“I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
Shortly after my first ex-boyfriend mailed my CDs and meaningless tchotchkes back to my parents house, I dyed my hair red. I had just watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the first time. And then I watched it again. I made my Mother watch it. I watched it in the bath, late, on school nights, procrastinating exam study with my own private intertextual affair: here was Clementine Kruczynski, and here was I, sharing the shallow waters of subjectivity.
Of course, that wasn’t the only reason I chose the colour red. I was fascinated by 14th-century medieval knights who dedicated their performances to specific ladies. These knights would take something personal from their loves — their heart — and wear it on their sleeves into battle to prove themselves worthy, to prove themselves vulnerable. This was, I decided at seventeen, my Goddess origin story. For if Aphrodite could rise from the white foam of her hateful father’s genitals to breed love, I could rise from the blood of war with sunshine hair, whole organs embroidered on my sleeves.
Perhaps, never graduating from the romance of meaning, I was inevitably subject to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG). That flighty, spontaneous creature most commonly found on screen and in John Green novels. The Clara Bow of kitsch, of excess. The bright-haired maiden, dragging the insecure protagonist from scene to scene. She is from the loins of the sensitive writer-director, Nathan Rabin famously stated, to which he, five years later, published an article entitled I’m Sorry For Coining The Phrase Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Although the fictionality of her own kind fluctuates. We know, inherently, that the MPDG does not exist outside of these films, the way we know vampires do not really exist — but it does not stop us from wanting them to exist. Rather, the MPDG manifests a set of semiotic criteria that are not only desirable, but mythological. Here is a colourful-haired, creative, strange woman. She is the pinnacle of difference, of mythology that we desire until she is actually that strange, creative and colourful-haired woman. Until she stains the bathroom tiles with her hair dye. Until she is actually spontaneous, actually vulnerable, actually fully-fleshed with her own kinds of turmoil and unbegotten memories. Not a woman, but a concept, an art object, a statue of projection, a place of idle worship.
Essentially, the study of the MPDG is a kind of nymphology. It is an annex to a much larger building, she exists in the same way that the unicorn or perplexed fairy exists. For as children, our imagination, our play is the most intense, serious and emotional occupation. Children create, rearrange the world in ways pleasurable to them. In his essay Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, Freud relates that the “opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.” That the child can very well distinguish play from reality, and yet links such imagined objects or situations with the tangible, palpable world, creating the (otherwise phallic) phantasy. And yet, Freud argues that we never really give up on play as adults; we only exchange one thing for another. That “what appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate… the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with the real objects.” This is to suggest that the surrogate for the little boy fantasy of the topless mermaid, of the cheeky tinkerbell, of the colourful playfulness of the childhood imagination is the birth of MPDG. Of the magical woman who is here to save him, the nymph who he dreamed of in pre-pubescent slumbers had her nose in Being and Nothingness in the Vegan Cafe by his dead-end job.
The MPDG is the imagined object placed in the palpable world, told to surprise us, to romance us, to save us. She is told to be unapologetic, but only in the eyes of visual difference. She is told to sit, stay, be good. Be loud, but not too loud: the Middle English etymology of ‘drem’ referring only to noise. Manic Pixie Noise Girl.
And yet, she is a dangerously easy role to fill. I’ve watched the ease of my body bend to spontaneity, the impulse to be memorable or dazzling kick me hard in the ribs, unable to breathe sentences of my own. I could be anybody, anything you liked, as long as it meant you wanted me. I have been a victim of this phantasy both on once-off dates and fully committed relationships: the semiotics of a creative, strangely-fashioned and brightly haired woman overpowering the girl beneath the plastic shell.
I am no stranger to her. Neither is she to me. We woke up in the same bedroom with the same purple mascara. We burn the same incense, read the same JSTOR articles. We long to be a mermaid in the ocean and know just what to say to that ubiquitous-looking male when his eyes start to search ours for some kind of object permanence that we alone cannot place. Manic Pixie Dream Girl is tired. Manic Pixie Dream Girl is wine drunk. Manic Pixie Dream Girl is some kind of concept, some kind of play in which all the actors are seldom seen but are really shadow puppets, which scared you as a child but under her guise you feel… safe. Warm. Homely. A pleasure akin to Freud. Has she ever read Freud? You doubt it. But she recites T.S. Eliot to you like it’s the ingredients on the back of cereal boxes. Do you even eat cereal? Does she? I know she doesn’t: we burn the same incense.
It is so easy to become a conspiracy of a woman, when she was the position you loved in the most.
