of movies about young women who can throw a punch, land a kick and run like the wind, girls who are more than sidekicks or pneumatic eye candy. Shailene Woodley's Tris Prior in "Divergent" - another crossover from the fertile world of young-adult dystopian literature - is, like Katniss, a fighter against corrupt authority. In Joe Wright's "Hanna" (2011), Saoirse Ronan is a big-eyed, sweet-faced killer, trained in combat by her father. In the culty "Kick-Ass" movies, Chloë Grace Moretz portrays the fearless Hit Girl with a foul mouth and an appetite for combat.

The violence there was played partly for laughs and shock value, making the most of the incongruity between the cuteness of the actress and the viciousness of the character, but it also tapped into a deep reservoir of restlessness and rage. For most of movie history - from the old westerns to "Thelma & Louise" by way of exploitation gore-fests like "I Spit on Your Grave" - women's violence could be justified by narrowly defined motives of self-defense or revenge. The broader battle between right and wrong - and also the pleasure of action for its own sake - have typically been male prerogatives, handed down over the decades from gunslingers to superheroes.

The comic-book fraternity has been slow to admit women as full members. Ms. Lawrence has made an impression as the blue-skinned, shape-shifting Mystique (a role originated by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), but her team is still called the X-Men for a reason. And if women can fight their way toward parity, it will be Katniss who blazed the trail. A.O. SCOTT

THE NEW SEARCHERS
Journey is one of the most overused words in movie-speak. One reason are guides like "Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You'll Ever Need!" that borrow heavily from Joseph Campbell, who wrote that whether the hero is "ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan." Too bad that in Campbell's "monomyth" that journey is also unequivocally male: "The woman is life, the hero its knower and master." The classic trip has been so historically male that one critic, Eric Leed, gave it a biological spin, labeling it a "spermatic journey." Never mind that every so often a girl or woman - Dorothy, Thelma, Louise or Hushpuppy - hits the road. She gets out of the house and, like a footloose Penelope, weaves an adventure instead of a shroud.

Quvenzhané Wallis in "Beasts of the Southern Wild." Credit... Jess Pinkham/Fox Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press

The truth is that women were on the move in movies before talkies, in serials like " The Perils of Pauline" (1914) and westerns like "The Covered Wagon" (1923). Although girls tend to experience more domestic exploits, a few second-wave feminist girls did get out and about, including in "Paper Moon" (1973) and the original "True Grit" (1969). In recent decades, the movie industry hasn't been much interested in women and girls, so it hasn't created all that many female-driven escapades. Yet the emergence of new peripatetic girls and women who voyage with purpose and goals - in the latest "True Grit," "Winter's Bone," "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and the coming "Tracks" (Sept. 19) - suggests that our movies may be finally catching up to female Americans on the move. MANOHLA DARGIS

SCREAM TEENS
Movies have long embraced young freaks and ghouls, those teenage werewolves and other children of the damned, and, in recent years, the young adult book market has helped pump fresh hot blood into the screen. The horror genre goes so well with the adolescent body, after all, both fertile sites churning with strange liquids, violent passions and seemingly inexplicable, terrifying changes. "I want to be normal," says the spectacularly paranormal Carrie (Chloë Grace Moretz) in the recent remake of the 1976 Brian De Palma freak-out. There's no chance of normal for Carrie, no matter her era, or for the title character in "Life After Beth," a young zombie (Aubrey Plaza) whose morbid resurrection turns her into the ultimate clingy girlfriend. "I kind of wish she'd stay dead," her boyfriend says with a sigh.

Chloë Grace Moretz in "Carrie" (2013). Credit... Michael Gibson/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Screen Gems

Having a monster for a boyfriend has metaphoric potential, but it's also true that these days it's harder for a white girl to hook up with a black guy than it is to get serious with a super-white vampire ("Twilight") or suck face with a deadly white zombie ("Warm Bodies"). The Production Code's ban on "sex relationships between the white and black races" ended in 1956, but in today's neo-segregationist cinema, blacks and whites rarely mix romantically. So while "Twilight" introduced a Native American heartthrob with Jacob the wolf boy, Bella was always destined to remain on Team Edward. Given our black-and-white obsession with race, it's no wonder that in the 2013 Southern gothic "Beautiful Creatures" a teenage witch who learns that "no good could come from us loving a mortal." MANOHLA DARGIS

ONCE UPON A TIME RIGHT NOW
Disney has been banking on princesses since Snow White warbled "Someday My Prince Will Come" in 1937. Decades later, its sagging fortunes were lifted in 1989 by the animated Ariel, a.k.a. the Little Mermaid, an undersea princess who paved the way for the tiara-wearing likes of Belle, Jasmine and Tiana. In 2000, the company created Disney Princess, what it called a "young girls' lifestyle brand" that brought together eight of its actual and honorary princesses under one "marketing umbrella." Since then more princesses have been gathered under that parasol, including Merida from Pixar's first female-driven movie, "Brave" (2012). Disney bought Pixar in 2006, and it's hard not to wonder if Pixar's run of male-driven hits didn't play into Disney's fleeting concerns about the whole princess thing.

