(By Laurie Penny,
New Statesman, 30 June 2013)
Like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie
Dream Girls were with us long before they were accurately named. It was the
critic Nathan Rabin who coined the term in a review of the film Elizabethtown,
explaining that the character of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl
"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". She pops up everywhere these days, in films and
comics and novels and television, fascinating lonely geek dudes with her
magical joie-de-vivre and boring the hell out of anybody who likes their
women to exist in all four dimensions.
Writing about Doctor
Who this week got me thinking about sexism in storytelling, and how we rely
on lazy character creation in life just as we do in fiction. The Doctor has
become the ultimate soulful brooding hero in need of
a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to save him from the vortex of
self-pity usually brought on by the death, disappearance or alternate-universe-abandonment
of the last girl. We cannot have the Doctor brooding. A planet might explode
somewhere, or he might decide to use his powers for evil, or his bow-tie might
need adjusting. The companions of the past three years, since the most recent
series reboot, have been the ultimate in lazy sexist tropification, any attempt
at actually creating interesting female characters replaced by... That
Girl.
Amy Pond was That
Girl; Clara Oswald has been That Girl; River Song, interestingly enough, did
not start out as That Girl, but the character was forcibly turned into That
Girl when she no longer fit the temper of a series with contempt for powerful,
interesting, grown-up women, and then discarded when she outgrew the role
(‘Don’t let him see you age’ was River’s main piece of advice in the last
season). ‘The Girl Who Waited’ is not a real person, and nor is ‘The Impossible
Girl.’ Those are the titles of stories. They are stories that happen to other
people. That’s what girls are supposed to be.
Men grow up
expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the
supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films
and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that
upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under
the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might
be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and
awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on
adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry
Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very
occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the
protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and
were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring
the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.
Stories
matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn’t mean
that those stories can’t be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can
exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter. In Doug Rushkoff's
recent book Present Shock, he discusses the phenomenon of “narrative
collapse”: the idea that in the years between 11 September 2001 and the
financial crash of 2008, all of the old stories about God and Duty and Money
and Family and America and The Destiny of the West finally disintegrated,
leaving us with fewer sustaining fairytales to die for and even fewer to live
for. This is plausible, but future
panic, like the future itself, is not evenly distributed. Not being sure what
story you're in anymore is a different experience depending on whether or not
you were expecting to be the hero of that story. Low-status men, and especially
women and girls, often don't have that expectation. We expect to be forgettable
supporting characters, or sometimes, if we're lucky, attainable objects to be
slung over the hero's shoulder and carried off the end of the final
page. The only way we get to be in stories is to be stories ourselves. If
we want anything interesting at all to happen to us we have to be a story that
happens to somebody else, and when you’re a young girl looking for a script,
there are a limited selection of roles to choose from.
Manic Pixies,
like other female archetypes, crop up in real life partly because fiction
creates real life, particularly for those of us who grow up immersed in it.
Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who
know better, and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of
a girl they met in a book one day when they were young and longing. For
me, Manic Pixie Dream Girl was the story that fit. Of course, I
didn't think of it in those terms; all I saw was that in the books and
series I loved - mainly science fiction, comics and offbeat literature, not the
mainstream films that would later make the MPDG trope famous - there were
certain kinds of girl you could be, and if you weren't a busty bombshell, if
you were maybe a bit weird and clever and brunette, there was another option.
And that's how I
became a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The basic physical and personality traits were
already there, and some of it was doubtless honed by that learned girlish
desire to please - because the posture does please people, particularly the
kind of sad, bright, bookish young men who have often been my friends and
lovers. I had the raw materials: I’m five feet nothing, petite and
small-featured with skin the color of something left on the bottom of a pond
for too long and messy hair that’s sometimes dyed a shocking shade of red or
pink. At least, it was before I washed all the dye out last year, partly to
stop soulful Zach-Braff-a-likes following me to the shops, and partly to stop
myself getting smeary technicolour splotches all over the bathroom, as if a Muppet
had been horribly murdered.
And yes, I’m a
bit strange and sensitive and daydreamy, and retain a somewhat embarrassing
belief in the ultimate decency of humanity and the transformative brilliance of
music, although I’m ambivalent on the Shins. I love to dance, I play the guitar
badly, and I also - since we’re in confession mode, dear reader, please hear
and forgive - I also play the fucking ukelele. Truly. Part of the reason I’m
writing this is that the MPDG trope isn’t properly explored, in any of the
genres I read and watch and enjoy. She’s never a point-of-view character, and
she isn’t understood from the inside. She’s one of those female tropes who is
permitted precisely no interiority. Instead of a personality, she has
eccentricities, a vaguely-offbeat favourite band, a funky fringe.
I’m fascinated by
this character and what she means to people, because the experience of being
her - of playing her - is so wildly different than it seems to appear from the
outside. In recent weeks I’ve filled in the gaps of
classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl films I hadn’t already sat
through, and I’m struck by how many of them claim to be ironic re-imaginings of
a character trope that they fail to actually interrogate in any way. Irony is,
of course, the last vestige of modern crypto-misogyny: all those lazy
stereotypes and hurtful put-downs are definitely a joke, right up until they
aren’t, and clearly you need a man to tell you when and if you’re supposed to
take sexism seriously. One of these soi-disant ironic films is (500)
Days of Summer, the opening credits of which refer to the real-world
heartbreak on which writer-director Scott Neustadter based the character of
Summer" 'Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely
coincidental. Especially you, Jenny Beckman. Bitch.'
