manic pixie dream girl

Cracked has several times in the last few months referenced a specific story character type that has been grating at me for the last few years, but didn't know had a name.  The character type is called the "Manic pixie dream girl." I will refer to this character as MPDG from here on.

I would encourage you to follow the link and click on the example movies to get an idea of what I am talking about. However, Nathan Rubin, who is the coiner of the term, describes the MPDG thusly:

"The Manic Pixie Dream Girl 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. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family."

The MPDG is absolute proof that Hollywood is less concerned with realistic relationships than with idealistic fantasies that ultimately result in a painful break-up or divorce. What usually happens is a straight-laced and highly-structured male character is introduced and we find out that he is not happy with life because being structured means he obviously is broken. He meets the MPDG and decides to change his approach to life, though it varies how related and in what order these events are. Hilarity ensues. There is relationship conflict, and the conflict is resolved by the highly-structured male accepting the MPDG's approach to life and progressing in a serious relationship with her. Movies where I have noticed this are Elizabethtown, Stranger than Fiction, and (most egregiously) Yes Man.

Apart from the fact that the MPDG as portrayed in the movies would not likely exist in real life, movies do real harm in romanticizing a personality type to people with clashing personality types. I can see where in real life an MPDG would be intriguing just long enough to get into a serious relationship with that person and realize the horrible mistake that has been made. True free spirits should not typically be merged with structured people. The movies kind of get around this by implying that this is a journey for the structured male character, and he will change for his beloved MPDG, but the whole idea is ridiculous. The tendency toward being structured or free-spirited, on the whole, is not a choice. A structured or free-spirited person might force themselves to live their opposite for a time, but after a while that would be a miserable existence.

Early in our relationship Golden heard someone describe similarities between partners in a relationship as money in the bank and differences as loans that will have to be paid back with interest. I can appreciate that far more now that we have been married more than a decade. We are very similar in a lot of areas, and those similarities have limited the issues we have had from our differences. In the course of our relationship most of the differences between us have resulted in or will result in some sort of compromise. Those compromises are sometimes easy and sometimes hard, but they always require care and effort and some pain.

My theory as to why the MPDG is so frequently worked into movie plots is that the character is something of a fantasy to freelance workers like writers or directors.  This free-spirited non-existent girlfriend never pressures them to get a real job or asks whether they paid the water bill.  She doesn't get upset when he gets distracted in his work or hobbies for days or weeks at a time, and doesn't care if he spends his money frivolously because she only exists for the moment.  In truth, all the MPDG character does is romanticize irresponsibility.

There are certainly other grating character types that show up in movies a lot, but I think the MPDG has to rank among the most annoying for me.  I say that as a structured man who doesn't believe he needs fixing.