History of the Manic Pixie

An Autopsy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Part 1/3

The following essay contains copious spoilers of the 1991 film, “Career Opportunities,” and the 2005 film, “Elizabethtown.”

That should not dissuade you. Trust me: You really do not want to watch Career Opportunities or Elizabethtown.

It also contains a link to the final scene from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which you can choose to watch or not at your own discretion.

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Intro: The Story As it Stands

Here is the story.

Throughout film history, but concentrated specifically in the 00s, there was a character archetype. A lovable, quirky, seemingly magical woman who showed up exclusively as a love interest for sad, lonely men. She was coined by critic Nathan Rabin, in his review of Elizabethtown, as the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”

Rabin, however, did not name something new. Once he put a label to this concept, people ran with it and applied it to dozens of movies they had seen before. The publication that featured Rabin’s review, the AV club, featured their own list of sixteen Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

To better illustrate: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl might play a ukulele or other instrument, and sing at random times. She might wear bright colors or dye her hair. She might be simultaneously silly and profound, always willing to impart a life lesson to a (typically) depressed male protagonist, who she would fall in love with for little believable reason. The film would center his development, in response to her.

Internet critics ran with this idea, and contempt for the character grew as knowledge of the trope spread. Baked into the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl were two core problems, which I will list here.

1: She had no real complexity or development of her own.

2: Because she existed entirely to give the male protagonist a life lesson, to reignite his joy or his purpose while he gave nothing meaningful back to her, it came off as a male fantasy.

As both of these storytelling qualities are sexist, the MPDG herself quickly became seen as a sexist archetype. Many actresses who played MPDGs, such as Zooey Deschanel, received significant criticism for their choice to play such shallow caricatures and further these stereotypes. The entirely male writers who used this trope were shamed, and gradually called out for their misogyny.

Given this vociferous criticism, and a more critical, socially liberal environment that the english-speaking world entered as we broke into the new decade (the 2010s) MPDG movies began to diminish until, finally, they died out entirely.

I hate this story.

I’m telling you that now, because while I conducted extensive research for this topic and tried to be as objective as possible, I still can’t entirely rule out any impact my bias may have had. I won’t go into detail as to why I revile the above narrative so much, yet, but keep it in mind that I do, and I promise that I will get to why.

For now, to start off this series of three MPDG posts, let’s get to what, exactly, I researched, and the data I gathered from it.

Part One: My List and Methods

I compiled a list spanning 82 years, and 40 movies, from across three separate articles and lists. The lists that I drew from are as follows:

• The AV Club's list (particularly essential, as this is the one that kickstarted it)

• This IMDB list (Compiled, as far as I can tell, by an MPDG enthusiast)

• The list on this article (Which includes some more obscure picks)

That doesn’t mean that I followed them exactly. I added some movies of my own that are typically listed as MPDG films, and I removed some based on availability. The final list of forty films ended up as follows (in order of release year):

1. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

2. Roman Holiday (1953)

3. The Apartment (1960)

4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

5. Paris When it Sizzles (1964)

6. Barefoot in the Park (1967)

7. I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968)

8. Harold and Maude (1971)

9. What’s Up, Doc? (1972)

10. Butterflies are Free (1972)

11. Annie Hall (1977)

12. Something Wild (1986)

13. Out of Bounds (1986)

14. Who’s That Girl (1987)

15. The Accidental Tourist (1988)

16. Joe vs the Volcano (1990)

17. LA Story (1991)

18. Career Opportunities (1991)

19. True Romance (1993)

20. Mad Love (1995)

21. Autumn in New York (2000)

22. Almost Famous (2000)

23. Sweet November (2001)

24. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

25. Garden State (2004)

26. The Girl Next Door (2004)

27. Elizabethtown (2005)

28. The Last Kiss (2006)

29. In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2007)

30. My Sassy Girl (2008)

31. Gigantic (2008)

32. Yes Man (2008)

33. (500) Days of Summer (2009)

34. Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)

35. Ruby Sparks (2012)

36. What If? (2013)

37. Her (2013)

38. Barefoot (2014)

39. Flower (2017)

40. Stargirl (2020)

True to the narrative that this was a 00s trend, half of these movies were released from the year 2000 on, though you can see that they rapidly start to diminish after 2013-14. While I don’t want to spoil the results too much, I will say that Flower, from 2017, is definitely not a MPDG movie in the traditional sense. The possible MPDG is the protagonist, and the movie barely has a romantic element at all. If we were to exempt it, for that reason, there would be a six year gap between Barefoot and Stargirl (which is, in turn, based on a book from 2000, and feels a bit like a relic), and then not a single new MPDG in the six years since.

