No Such Thing: SWISS ARMY MAN and the Impossibility of the Manic Pixie Dream Guy
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(NOTE: This piece discusses major plot points for Swiss Army Man. I highly recommend that you see the film before reading any further, both because I don’t want to spoil it for you and because it’s fantastic and you should just see it already.)
In his essay on Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined a term that has since become a part of the cinematic lexicon when discussing a certain type of character. The “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” is “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.” This is a character that has haunted many a comedy/drama, frequently defined by irrational behavior that teaches a mopey protagonist how to really live, man. Rabin has since apologized for coining the term, but it remains a useful shorthand for a trope that from all indications appears (rather alarmingly) to be all but deathless.
There have been some variations on the trope, but this character type is overwhelmingly represented in films as female. And not coincidentally, also young and attractive. The idea is that the protagonist — invariably male — falls in love with her joie de vivre, but of course it doesn’t hurt that she’s also Hollywood gorgeous. Sure, she does “crazy” stuff and is obviously emotionally unstable, but it’s cute. Or at least the viewer is supposed to read it as cute since the it is the filmmakers’ assumption that they presumably identify with the lead character, who finds these “quirks” endearing. Like the concept of “romantic comedy behavior,” though, what’s charming on the screen often seems considerably less so in real life.
Which is what brings us to Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Swiss Army Man. In this film, Paul Dano plays a man named Hank who is stranded on a small island in the Pacific. On the verge of committing suicide, Hank sees a man washed up on the beach. It turns out to be Manny (Daniel Radcliffe), who is obviously dead. But Manny has superhuman abilities, including the power of jet propulsion thanks to his explosive farts, and Hank is able to ride Manny like a jet ski off the island and back to the mainland. Hank brings Manny along as he treks toward civilization, and soon finds Manny is not quite as dead as he initially seemed. He has amnesia, so Hank has to spend a lot of time teaching Manny about the world. When Manny sees a picture of Sarah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) on Hank’s phone, Manny becomes determined to find her, thinking she is someone from his own forgotten past.
To help jog Manny’s memory, Hank fashions a rough-hewn but charming little world out of the trash in the woods through which they travel. He dresses up as Sarah. He builds a bus and walks Manny through the first meeting with her, seeing her on the bus and imagining she’s just as lonely as he is. He throws a party (complete with marionette strings to help Manny dance) and the two men end up sitting on the “fire escape” and come close to sharing a romantic moment. Through this all, they occasionally break out into songs underscored and echoed by the film’s score. For most of its running time, Swiss Army Man plays on an exceptionally odd variation on the kind of indie-film quirk associated with Sundance hits like Little Miss Sunshine.
The film coasts along in this charmingly bizarre mode all the way up until it very abruptly doesn’t. In the climax of the film, Manny and Hank end up in Sarah’s backyard. But the first person they meet when they stumble out of the woods isn’t Sarah. Instead, they meet her toddler daughter Crissie (Antonia Ribero). Suddenly, everything that has come before is thrown into a completely different light. Hank supposedly never knew anything about Sarah other than that she rode the bus with him and that she was pretty. The life he imagined for her has no relation to the life she actually lives. She’s married and has a kid. She seems kind and happy. He never took the time to actually talk to her on the bus before, and now that he has interacted with her Hank is an upsetting intrusion into her life: ragged and dirty, dragging a corpse into the backyard where her daughter plays.
Sarah calls the police and ambulance to help Hank and figure out what’s going on and what has happened to him and Manny. When the medical examiner (Shane Carruth, in what has to be the cameo of the year) shows up, he quickly determines that “Manny” was probably a suicide. The police find Sarah’s picture on Hank’s phone, and she and her husband confront him. Hank’s dad, whose shadow has been cast over the whole film in what Hank has and hasn’t said about him, berates Hank for his weird behavior. In a panic, Hank grabs Manny off a stretcher and flees into the woods. The police, Sarah and her family, and Hank’s dad follow him and find all the sets he built to show Manny what life was like in the real world. They end up on the beach where Hank is about to shove Manny back out into the water. “Did you really build all that stuff?” Sarah asks. Hank confirms he did, and Sarah looks completely disgusted.
This is, of course, a totally reasonable response to finding out that a dude hanging out with a corpse built a detailed replica out of garbage of the bus where he basically stalked you. She’s not impressed by his amazing talent for creating things out of trash, she’s scared. These actions that seemed quirky and endearing when set to the film’s score, in an imaginary world shared by the two friends, are thrown into stark contrast with “normal” behavior. Suddenly, what seemed amusing and maybe even touching just a few minutes before becomes terrifying. Even more so when it seems rather strongly implied that Hank and Manny’s whole adventure may have taken place not in some remote part of the forest, but in the woods near Sarah’s house. When Hank is confronted with reality, the audience no longer sees him as a lonely man just wanting someone to love and instead sees him as something closer to Dorine (Carol Kane) in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer; it’s not much of a leap to think he might have a basement full of corpse “friends” he’s collected back home.
