Hunger Hurts: The Dangers of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

The “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” is a stock character in movies that was first coined by film critic Nathan Rabin, who used it to describe Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown. In his 2007 series of columns “My Year of Flops,” he says, “Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. [This character] 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 is beautiful, vivacious, spontaneous, whimsical, and wise. She has strange and endearing hobbies, like dancing in the rain or exclusively drinking black coffee. She is not like other girls.

Besides her quirky style and enigmatic personality, a huge part of what creates the manic-pixie is her relation to the lead male. His character is inherently unremarkable. He is palatable - attractive enough to watch for two hours, but not so much that he is unrelatable. We usually meet him at a place of discontent in his life. He is often quiet, broody, perhaps a bit naive. In her essay “In Defense of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Final Girl Studios dubs this character the ‘Stale White Wonder Bread Boy’ and I will be also be referring to him by that name. But the most important feature of the male lead is that he serves as a “blank canvas for the average guy to project himself onto” (Final Girl Studios). He is the lens we are meant to look through when we meet the Pixie.

The sole purpose of the Pixie’s character is to act as a savior for the Stale White Wonder Bread Boy.  When he stumbles across her magical little life, she, through her free-spirited nature and quirky outlook, teaches him some crucial lesson that allows him to rediscover his passion for life.  She does so without ever expressing any true agency of her own, and without expecting anything, especially not commitment, from him in return.

She is everyone’s perfect woman: men love her for what she can offer them, and women love her for her for the way she is loved.

But the problem with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is that she doesn’t exist. She can’t. Every part of her has been filtered and reduced through the lens of the Stale White Wonder Bread Boy until she is unrecognizable. Any characteristic that adds depth, grit, or authenticity is conveniently wiped from her story, and only the appealing, fitting aspects of her personality remain. She is a lie, fed again and again into the hungry mouths of young women.

When I was 14, I was introduced to two movies which redefined my perception of womanhood: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and “Scott Pilgrim vs the World.” The love interests, Sam Button and Ramona Flowers, are widely regarded as some of the most quintessential Manic Pixie Dream Girls in film. They hit every stereotypical mark, with their choppy pixie cuts, alternative taste in music, and their strange yet endearing habits, like rollerblading or flying through the Fort Pitt tunnel in the bed of a pickup truck. I remember watching these movies and becoming thoroughly entranced with Sam and Ramona, in all their wisdom and whimsy.

In my own life, I saw women who were complicated, frustrated, multi-dimensional - women who, for all their grace and kindness, were simply not as enchanting as these characters. Life has attached itself to them, a bag of rocks tied to their ankles. In my young eyes, they seemed too gritty, too weighty, too real, and for the first time, I was imbued with a longing, a hunger to be something more remarkable than myself, and to escape this dreary future.

Throughout the following year, I, accompanied by my best friend, set out to embody the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. We chopped and dyed each other’s hair. We lit incense and read our tarot, pretending to understand the cards. We starved ourselves, made ourselves sick on saltine crackers. Once, she stuck a safety pin in my ear; it went halfway through, and my vision blurred - I had to lie down. We leapt out of windows at midnight and skated to parks to stargaze and ponder life’s infinite mysteries. It was a magical time; adolescence usually is.

When you are young, the world seems to emit an ever-present glow, a soft hum of magic that lights up all the dark corners of your life. Life stretches out into eternity; everything seems absolutely and inevitably possible. But despite this atmosphere of wonder, you are at your most vulnerable. At this stage of adolescence, we develop our sense of identity: where we stop and the rest of the world begins. Anything - an offhanded comment, a particularly good song, a single frame in a movie - can have an unimaginable influence on the fundamentals of your budding personality. For my friend and I, characters like Sam and Ramona reterraformed the landscape of our identities, and colored the world in a new, dreamy light.

Yet, we weren’t happy. We existed in a constant state of discontent: always reaching toward the imagined versions of ourselves that were more interesting, more unique, more impulsive, whimsical, spontaneous, fill-in-the-blank. We were trying to fill the too-big shoes of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl - a task that would, of course, prove to be impossible. Our hunger created a vacuum, an insurmountable cavern between who we were and who we desperately wanted to be. As each of our efforts proved futile, the yearning soured into a sadness, and a rage.

Because the Manic Pixie Dream Girl can only ever exist through someone else’s eyes, it was much easier to imagine that the other was succeeding. At the time, I believed that my friend had fully stepped into her wonderful new self, and I was beyond envious. The cavern widened, a crack running through the ground that eventually opened between our feet, separating us. Such is the way of teenage female friendships.