Some movies were good, others were bad, but for the purpose of this research, that isn’t what I was evaluating for. I was interested in whether they had authentic Manic Pixie Dream Girls.

Based on the critiques of this trope, I worked out four criteria ahead of time for what a MPDG fundamentally is, and considered how they applied to every film:

1. Does she have the MPDG Personality or Behavior?

   1. (Hard to qualify, so I usually err on the side of ‘yes,’ so long as she is quirky. Otherwise, she might just be poorly written, and there are a lot of poorly written female characters who don’t qualify as MPDGs.)

2. Does she have no goals, motives, and/or development of her own?

   1. (Any clear, direct scene that establishes that she has her own story outside the MMC [male main character] negates this. Again, I am not here to evaluate whether these movies are good, so I am not here to establish whether her motives are fleshed-out enough, or believable.)

3. Does the MMC offer her nothing, in return for her support?

   1. (Again: Not here to qualify. If he helps her, the relationship might still be uneven. But that’s very subjective.)

4. Is it Presented in Earnest?

   1. (Does the movie believe, earnestly, in the relationship between the MMC and the MPDG? If it is a subversion, or otherwise presents the relationship as undesirable or unhealthy, it cannot honestly be considered a male fantasy.)

After compiling these requirements, I did get a little miffed by how easily a movie could be considered not a MPDG film, if it was missing even one of them. So I decided: 1 and 4 are absolutely necessary (After all, she needs to act like a Manic Pixie, and the movie needs to not subvert the concept of a Manic Pixie.) But either 2 or 3 is necessary.

Which means that, even if the FMC (female main character) has development or characterization, she can still be a MPDG if she loves the sadsack MMC for no reason. Likewise, even if she has a good reason for loving him, she can still be a MPDG if she has no complex characterization, and no story of her own. This felt right to me because each of these is a valid criticism of the character, and people would be right to complain about this trope if either was frequently true.

Part Two: A Backdrop of Film History

The earliest MPDG film mentioned is “Bringing Up Baby,” a Screwball Comedy.

Screwball Comedies, actually, are a subgenre that at least four of these movies draw heavily from. (“Baby,” as well as “What’s Up, Doc?” “Who’s That Girl” and “Something Wild”) They are, broadly, a type of film in which a man and a woman engage in witty dialogue until they eventually end up in a romantic union. But they often depict a romantically aggressive, eccentric FMC who insists upon pursuing a relationship with a reserved MMC who may initially reject her advances. In the process of pursuing him, she will typically deal great damage to his well-ordered life, and what seems consistent across all Screwball Comedy is that the MMC is both the straight man and the butt of the joke.

This is, of course, an entirely different type of movie from a MPDG film. Screwball Comedies are anything but a male fantasy. They’re a vehicle for the audience to spend ninety minutes laughing at a man being humiliated by a woman, before she eventually wins him over.

These kind of idiosyncrasies abounded in the early parts of the list. “Barefoot in the Park” features a couple that is already married, in which the woman happens to be more eccentric and submissive. “Out of Bounds” is not a romantic movie at all, but an action film, in which the supposed MPDG is the love interest. “L.A. Story” is a romantic comedy in which Sarah Jessica Parker plays a goofy, shallow airhead who is a foil for the true, intended relationship between the MMC and the actual love interest. The first movie that I would say fits the ideal MPDG plotline is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” from 1961, in which Holly Golightly fits many of the tropes that would be associated with the character.

After that, the next movie that ‘feels’ like a MPDG film, letting go of my more rigid criteria, is “Harold and Maude” from 1971, in which, yes, the FMC does absolutely give the MMC a new lease on life. The only problem? She’s a 79 year old woman dating a depressed young adult, and I can’t be convinced that the writers of the movie were fantasizing about her.

