Oh good it's not just me and jethrien

[trinityvixen]

Some way while back, I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and liked it, with the reservation that I'm constantly annoyed by the free-spirit wild-child romantic interest character as played (excellently, don't get me wrong) by Kate Winslet in that movie. I'm sick of near-schizophrenic free-thinkers "saving" people--sorry, not people, men--with their cah-ray-zee antics that would more likely get the fellow on the receiving end fired, arrested, or killed, depending on the severity of the life-saving method.

Well, thank god, the AV Club agrees with me. DOWN WITH THE MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL. (In all of her incarnations!)

An article commenting on the AV Club article over at Salon has this great addition:

I would suggest that women like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl do exist; it's just that, when I've known them, they've mostly been self-obsessed nutballs.

And this is precisely what jethrien and I were griping together about. It's really an insult to the smart, together, fun girls out there that this MPDG archetype is "the dream." Personally, I find that person to be unstable, and while that's fun for the occasional romp and perhaps easy to fall in love with, you don't have a future with this person. Because if they were on the meds they're supposed to be on, they wouldn't be fun. They'd just be self-obsessed instead of being self-obsessed muse-gurus meant to free penises from the chokeholds of dress pants.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Clementine was, as I say above, a tad sociopathic. The point of our sympathy is that everyone wishes there were some memories they could just erase from their heads. Everyone does. But wishing and actually doing are different things. We're more than the sum of our experiences because we use those experiences to form an outlook to the future. Removing the experiences means not adapting or changing. Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, one way or another.

The movie made that point that the erasing didn't stop some less memory-driven notion of connection from bringing people back together--Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst and Tom Wilkinson. No matter what was done to the literal memories, these people returned to old habits of love/attraction/addiction/etc.

The thing about the Clementines of the world is that they are utterly lacking in responsibility. They seem to have jobs or houses or other identifiable forms of commitments and money, yet they never do anything to show how they get it. In the magical pixie dream land, you just have the things that real men and women have to work for. And I'm annoyed at the idea that Kate Winslet, for example, can just kidnap Jim Carrey off a train platform and neither will suffer any consequences in the real world.

This is not to say dream-world movies can't work. I didn't have a problem with the escapism of, say, Mirrormask (even though I didn't love the movie) or things like that. My problem is the idea that this free-spirit naif can survive without any tangible means of support in a decidedly money-driven world. And survive well. It's the extreme version of the ridiculously sized apartments that poor characters occupy in TV shows only the Magic Pixie Dream Girls don't ever seem to have jobs. (Or, if they do, that they shouldn't be able to cover half the expenses these pixies have.)

It's okay to identify with them--they're a fantasy. I identify with kick-ass ninja chicks. Doesn't mean I realistically expect to ever be one. What I bemoan is that these are the images we present instead of recognizing the fun and beauty in women who are more grounded. (And less in need of a Prozac chaser.)

[viridian.livejournal.com]

I think the only thing that annoys me about the Clementines is that you can't actually have a personality like that and get away with it without consequence in the real world. Nobody actually likes you if you behave that way. At the most harmless, you're a flake, and at worst, you're unstable.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That's exactly why they aggravate me to pieces--because these women would be schizophrenic in real life and you'd want to stay as far as possible from them. Granted, in real life, I wouldn't cozy up to half of the serial killers I regularly fantasize about, but they at least get to have their own lives and be pro-active. Manic Pixie Dream Girls only exist to give their men a kick in the ass. There's a strong sense that without that magical, one-of-a-kind connection to the protagonist, they'd spend their lives miserable, too.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

You're also talking about a character who appears 99% in the head of someone else. So this isn't necessarily the person Clementine is, but is instead a very slanted representation of what Joel needs her to be when he's going through this process.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

She's supposed to be what he remembers of her. His memory, in the midst of passionate turmoil is, granted, faulty. But even after, when they meet and they've both erased each other, she's still a where-the-wind-takes-her girl.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

When she starts playing along, she's no longer strictly memory.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Again, in defense of the movie, Eternal Sunshine shows Clementine at her job at Barnes & Noble several times, and Carrey calls in sick to work. I can certainly buy a Clementine working at a bookstore.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

And owning a house? She had a place that was fairly large for what bookstore people would make. She certainly wasn't management.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was a house. It was an apartment. I think really she has the kitchen and the room with the couch where they have the drink and the bedroom and that's it. You see her getting her mail, like Carrey does, from a community mailbox at the front door, unless that was a deleted scene.