I posted this in a couple of other places, but I needed to put something on this one. It’s a little rough and I’ll probably re-write it at some point. The problem is that when I want to write something, the longer it takes the less likely I am to finish. So, Enjoy…
“One of the defining traits of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is lack of an inner life.” -Neda Ulaby
“…She’s a wonderful character but she’s not a person.” -Bob Mondello
I was listening to public radio the other day and they did a piece on Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Now, this is a term that I had not heard before. An MPDG is a girl in the movie whose free spirit brings life to a man who is very much in need of life. One of the examples given was Natalie Portman’s character Sam in the movie Garden State. She’s the one I’ll go with because she’s the one I know best.
Garden State centers around the character of Andrew “Large” Largeman, a young man living in L.A. aspiring to a career as an actor. Andrew’s life is dull, and that past the point of mere boredom. Andrew is, for all intents and purposes, a zombie. As the story goes on we find that his numb-ness is caused by a cocktail of psychotropic drugs that were the result of a rather angry childhood. We find this out in the wake of his going home for his mother’s funeral in New Jersey.
It’s in New Jersey that we meet Sam. A young lady sitting in a neurologist’s office giggling at a man being mounted by a working dog. When the two leave the doctor’s office and head to Sam’s house the movie takes a turn toward romantic adventure upon which we see life and feeling come back to Large with all of the consequent emotions; anger, hurt and joy.
There’s no denying that the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl applies to Sam in this movie. But not the very narrow and limiting definitions that some critics have placed upon it. The two quotes that preceded this post are not true of Sam. Sam is very human and has a depth and history that is utterly fascinating. She is an epileptic who must wear a helmet to work at her job at a law firm, which causes her a lot of embarrassment and pain. Her function is not simply to bring some superficially unsustainable adventure to the life of our male protagonist. The vocation of the MPDG is to bring life by deconstructing the cold, metallic world that has enveloped the protagonist.
This is a vocation that is only fitting for a woman. A man needs to be reminded, by the warmth of feminine embrace, that the things around which he has constructed himself are too limited to really be life. I think that much of the male-ness of the world around us (i.e. history, science, business, politics, etc.) are severely de-feminizing and ultimately self-destructive. Greed is not a feminine attribute (that’s not to say that a woman is not capable of greed, it’s just not feminine conceptually) nor are the many types of abuses of power in the political realm. We see in the MPDG many of the warmest, most loving aspects of femininity condensed into a character who exist is as a salvific type. I think that we need to explore the implications that this has for the Gospel as a narrative in which Christians should exist.
You can find the piece from NPR at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95507953
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Anglopressy 