Which is to say: Regardless of my criteria, these are the only two that actually fit the larger plot and character dynamic of a “MPDG movie” before the year 2000. I can’t find any others before that time that match it entirely, and then make it the focal point of the film.

Keep that in mind as we go forward.

Part Three: The Final MPDG Film List

Without further ado:

1. Barefoot in the Park (1967)

2. Harold and Maude (1971)

3. Out of Bounds (1986)

4. Elizabethtown (2005)

5. Yes Man (2008)

6. Stargirl (2020)

But wait. I just contradicted myself.

If you were paying attention, I just flat-out admitted that “Barefoot in the Park” and “Out of Bounds” (each for their own reason) don’t fit the ideal character dynamic for a MPDG film, and that “Harold and Maude” is kind of an oddball. That may be true, but “Barefoot in the Park” and “Harold and Maude” both feature MMCs that do not give a lot back to the FMC. “Out of Bounds” is one of the very (very) few movies that is a total strikeout: Dizz, the love interest from the film, neither has any clear motivation, nor does she have any reason why she desires the MMC. This, of course, is mostly because she’s the obligatory love interest from a terrible action film.

And what about Holly Golightly, who I referenced above? No dice. Golightly is a complex and deeply flawed character, terrified of commitment to others, who runs her life into the ground out of that fear before the MMC persistently courts her, and convinces her to change. This makes her both a full human being and someone who needs her love interest, perhaps more than he needs her. (Spoilers, the movie’s final scene is below.)

(His line: “You belong to me” might not have aged well, but it still serves to contrast Golightly’s idea that: “People don’t belong to each other.”)

In reality, number 2, (No Goals/Motives/Development) was the rarest quality that any of these characters had. Out of 40 movies I watched, only 7 of these female characters had no clear motives or inclusion of their own story. The idea of the MMC offering the MPDG nothing fared exactly twice as well. 14 of the 40 movies involved an MMC who did not help the MPDG in any meaningful way.

Let me pre-empt a counter-argument: It may seem as though I, a man, am downplaying Hollywood’s historical sexism.

But please keep in mind that I am not watching every movie that has ever been made. I have a list of 40 MPDG films, and that’s what I am drawing from. I’m pretty sure that if I were to watch a list of Bond films, and apply these two tests (Does the FMC have her own story/does James Bond offer her anything?) the vast, vast majority of them would flunk to reveal terrible female characters.

But let’s take a look at a counterexample that, through a useful fluke, ended up on this list: “Career Opportunities.”

Career Opportunities is a mediocre (at best) young adult romantic comedy, which is only remembered for presenting us with Jennifer Connelly at the absolute peak of her beauty, and for wearing out tapes with the above scene.

The actual main character of this film, and by extension Connelly’s love interest, is a detestable garbage human. A lazy, compulsively lying cockroach with an entitled sense of deluded grandeur who makes the movie torturous to get through. For no believable reason, Connelly’s character (the richest, most beautiful girl in the entire town) falls in love with him and has sex with him in the span of a single night as they are trapped in a Target.

This is, to my mind, a much more ‘normal’ movie, at least of its time. Mediocre male has sex with the most beautiful woman any of us have ever seen, just because he exists? Of course! It’s everywhere!

But it isn’t everywhere on this list. And Connelly’s character is disqualified for one simple reason: She doesn’t act like a MPDG. She isn’t quirky. She isn’t all that free-spirited. She rebels against her father and shoplifts, but there isn’t much goofy fun to it, and she has no weird or unique traits that shine through.

This is a bad female character. An actual bad female character. And as part of her being a bad female character, she has no strong personality, no meaningful loves or hates or clear motives beyond being angry at her dad, and inexplicably being attracted to a loser. A MPDG is passionate about life, but this character has no passion, or if she does, it’s not enough to make her feel alive.

And so, if ‘having a quirky personality’ and ‘being a bad character’ are both essential qualities of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, we start running into some problems when it comes to actually finding them. If we want to really nail down what this is, in its purest form, let’s look at a perfect case study. The singular movie that inspired the entire label.

