The Real-World Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché
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 ’s Laurie Penny 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
