The Annie Hall Problem: Dating a Manic Pixie Dream Girl
In 2013 I briefly dated a woman, let’s call her “Annie”, who told me she was a ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’. For anyone who’s somehow avoided falling into Zooey Deschanel’s huge blue eyes in, well, any film she’s ever been in, the ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ was a phrase infamously coined in 2007 by AV Club reviewer Nathan Rabin to describe a type of female character on screen who floats whimsically into the life of “broodingly soulful young men”, helps them to “embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”, and then departs, job done. Anyone who spent time around me in the last half of 2013 knows I certainly fit the mould of broodingly soulful young man, for which this is a public apology. Annie floated into my life unexpectedly, came up with elaborate dates involving adventurous explorations of Sydney and wholly captured my attention with her charm and whimsy. All too quickly she disappeared, and I haven’t talked to her since.
I’m still not sure why I fell for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG). It’s the most infantile and servile model of contemporary femininity, and it’s worrying that I, and perhaps other men, find it alluring. Even using the label is a problem, according to the guy who made it up. According to Rabin, labelling a fictional character a MPDG strips that character of agency and nuance. Actor/director Zoe Kazan said in an interview that the term is “really reflective of the man who is looking at them, and the way that they think about that girl” and that the term was misogynist. The same criticism is made about the MPDG time and time again — it’s reductive or misogynist. An article in the Guardian in July 2014 argued that it’s time to get rid of the sexist trope in cinema and make room for “people that actually reflect our lives”. I would argue that she sticks around because she does reflect our lives, or perhaps our lives reflect her.
Leaving aside the question of how to eliminate the structural causes of the MPDG, it’s worth pointing out that the trope pre-dates Nathan Rabin’s review of Elizabethtown. Liz Conor, author of The Spectacular Modern Woman, argues that in the 1920s a new, spectacular, public femininity put women on screen and influenced the way women behaved in public. The Flapper was one example of this new way of being a woman in public. She smoked, drank, slept around, and whimsically disregarded the future. This visibility offered some power to women, but that that power had drastic consequences. Conor notes he example of Lotus Thompson, an Australian actress whose legs were used to stand in for other women’s legs on camera, but she couldn’t get speaking parts on screen. One day she poured acid over her own thighs in protest, crying out that she wanted to be recognised as more than a pair of legs, but ending her career in the process. Public visibility and gender equality are not the same thing, and the ways women are portrayed on camera have troublesome real-world consequences.
So what happens if you read the MPDG in a history of women in literature and on screen since the 1920s? Suddenly, I found MPDGs popping up all over the place. To Rabin’s list Annie had added Sally Bowles from Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and I added Agatha Runcible from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. It seems to me, looking over this list, that the more a female character is the object of the protagonist’s desire, the more she is caught in his gaze, the more like a MPDG she gets. Like Kazan says — this is about the way men look at women.
This is really clear in the film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The book is a searing exploration of the difficult consequences of being a young woman in public. The film is about one man’s fantasies coming true. Holly Golightly is a naïve but canny young woman troubled by her public visibility. She’s been running from men who want to possess her all her life, starting with Doc Golightly, who married her when she was fourteen. Every man she meets desires her, and this gives her the power to pay her way in New York, but she’s troubled by a long string of suitors who can’t let her go. She feels trapped by men’s desire for her, and only confides in the novel’s narrator because he does not fall into erotic or romantic love with her. As in so many of Capote’s exquisite character portraits, Holly in the book is a butterfly under glass, selected for display because it was interesting rather than out of sympathy with the butterfly.
On screen, Holly emerges as a MPDG through the captivating presence of Audrey Hepburn, but what really changes is Paul Varjak, the narrator. In the film he falls for her like every other man, but he thinks his desire is authentic while everyone else fails to see the real Holly. When she asks “Do you think you own me?” he replies in the affirmative, and she admonishes “It’s what everybody always thinks but everybody happens to be wrong.” His answer? “But I am not everybody.” In the film it’s all about how special and different he is. It’s no longer about Holly; it’s about what Paul wants.
Holly squirms with existential discomfort, always looking for a way out. Like Lotus Thompson, her unresolvable trauma is being highly visible, but being held hostage to the very thing that makes her visible. Varjak reads her problem as simply not being loved. In the film, which is about his fantasies, telling her “I love you” resolves the conflict as it delivers her up to him. Like Kazan says, the thing about the MPDG isn’t the girl; it’s the guy who wants her. He’s really only interested in her as the object of his desire.
Certainly a more sophisticated representation of this kind of public femininity is easy to find. It’s possible to read Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight as Holly Golightly’s autobiography. It describes the emotional world of Sophia Jansen, a woman in her early thirties, living off a private income in Paris. It’s a confronting and difficult tale. Jansen’s traumas are not as simple as not being loved. She’s lost a child and had a marriage fall apart. She is painfully conscious of her waning beauty. When she overhears a French woman in a café ask her friends “What is that old woman doing here?” it is clear that even the power her visibility secures for her is unreliable. Men want Sophia, but she is acutely aware that emotional succour is not on offer in the sexual transactions she participates in. She wants to be visible, but the price of that visibility is her own deepening objectification. There is no way for her to get the recognition she wants.
My real-life MPDG seemed to thrive on male desire, but like Holly, never felt properly understood by the men whose attention she attracted. Like Paul Varjak, I was captivated by my own desire, and misread Annie’s past romantic traumas as simple and easily resolved. Annie talked explicitly about not being loved the way she wanted to be, and I understood my own desire as capable of solving that problem for her. Annie and I constructed our attitudes to each other through the very real trope of the MPDG. I desired the stereotype and Annie internalised it; as such our brief relationship had drastically different consequences for each of us. I’d been attracted to the shiny façade of naïve whimsy like some kind of mindless moth to a flame. Annie had used the glittering spectacle of public femininity to attract men’s attention, but that attention had unintended consequences. I saw Holly Golightly, she felt like Sophia Jansen. The problem of the MPDG as a form of public femininity is that men’s desire, their very gaze, makes their lovers invisible to them.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is just the latest iteration of a type of male-female intimacy that has been obscuring and trivialising women’s lives since at least the 1920s. She’s been around a long time, and we can’t just get rid of her because she’s foundational to the way we interact with one another. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl isn’t just a creation of one man’s gaze or one woman’s desire to be desired. She is both simultaneously, and she’s our way of talking about the relationship between the subject and the object of desire. Florence Thompson shows us that the most radical solution — cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face — might solve the problem, but what if the consequences of taking yourself out of that relationship makes your life unliveable? This isn’t stripping women of agency or nuance, but it is recognising the ways agency is constrained by circumstance. ‘Agency,’ especially in the Lotus Thompson model, might not be the answer here. To solve the problem of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, we need to look beyond women to the men that desire them. This harmful stereotype won’t go away unless men learn that their desire tends to transfix rather than transform its object, and that to desire is not to own.