Let’s talk about Elizabethtown.

Part Four: Elizabethtown

Elizabethtown is a terrible romantic dramedy from 2005, a movie that I suspect would be forgotten if it hadn’t led to Nathan Rabin’s coining of the MPDG trope. That being said, to watch Elizabethtown is to realize that it is anything but forgettable. It is, in fact, deeply bad in a deeply memorable way.

Elizabethtown clearly aspires to be a type of movie, a kind of quirky dramedy that is a modern americana-laced folktale, with deep insights into life. Think Forrest Gump. Holes. Almost Famous. (Elizabethtown is also directed by Cameron Crowe, and it reeks of self-imitation.) These movies are goofy but grounded. Their characters will be quirky, but still believably human. Elizabethtown, on the other hand, is deeply enamored with quirk for its own sake, and will not let believable humanity get in the way of its good time. Perhaps we should believe that this is just the way that citizens of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, act.

In Elizabethtown, literally everyone waves to cars that pass. Everyone knows each other’s names, down to knowing your name if you do not actually live there, but are related to someone who does, and family gatherings are filled with an army of old people and screaming children who will behave better if you sit them down and make them watch a video where a man demolishes houses. In Elizabethtown, this happens at a funeral:

And phone calls like this one happen:

And yes, in Elizabethtown, vivacious flight attendants fall in love with depressed men immediately upon meeting them. This particular depressed young man being played by Orlando Bloom, a British actor struggling to speak in an American accent in this americana-obsessed movie.

Kirsten Dunst’s Claire, the manic pixie dream girl in question, is filled with quotes that sound deep but are incoherent. One of my (ironic) favorites is the refrain: “We’re the substitute people,” which she says to the MMC to imply that they are not valued, or not valuable, or…something? She also has a list of common names for people and their associated personality traits, which seems entirely self-created and to exist exclusively inside her own head. (When the MMC tells her that his late father was named Mitch, she says: “Never met a Mitch I didn’t like! Fun, full of life.”) At the end of the movie, after she and the protagonist have had multiple fruitless (and incomprehensible) conversations about how they cannot be together, she gives him an overly detailed roadmap for his trip home, an instruction guide telling him exactly where to go and when, even including CDs filled with music he should play in various locations. It all eventually leads him back to her, in the middle of the “world’s second largest street fair” where he must “find a girl wearing a red hat.” (In a moment that is supposed to be dramatic, but is unintentionally funny, he struggles to find her amidst a crowd of other women wearing red hats. Newsflash, Claire: Other women wear red hats!) Despite this, there is still no clear reason why she loves the MMC, and she has no real depth as a character.

So yes: Claire is an insistently quirky, but ultimately vapid female character. But she is also the main romantic interest of an insistently quirky, ultimately vapid film.

And after watching these forty movies: Claiming that shallow Manic Pixie Dream Girls are a phenomenon because one movie possesses a shallow Manic Pixie, and you can find others if you dig back through film history, would be like claiming that there is a phenomenon of ‘conscious car’ movies. What is a conscious car movie? Oh, it’s a movie in which a car is capable of conscious thought. I just came up with it. Think Christine, Knight Rider, Herbie the Love Bug, 2016’s Monster Trucks (which is a real movie that exists.)

I imagine that there are already people nodding their heads saying: “Oh, yeah, you have a point! Movies with intelligent cars totally exist!” And they do. Sure. But is it a cinematic phenomenon worthy of commentary? Is it worthy of a label? Out of over a century of film history, I just thought of four movies/franchises that feature intelligent cars, some of which (Monster Trucks) have no cultural impact, and others of which have very little in common. (Herbie is our friend, Christine definitely is not.)

So perhaps the “phenomenon” of the poorly written Manic Pixie Dream Girl was created through that same confirmation bias. In 2005, Nathan Rabin wrote one negative review of one bad movie, in which he implies that he has seen these tropes before. The AV club ran an article shortly after, listing 16 Manic Pixie Dream Girl movies, which I have now watched all of, and of which almost none meet the criteria for the love interest being shallow or vapid.

