Though I coined the phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe Kirsten Dunst in 2005’s Elizabethtown, Zooey Deschanel is the ultimate example of the curious breed, for better or worse. Bringing the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” into the world has at times made me feel like Dr. Frankenstein.
But I’m not Dr. Frankenstein. I did not create the concept. I merely gave a name to something that already existed and has proven surprisingly ubiquitous and enduring.
I did not coin the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” because I love romantic comedies, but rather to call out a toxic, dishonest, and pervasive fiction that beautiful, quirky young women exist primarily to cheer up mopey male sad sacks, and have no real agency, drive, or will of their own.
By the time 2009’s (500) Days of Summer was released to wildly conflicting reviews, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl had acquired enough cultural currency that makers of twee, precious romantic comedies had to confront the archetype, either in interviews or within the movies themselves.
(500) Days of Summer did both. In interviews, the filmmakers discussed how they subverted the trope. Summer, Zooey Deschanel’s excitable, elfin fantasy lady, essentially tells the depressed protagonist, Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), that she will not be his Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
She bluntly informs him that while he may have fantasies and delusions rooted in the romanticized, idealized, poisonously fake conception of love and sex found in Cameron Crowe and Zach Braff movies, she has no interest in being his muse, girlfriend, and redemption. She tells him not to fall in love with her because doing so will only break his heart.
Tom interprets that as “Fall in love with me immediately, as I am your muse, girlfriend, and redemption.” (500) Days of Summer begins by informing us that what we are about to see is not a love story. The film and Summer herself manage the strange feat of being at once bracingly, refreshingly honest about their intentions and weirdly manipulative and dishonest.
The movie opens with Tom at a low ebb. He is devastated by the most brutal disappointment in his relationship with Summer, a coworker at a greeting card company where he works as a writer.
(500) Days of Summer continually highlights its artificiality. We’re never allowed to forget that what we’re watching is a fiction about characters who see their lives through the prism of New Wave masterpieces, J.D. Salinger novellas, and Hollywood musicals. It’s a movie that isn’t afraid to sit back and have its characters watch other movies, most notably The Graduate, so that it can harness their iconic power.
(500) Days of Summer is self-aware enough to acknowledge, implicitly, that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is one of the prisms through which its characters distort the world. It understands how toxic, sexist, and unfair the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype can be. It’s telling us not to identify with Tom because he is selfish, self-pitying, and filled with incoherent rage at the universe, and Summer establishes clear, if confusing, boundaries with him.
It posits romantic comedies and love stories as lies, then invites us to become emotionally invested in the love story at the core of its romantic comedy. (500) Days of Summer discourages us from identifying too strongly with Tom and his inability to deal with the complicated, frustrating reality of Summer as opposed to the fantasy version of her that exists inside his head.
Yet because Tom is played by the preternaturally adorable Joseph-Gordon Levitt, and is the hero of a very pretty movie full of emotional music and beautiful people, we are programmed by convention to root for Tom because the female romantic lead is always supposed to end up with the male romantic lead, or what the hell kind of romantic comedy are they even in?
(500) Days of Summer would like to be a different kind of romantic comedy, a different kind of love story, and a different kind of movie about Manic Pixie Dream Girls and the strange, fraught, impossible place they occupy in the minds of sensitive, lonely young men with vague literary ambitions and sensibilities. On some level it is. Yet it can’t quite figure out what it wants to say. (500) Days of Summer sets out to be the ultimate romantic comedy and the ultimate anti-romantic comedy and ends up as a fascinatingly confused, if intermittently inspired example of both beasts.
The movie is twee personified, yet it’s far more bearable than it really has any right to be, thanks largely to casting. Deschanel is irresistible and unknowable, the incandescent light the movie revolves around. Gordon-Levitt makes a character who is misogynistic and petty, selfish and imprisoned by his narcissistic delusions sympathetic in spite of himself.
If we root for Tom, it’s partially because we’re supposed to root for a romantic lead to get what he wants, even if he doesn’t deserve it and has been told why he’s not going to get it, but it’s also because we root for Gordon-Levitt as an unusually likable and charismatic actor.
The movie’s structure has Tom tell the story of his fractured romance with Summer to a support system that includes a weirdly miscast Geoffrey Arend as McKenzie, his horny best friend, and the hero’s sister Rachel, played by a very young Chloe Grace Moretz.
Cast an adorable, lisping child actress in the role, and (500) Days of Summer realizes its potential as an unwatchably precious exercise in twee self-parody. Yet Moretz brings the same spooky precociousness to the role that Jodie Foster brought to her performances as a child actress. Moretz is, if anything, far more mature than her older brother, but thankfully the movie doesn’t push her precociousness too far.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is primarily an archetype. But it caught on because it’s ultimately bigger than that. It is a world unto itself, stitched together from Belle & Sebastian singles and Woody Allen movies from the 1970s, bicycling in the rain, Audrey Hepburn’s impossible beauty, Wes Anderson, heartbreak, Nick Drake, screwball comedies, and arthouse first dates.
Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a language, a cinematic vocabulary that (500) Days of Summer speaks fluently, even as it seeks to undermine the phony and toxic dynamic at its core. So while the film may indeed subvert the idea that a female romantic lead must, and should, end up with the sappy dude pining for her, it’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl movie all the same.
The archetype is most often a self-congratulatory male fantasy, but it also has a masochistic element. (500) Days of Summer uses its dream girl to punish its lead for being an entitled creep, but it can’t help but feel for him all the same. After all, who can resist someone with Zooey Deschanel’s gamine charm and Audrey Hepburnesque perfection?
The Next 14 entries in this series are:
Along Came Polly
Amsterdam
Autumn in New York
Bringing up Baby
Companion
Forces of Nature
Joe Versus the Volcano
My Sassy Girl (American remake)
Serendipity
Sweet November (1968)
Sweet November (2001)
Watching the Detectives
What’s Up Doc?
Who’s That Girl?
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