Men write women,
and they re-write us, for revenge. It's about obsession, and control. Perhaps
the most interesting of the classics, then, is the recent 'Ruby Sparks',
written by a woman, Zoe Kazan, who also stars as the title character. It’s all
about a frustrated young author who writes himself a perfect girlfriend, only
to have her come to life. When she inevitably proves more difficult to handle
in reality than she did in his fantasy, the writer’s brother comments:
"You've written a girl, not a person."
Kazan told the
Huffington Post, “I think defining a girl and making her lovable because of her
music taste or because she wears cute clothes is a really superficial way of
looking at women. I did want to address that.
Everybody is setting out to write a full character. It's just that some
people are limited in their imagination of a girl.” Those imaginative limits, that failure of
narrative, is imposed off the page, too, in the most personal of ways. I
stopped being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl around about the time I
got rid of the last vestiges of my eating disorder and knuckled down to a
career. It’s so much easier, if you have the option, to be a girl, not a
person. It’s definitely easier to be a girl than it is to do the work of being
a grown woman, especially when you know that grown women are far more fearful
to the men whose approval seems so vital to your happiness. And yet something
in me was rebelling against the idea of being a character in somebody else’s
story. I wanted to write my own.
I became
successful, or at least modestly so - and that changed how I was perceived,
entirely and all at once. I was no longer That Girl. I didn’t have time to save
boys anymore. I manifestly had other priorities, and those priorities included
writing. You cannot be a writer and have writing be anything other than the
central romance of your life, which is one thing they don’t tell you about
being a woman writer: it’s its own flavour of lonely. Men can get away with
loving writing a little bit more than anything else. Women can’t: our partners
and, eventually, our children are expected to take priority. Even worse, I
wasn’t writing poems or children’s stories, I was writing reports, political
columns. I’ve recently been experimenting with answering ‘fashion’ rather than
‘politics’ when men casually ask me what I write about, and the result has been
a hundred percent increase in phone numbers, business cards, and offers of
drinks. This is still substantially fewer advances than I receive when I used the
truthful answer to whether I wrote was: “sometimes, in notebooks, just for
myself.”
I don't often
write about love and sex on a personal level these days, even though I spend a
great deal of time thinking about it, like everyone else in the It's
Complicated stage of their twenties. Lately, though, as I've been working on
longer ideas about sexism and class and power, I keep coming back to love, to
the meat and intimacy of fucking and how it so often leads so treacherously to
kissing. I flick through a lot of feminist theory in the down hours where some
people knit or go jogging, and I was prepared for the personal to be political.
What I didn't understand until quite recently was that the political can be so,
so personal.
There was never a
moment in my life when I decided to be a writer. I can't remember a time when I
didn't know for sure that that's what I'd do, in some form, and forever. But
there have been times when I didn't write, because I was too depressed or
anxious or running away from something, and those times have coincided almost
precisely with the occasions when I had most sexual attention from men. I wish
I’d known, at 21, when I made up my mind to try to write seriously for a living
if I could, that that decision would also mean a choice to be intimidating to
the men I fancied, a choice to be less attractive, a choice to stop being That
Girl and start becoming a grown woman, which is the worst possible thing a girl
can do, which is why so many of those Manic Pixie Dream Girl
characters, as written by male geeks and scriptwriters, either die tragically
young or are somehow immortally fixed at the physical and mental age of nineteen-and-a-half.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the very worst thing about being a real-life MPDG
is the look of disappointment on the face of someone you really care about when
they find out you’re not their fantasy at all - you’re a real human who breaks
wind and has a job.
If I’d known what
women have to sacrifice in order to write, I would not have allowed myself to
be so badly hurt when boys whose work and writing I found so fascinating found
those same qualities threatening in me. I would have understood what Kate Zambreno
means when she says, in her marvellous book Heroines, I do not
want to be an ugly woman, and when I write, I am an ugly woman. I would
have been less surprised when men encouraged me to be politer and grow my hair
long even as I helped them out with their own media careers. My Facebook feed
is full of young male writers who I have encouraged to believe in themselves,
set up with contacts, taken on adventures and talked into the night about the
meaning of journalism with who are now in long-term relationships with people
who are content to be That Girl. I would have understood quite clearly
what I was choosing when I chose, sometime around the time I packed two
suitcases and walked out on Garden State Boy, to be a person who writes her own
stories, rather than a story that happens to other people.
I try hard, now,
around the men in my life, to be as unmanic, as unpixie and as resolutely real
possible, because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And it’s a
struggle. Because I remain a small, friendly, excitable person who wears witchy
colors and has a tendency towards the twee. I still know that if I wanted to, I
could attract one of those lost, pretty nerd boys I have such a weakness for by
dialling up the twee and dialling down the smart, just as I know that the hurt
in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever
want to see again. I still love to up sticks and go on adventures, but I no
longer drag mournful men-children behind me when I do, because it’s frankly exhausting.
I still play the ukelele. I wasn’t kidding about the fucking ukelele. But I
refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives
to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself. Everyone who was
ever told a fairytale knows what happens to women who do their own magic.
So here’s what
I’ve learned, in 26 years of reading books and kissing boys. Firstly, averagely
pretty white women in their late teens and twenties are not the biggest, most
profoundly unsolvable mystery in the universe. Trust me. I should know.
Those of us with an ounce of lust for life are almost universally less
interesting than we will be in our thirties and forties. The one abiding secret
about us is that we’re not fantasies, and we weren’t made to save you: we’re
real people, with flaws and cracked personalities and big dreams and digestive
tracts. It’s no actual mystery, but it remains a fact that the half of the
human race with a tendency to daydream about a submissive, exploitable, transcendent
ideal of the other seems perversely unwilling to discover.
Secondly, you can
spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can
twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t
quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day,
you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose. Because
the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re
left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural
detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a
character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is
the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination
for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t
exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our
minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to
women who do their own magic - but it’s a risk you have to take.