By the way: If I had made both criteria 2 (Does she have no goals, motives, and/or development of her own?) and criteria 3 (Does the MMC offer her nothing, in return for her support?) necessary, only two movies would qualify. “Elizabethtown,” and the forementioned terrible 1986 action/thriller “Out of Bounds,” an obscure film that has no cultural impact and is almost completely forgotten because it deserves to be.

This would all mean that, to any skeptical observer, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl never existed in any significant way. It was always a fake trope capitalized on for clicks, and by God, did it work. It is now an actual character archetype that people imagine, materialized out of thin air and words.

But that idea still doesn’t satisfy me.

Part Five: We Just Hate Her

There is another possibility, one that doesn’t reject Rabin’s thoughts entirely, or the thoughts of all the critics who ran with his idea.

In Rabin’s original Elizabethtown review, he actually said this of MPDGs.

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.

Meaning that, from the beginning, Rabin claimed that the character type could be done well or poorly. He does say that such a woman is unrealistic, yes, that she:

…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.

But when removed from the hypercritical trope-talk that sprouted off from this term, it really feels like he’s describing the MPDG with the kind of wet-blanket, caustic but somewhat flippant sarcasm endemic to critics who joke around at the expense of a bad movie.

Rabin later expressed regret for inventing the term.

But in the moment, not knowing where it would lead, it’s not like he was wrong. Quirky female love interests absolutely exist. And when I look at how many movies I marked just for that quality, it was 30, 75% of the films and a clear majority. But almost every time, the manic pixie’s quirky, strong personality and vivid passions got in the way of her actually being a ‘bad female character.’ These manic pixies have hobbies. They care about things. They almost always have ambitions and goals. And in all their clear ambition, they also usually have their reasons for being attracted to the protagonist. Almost without fail on this list: When the MPDG had a vivacious, passionate personality, she had all her own goals and desires, and when the supposed MPDG actually had no real reason for loving the MMC, (such as in “Career Opportunities”) she usually didn’t have enough quirky behavior to fit the archetype.

While poorly written female characters are everywhere across film history, most of them come off like sex objects. Bond Girls don’t play instruments, they don’t sing in the rain, they don’t convince you to get your life back together while secretly struggling with their own insecurities, which you help them resolve by the end of the film. In being given real depth, the average (supposed) MPDG is given flaws. In being given flaws, she is given a reason why she needs the MMC as he needs her.

So I’m left with this belief: That Manic Pixie Dream Girls are real, but that they are not bad characters. That, when we make 1 (does she have Manic Pixie Behavior?) the sole qualifier, we instead see a picture of thirty diverse, unique, interesting female characters who are full of love and worth loving in return. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t fantasies. But so much of art is fantasy, and countless great artists have given their fantasies a certain depth and texture and believability to bring them to life.

Dear reader: I do have more to say. A lot more. But if we’re going to go further, I need something from you. I need you to admit it.

I’ve done all the research. I put at least eighty hours into watching these films, many of which weren’t even good, so give me this back: If you hate these characters, admit that it was never about bad writing. That’s a useful post-hoc justification, sure. You might have latched onto it, and even begun to believe it. But it was never really the reason, was it?

Maybe you hate the entire idea of a quirky, vivacious woman being onscreen with a relatively bland, less interesting man. You might hate the male fantasy that it represents, and perhaps even hate the kind of men who would fantasize about it. You might also hate the woman in and of herself, and cringe at the way she is represented. There are many more possible reasons. But if you hate it, you hate it regardless of its quality of execution or the depth of the female character in question.

And if you would be so humble as to admit to that (please), then let’s talk about it.

What is it about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl that we, as a society, really decided that we found so detestable? And what does it say about us?

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This is part 1 of 3 of my project “An Autopsy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl”

Part 2 is titled: “A Romantic Fantasy” And Part 3 is: “I Mourn the Manic Pixie.”

There will be a less structured essay, after this series is over, diving a little deeper into my research and individual movies I watched. It will be be for paid subscribers only. Tubi was my friend, for this research, but I spent a surprising amount of money on renting these movies from streaming services, as this was the only way that some were available. I spent this money because I believe in this project. Nonetheless, any financial support is greatly appreciated, and from those who cannot contribute, free subscriptions are greatly appreciated as well.