The casting of Paul Dano in this role suddenly seems pointedly intentional. In addition to starring in the aforementioned Little Miss Sunshine, Dano also starred in that film’s directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s follow-up Ruby Sparks (2012). Swiss Army Man feels very much like a response to and inversion of that film, which is basically the ultimate “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” movie: Dano plays Calvin, an author suffering from crippling writer’s block who writes an MPDG character named Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan). Ruby appears in the real world, and whatever Calvin imagines and writes about her becomes true. Calvin writes Ruby as free-spirited and “crazy,” but in Swiss Army Man it’s Hank who acts “crazy.” Nothing that Hank imagines about Sarah has any impact on her life until she finds his camp in the woods. In Ruby Sparks, Calvin finally “frees” Ruby by allowing her to leave him and live her own life. In Swiss Army Man, Sarah is already living her own life totally apart from Hank, whose only power is over an imaginary construct of Sarah he keeps in his head.
Hank’s character, then, ends up landing close to another character in a similarly “quirky” indie: the titular character of Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl (2007). Lars (Ryan Gosling) is a reclusive young man who has lived his whole life with his resentful father after Lars’s mother died giving birth to him. After his father’s death, Lars’s brother and sister-in-law return to the small town where Lars and his father lived to deal with their father’s estate. While there, Lars announces he has met a woman named Bianca on the internet who is coming to visit. When she arrives, it turns out she is a life-sized sex doll Lars pushes around in a wheelchair. Lars imagines Bianca is a Christian missionary, and gives her attributes he admires. The whole town plays along and treats “Bianca” like a real person as a sort of large-scale therapy for whatever underlying psychological issue Lars is trying to work through.
Ruby Sparks and Bianca serve the same basic function in their respective stories, but with one important difference. When Calvin has learned his Important Lesson, he sets Ruby free. When Lars sees the possibility of a real relationship with a living woman, he imagines that Bianca dies after a brief stay in a real hospital and the town even has a full funeral for her. Ruby fulfills her function in Calvin’s life, is freed, and returns to him in the end. Bianca fulfills her function in Lars’s life and is metaphorically killed so he can be with his longtime friend Margo (Kelli Garner) and live a “normal” life. In Swiss Army Man, Sarah has her own life that has nothing to do with Hank’s. She serves no function in his reality, and appropriately at the end of the film Hank does not seem to have learned anything. While it’s naturally open to interpretation, one way to read the final moments of Swiss Army Man is that Hank has finally embraced his own delusions entirely. He watches Manny jet-farting his way back out to sea, and Sarah (standing by with her family) is all but forgotten.
There are a few telling moments through Swiss Army Man that point toward the fact that Hank is not exactly the nice guy he initially seems to be. He uses the word “retarded,” but then scolds himself for sounding like his father. We come to learn that Hank’s father views him as a disappointment and makes no secret of it, which may be a factor in Hank’s social and psychological issues. When Manny sees a swimsuit magazine, Hank explains to him about how he used to have to sneak a peek at his father’s magazines to see nude women. He concludes with a comment that sounds jarringly cold and seems to contradict what the audience has been led to think of him up until this point: “Girls were more special before the internet.” Later, we see that Hank has seen Sarah’s Instagram account, which includes pictures of her family. Hank had not just imagined Sarah’s life from that chance meeting on the bus, but had learned and then willfully ignored the facts of her life that did not fit into this fantasy.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a character who blows into a male protagonist’s life like a tornado, “shakes things up,” imparts wisdom (intentionally or otherwise), and then moves on. She leaves a new man in her wake, maybe a little bruised but a better person for having known her. The definition of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl requires that the story in which she appears end once her function in the protagonist’s life has been fulfilled. We know what she’s done for him. But what has he done for her? In Ruby Sparks, he not only conjures her from his own imagination, but he “frees” her by wiping her memory of their relationship. In Lars and the Real Girl, he kills her.
Sarah in Swiss Army Man is not a MPDG, and instead the burden of “crazy” behavior falls on Hank. And it’s here that Swiss Army Man points out the impossibility of the concept of the “Manic Pixie Dream Guy.” It is impossible to imagine a male character sweeping into a female character’s life, doing a bunch of “crazy” stuff, and not leaving her traumatized. Society tells us women are “crazy,” so the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” is an acceptable trope: that’s just women being women, free-spirited and wild with their mysterious, fickle ways, am I right, guys? But if a male character behaves the same way, it’s not “cute” or “endearing.” It’s upsetting. It’s dangerous. Movies have taught us that Hank should be a “Manic Pixie Dream Guy.” He falls in love with a woman he doesn’t know, he builds intricate crafts to show his devotion, he does all kinds of “crazy” stuff for her. But when she sees it, Sarah doesn’t fall in love with his quirky charm, because that’s not what this is. She’s freaked out by his obsessive behavior. The cops get involved much too late in this process.
As Nathan Rabin stated in his apology, the MPDG trope is “fundamentally sexist… since it makes women seem less like autonomous, independent entities than appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize.” Female characters act as eye candy or victims of violent acts committed to spur male characters into action. We’re so inured to seeing women used as props in all sorts of films that the MPDG hardly causes a single raised eyebrow. But like those other types of “props,” it’s virtually impossible to imagine the concept of a gender-reversed Manic Pixie Dream Girl. And whether Daniels Kwan and Scheinert meant for it to be or not, Swiss Army Man is a deeply perceptive meditation on just why that is.