But of course, my friend hadn’t reached her goal. In time, we both grew to understand the utter impossibility of the personality we so desired, and we loosened our grip on it, although never quite letting go.

Although she is an unattainable standard in real life, there is one other place the Manic Pixie Dream Girl can exist, and even thrive in: social media. Like in films, social media, particularly sites such as Instagram and TikTok, allow women to be perceived fragmentally. The key difference is that online, women can choose which parts of themselves are on display and which parts remain behind the curtain, while the Dream Girls of the movies have no say. In a culture where women are expected to perform idealized femininity, the idea of a place where everything about you can be tailored to perfection is undeniably alluring.

In the past few years, there has been a steady rise in women, often young women, who have used their online platform to step into the dreamy role of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. These personas are often recognizable by their vintage wardrobe, alternative music, and bedrooms that look straight out of Pinterest. They post well-edited videos of themselves reading, lounging, or dancing, always accompanied by the perfect song.  They even - seemingly self-aware - post videos of themselves lip syncing to an audio from one of these movies, dressed as one of the classic Pixies.

Like Sam Button or Ramona Flowers, these women’s personas are made to be looked at, not lived in. The ability for viewers to silently peer into their lives mimics the role of the Stale White Wonder Bread Boy; we, the audience, become the voyeuristic lens that creates the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. And, like Sam and Ramona, these women don’t truly exist, at least not in the way their profiles may suggest.

So, why the Manic Pixie Dream Girl? What is so enchanting about the trope? How has it pulled so many young women, including me, into its glowy trap? Well, obviously the Dream Girls are attractive: they’re pretty, fun, wise. But these girls aren’t just “cool,” they’re cooler. Cooler than the “other girls” of their respective stories. In “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” our Stale White Wonder Bread Boy, Scott, is already dating someone when he meets Ramona, a (too) young girl named Knives. Knives is sweet and deeply infatuated with Scott, and yet, he dumps her at the first sight of Ramona, (though not without cheating on her first). The implication is that Ramona is worth it, worth forgetting about every other woman, because she is simply and undeniably better. That’s the real pull of the Pixies. They are not just attractive, smart, funny - they are attractive, smart, and funny in a way that is better than all other women.

And this is where the dangers of the trope lie. First, it sets an impossible standard for what women should strive to be, a standard that is hungrily consumed by adolescent girls on the hunt for identity.

The affected girls begin to view themselves not through their eyes, but through the the eyes of others; it is the only way they can exist as a manic-pixie. It is an internalization of the male gaze, a violent invasion of their privacy, and their freedom. Margaret Atwood famously said on this, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

Then, it tells these girls that if they are to become this perfect, otherworldly being, they must set themselves apart from other women - their friends, sisters, mothers. Women who, like them, are after the same thing: to be loved by others, and by themselves. It breeds jealousy, resentment, pettiness, and superficiality. It is divisive in the most egregious way possible, by convincing women that they don’t need each other, and they do. They do.

It is important that I explicitly emphasize here that the Pixies, real or imagined, are not responsible for the dangers of their trope. They, like every other woman, are victims of the male gaze. Sam just wants to get into a good college. Clementine (of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) says she is just “a fucked up girl looking for her own peace of mind.” The manic-pixies of the internet are victims of the endless popularity contest that is social media. The “villains” here are the voyeurs, the Stale White Wonder Bread Boys.

And even they, in some way, are not truly villains. These men, usually young and inexperienced, have been conditioned by forces outside of their creation to desire a certain type of woman - a woman that will fix them, save them, nurture them, but will not require anything in return. They did not create this stereotype, but they are guilty of perpetuating it.

For a long time, I was at a loss for how to feel about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I often felt a sense of contempt for her, for the pain that her trope had caused me. She reminded me of my old friend, the magic of our youth, and the cutting losses I felt she was responsible for. But I still loved her and her promise of what I could be, a promise I continued to hold onto, even after I learned of its impossibility.

Five years later, I’m living my 14 year-old-self’s dream: I’m an art student at a beautiful university, in a beautiful city, surrounded by a wonderful community, far, far away from the place I grew up. I listen to alternative music. I thrift all my clothes. I play guitar. My room is exclusively lit by stained glass lamps. In a lot of ways, I am truly happy, happier than I ever dreamed was possible. But it isn’t the golden life Sam Button told me I would have, because I am real. I exist, the full weight of me, even the complicated parts I still don’t quite understand - and that’s okay. My complexity is a sign I am alive.