FIRST OF ALL: “Slightly Serious
Saturday” is something I stole directly from a YouTuber called Laurology. She’s makes me laugh a lot, you
should check her out. I recommend this video.
Next: This is something I did for my
final project for this class I’m in right now. I tried to clarify anything that
may not make sense outside the context of this class, but sorry if it remains a
bit disjointed. If you want to know more about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, you can
check out the two articles I cited at the bottom, or alternatively, Google it
and read the Wikipedia article.
Okay. Go.
When
I watched (500) Days of Summer, it
made me really angry, but I couldn’t figure out why. It was weird because
usually I’m not opposed to romantic comedies and stupid, unrealistic romance
movies that exist in that fascinatingly inaccurate world where these stories
take place, in which everyone inexplicably lives in nice apartments and has
enough money to buy extravagant things even though their jobs seem to be only
marginally important. For whatever reason however, maybe because I was watching
it through a lens critical of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Trope, this particular
movie just ground my gears. When it ended, I couldn’t figure out what it wanted
from me. I didn’t know if it wanted me to be optimistic and love, or if I was
supposed to not believe in it. It was confusing. I then went to meet some
friends for dinner, and was cranky and cynical for the entire meal.
The
thing that struck me most about both Penny and Schwyzer’s articles (cited
below) is that they both addressed real-life people who they identified as
Manic Pixie Dream Girls. It fascinated me that this trope was something that
could be taken as far as to define real people. I feel the same way when people
discuss Zooey Deschanel as the definition of a MPDG, because she’s a real
person. She just happens to play a lot of MPDGs in movies. Real people can’t
fall into Nathan Rabin’s (the guy who coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”)
definition of someone who "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".
That’s not a real thing, or at least it
shouldn’t be, and it’s pretty alarming to think about, yet Penny refers to
herself as at one point in her life being
a MPDG, and Schwyzer recounts a story of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in his
life. Penny, of course, overcame this trope as she continued writing and
realized what kind of damage the MPDG could do, and Schwyzer’s dreams were torn
apart when he realized he was wrong about the MPDG in his life.
As I thought
about the horrifying connotations of real people really believing that Manic Pixie Dream Girls can actually exist,
it reminded me of this quote from Jeremy Dauber’s essay, “Demons, Golems
and Dybbuks: Monsters of the Jewish Imagination” (A dybbuk is a monster in
Jewish mythology): “Today,
of course, these accounts of dybbuk possession might be read as case studies of
mental illness, as allegories for some of the religious, political or social
issues affecting the Jews, or simply as terrifying stories. It appears,
however, that 16th- and 17th-century readers readily
believed in the existence of dybbuks” (Dauber 2).
Maybe
today we talk about monsters like they are fictional beings, but at some point
in history, people really believed in them. Maybe today our scope of science
and technology has disproven the existence of such monsters like the dybbuk or
other scientifically impossible beasts, but who’s to say that monsters haven’t
just evolved and taken on a new form, maybe as a trope found commonly in
stories perpetuated onto real human beings?
The first poster is a warning
It's a warning to men of the dangers of the MPDG. I wanted it to
serve both as something that you would maybe expect to see from Tom’s
perspective from (500) Days of Summer,
in that the blame is being put on the woman, instead of at all on the man. Tom
would probably warn that girls like that seem perfect but end up breaking your
heart.
It
could also be interpreted from the perspectives of Penny or Schwyzer,
discussing the dangers of the monster-like trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl,
instead of the MPDG herself.
The woman on the poster is taken
from the WPA poster, “WPA women painters, Federal Art Gabllery, 50 Beacon St.,Boston”. The woman is painting some
“scary eyes”, representing the monster-like characteristics of the trope. I
left the background in the thought bubble white to represent the nothingness of
the environment in which one would find a disjointed trope such as the MPDG.
The man in the poster who is imagining her has imagined nothing but the girl
herself, allowing her to float from situation to situation without becoming a
specific and real being.
I framed the warning in the same
context as the WPA poster, “Be careful near machinery”. It amused to me to draw a
parallel between “machinery” and the MPDG, because that’s sort of how tropes
work, like machinery creating the same product in an endless loop.
I liked the idea of using a featureless man, like
in the poster, “A young man’s opportunity for work, play, study & health”, because it allows the poster to apply to
anyone. He’s wearing black, because black is a simple color. I made the world
around him a faded green color, to emphasize the mundane nature of his world,
providing him with the need for a brightly colored MPDG.
Be the hero in your story
The text on
my second poster reads, “Women: Be the hero in your story”. This is more of an
empowering poster for women in danger of becoming
MPDGs, like how Penny felt she did. Penny says, “Men grow up expecting to
be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting
actress in somebody else’s”.
I used the same woman as the other poster, but
she is painted in “Superman colors” (blue and red), and instead of painting a
canvas with the eyes of a monster, she’s painting a comic book style effect
bubble that says “Hero!” The background is sky blue, and the words are floating
in white clouds, so it appears that she’s flying, because if I know anything
about superheroes, it’s that most great heroes can fly.
Both of
these posters I think work together to provide, in WPA style, warnings against
the dangers of the MPDG. I hoped to express not only the dangers of the trope
in stories, but also the potentially damaging effects of applying tropes to
real people, because that’s what makes a modern day monster.
Works
Cited
"Laurie Penny on Sexism in
Storytelling: I Was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl." NewStatesmen. N.p.,
30 June 2013. Web.
<http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/06/i-was-manic-pixie-dream-girl>.
Schwyzer, Hugo. "The Real-World
Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché." The Atlantic.
Atlantic Media Company, 9 July 2013. Web.
<http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/07/the-real-world-consequences-of-the-manic-pixie-dream-girl-clich-233/277645/>.
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