Pages

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Exactly:

"Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. In the late '60s and early '70s, MPDGs often took the comely form of spacey hippie chicks burdened with getting grim establishment types to kick back and smell the flowers."

I find that the older I get, the less I care to see relationships with wacky, supposedly artistic, yet so uninspiringly flat, ladies be the turning point for mopey male characters. Those guys are so tortured-- I should care about them because-- wait, why? Wouldn't it be better if all these guys started a flirtation with extreme sports or meth instead? That would be just as realistic, don't you think? It's not that these characters fall in love with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, they just use her to come to some kind of understanding of themselves. After all the sexin' and/or adventures stop, so does the relationship.

BARF!

Can movie makers please stop thinking the mopey-man-flowers is interesting at all? It is so insulting to any creative woman with a brain and a real life. Sadly female actors and audiences aren't the only ones stiffed by this lameitude, the guy characters in these films end up being merely a more charming bag of tics in the end.

The worst is how many men, especially ones who indulge in lots of media, think that the Magical Pixie Dream Girl exists, and if you are artsy, you could be her. If you don't do your job to shake that artsy boy loose, you'll find out just how disposable you are.

Worse than the MPDG is, of course, the Unbearably Sexy Crazy Lady. USCLs are darker and show more tit. Rather than just flitting away like the MPDG, USCLs get to succumb to drug addiction, suicide or mental illness. Sexy, no? Well, as long as she's out of the way so the protagonist can live his new life...

HATE!

2 comments:

LOOKA said...

HA!
"live their life" - they just creep into their house with the 'you can never pay me' glow to it and the new car of the same type, to look at the woman and the kids they possess and think:

"I owe it all to the MPDG, I still think back to it and wonder what would have become of us. Ah, it would have never worked but it was the best time of my life. "

PUKE to the tenth power!

Amanda said...

Extreme sports and meth--ha! Nice one, mademoiselle.

:)