Some of that unease was apparent in Disney's titling of "Rapunzel," which it renamed "Tangled" because, according to a 2010 article in The Los Angeles Times, company suits believed - after the disappointing box office returns of "The Princess and the Frog" (2009) - that boys didn't want to see a movie with "princess" in the title. Maybe not, but to judge by that billion-dollar juggernaut called "Frozen," everyone wants to see a good princess movie with an ear-worming song. Critics debated whether the movie repackaged stereotypes or was a continuation of the slow-moving revolution that had begun with the introduction of minority princesses. "Frozen," of course, splits the difference with two royals: one who kisses a guy and one who, smiling and skating, emphatically does not.

With two shorn wings and an astonishing maternal kiss, the recent "Maleficent" demolishes stereotypes that were only tweaked in "Frozen." So it's a surprise that "Maleficent" - a fascinating live-action origin story about the mean, green fairy in Disney's 1959 "Sleeping Beauty" - hasn't inspired all that much critical thumb sucking. It stars Angelina Jolie as the titular fairy whose path to villainy is directly traced to the catastrophic moment when her old childhood friend, Stefan, cuts off her wings in a power grab. It's a shock of violence that's been read as a rape, and more than one observer has seen allusions to Ms. Jolie's double mastectomy. In retaliation, Maleficent curses Stefan's daughter, Aurora (the future slumbering beauty), only to gradually, and with great feeling, fall for the girl.

The scenes of the emotionally chilled Maleficent melting while she watches Aurora grow up are flecked with comedy. But they also chip away at the cliché of the beautiful evil woman whose power is inseparable from her narcissism, and who invariably sees a younger woman as a competitor. Maleficent only threatens to lash out at Aurora - the girl loves her in turn - saving her fury for Stefan. By the time Aurora slips into her curse-induced sleep, there's a prince hovering at the story's edge. Yet his kiss doesn't awaken Aurora. Instead, Maleficent stands over this girl and, with a tender, motherly kiss on the head, wakes both this beauty and movie genre, ushering the Disney fairy tale into the 21st century. MANOHLA DARGIS

GIRLS GONE WILD
American popular culture has always indulged male rebellion in various forms, from James Dean and Holden Caulfield to Adam Sandler and the overgrown man-children who have followed in his wake. Girls have played by different rules, and their acting out is more likely to be viewed with disapproval or prurience, and to turn on the defiance of sexual taboos.

At first glance, the four college friends in "Spring Breakers" (2012), who set out on a hedonistic crime spree in the Florida sunshine, seem to belong to this tradition, which often blurs the line between liberation and exploitation. But Candy, Cotty, Faith and Brit are not looking primarily for male attention, or even for sex. They are American dreamers acting out of a sense of constitutional entitlement: They want money, stuff, fun and freedom, and above all the thrill of raising a middle finger at the world's expectations.

This kind of rebellion has its dangers, and movies about young women in revolt frequently carry a cautionary, moralistic charge. The bored suburbanites in Gia Coppola's recent debut, "Palo Alto," risk being taken advantage of by creepy older men or callous male peers; the privileged housebreakers in her aunt Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring" (2013) risk jail and disgrace.

But often the thrill of recklessness outweighs such perils. There is pleasure in asserting yourself against the world's indifference or censure, and power, too, especially in the company of friends. For boys, rock 'n' roll has been a perpetually renewable source of that power, and girls have been tapping into that for themselves, breaking out of the traditional roles of groupie or girlfriend. Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart were awesome in "The Runaways," Floria Sigismondi's underrated movie about the 1970s hard-rock band of that name. So were Elle Fanning and Alice Englert in Sally Potter's "Ginger & Rosa" (2012), at least until the selfishness and hypocrisy of certain adults spoiled their trip through the '60s. And the spirit of punk rock - mischievous, angry, joyful and silly - has never been more truly served than by the trio of middle-school Swedish thrashers that invaded American screens last spring in "We Are the Best." A. O. SCOTT

LOVE AND DEATH
According to Edgar Allan Poe, "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." Alfred Hitchcock had a perverse respect for this idea, as did the makers of "Love Story" (1970), which asked, "What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?"

Why not ask the girl herself? The nexus of romance and mortality has been given, as it were, a new lease on life by a crop of teenage melodramas, many of them based on young adult novels, that explore the nexus between love and death from the point of view of brave, serious, smart teenage girls. The summer of 2014 began with "The Fault in Our Stars" and wrapped up with "If I Stay," both drawn from young-adult best sellers and both starring formidable and already seasoned young actresses. Shailene Woodley, in "Stars," and Chloë Grace Moretz, in "Stay," each played artistically minded adolescents whose first experiences of love are shadowed by mortality.

Ms. Moretz in "If I Stay." Credit... Doane Gregory/Warner Bros. Pictures

But these characters are more resilient than tragic. Unlike, say, Bella Swan of the "Twilight" books and movies, they are not consumed and paralyzed by romantic longing. They prove themselves capable of juggling their dream boys with other dreams and ambitions, of suffering the pangs of love and loss with discipline and humor. What they project, even when faced with the disruptive forces of passion and calamity, is common sense, kindness and responsibility.

Remove the specter of fatal illness or accident, and you see that they are romantic real girls. Ms. Woodley's character in "The Spectacular Now" (2013) is an especially vivid example of this type, a girl who might once have been sidelined as a nerd or a wallflower but who now can now be seen as a heroine in her own right. A. O. SCOTT

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Girls grow up on big and little screens, and sometimes the thinking about girls and girlhood grows, too. Inspired by Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" - a magnificent film that tells the story of a boy's life from 6 to 18 - we are taking a look at how girls are growing up in the movies.