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

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Oh, they exist in real life. And yes, you're right about them. I'm not as against them onscreen as you are, but I consider them the romantic equivalent of popcorn. :)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

And they're a mirror of the bad-boy, which is okay except that the bad boy has things going on when not in pursuit of making the good girl flip her shit and go wild. Whereas the MPDG really is either eternally upsetting lives--thus being a possibly psychotic acquaintance--or just waits to unload the crazy onto the first receptive person she finds--thus being a needy, leech...

[gryphonrose.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely on the Bad Boy/MPDG parallel. I've seen way too many cases where a woman falls for a BB and then realizes, "Oh, wait--he isn't just 'bad' in that edgy-Hollywood way, he really is BAD!"

And yeah, psychotic acquaintance and/or needy leech.