This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  More insidiously a male creation than anything as obvious as Sharon Stone’s cervical cynosure or the newly mainstream porn stars, this was an exclusive, divisive ideal. Though she set off a kind of daisy chain of mimetic desire, real-life girls were not invited to share in her invention.

  It took real-life girls—many of whom wondered whether they were supposed to try on this new costume of quirks or congratulate filmmakers for finally getting them right—a while to figure this out. On the set of Garden State in 2003, actress Natalie Portman described her character, a literal spastic who draws the lead, Zach Braff, out of his world-phobic catatonia, this way: “Sam’s just a really … she’s a funny girl. Most parts written for women, especially romantic parts written by guys, are like some weird ideal of what a guy would want a girl to be. Like, she’s hot, she takes off her clothes a lot—she also really likes sports. And this is a real person who’s got problems, and she’s funny and she’s just as interesting and complex as the male character, and I appreciated that.”

  Having problems and being “funny” became leading dream-girl qualities. For those of us out in the field, the new girl appeared as both a watered-down affront to iconoclasm (or sadness, for that matter) and a willful force to be reckoned with.

  And Then There’s This

  There was a period, when the Internet was still a largely written medium, where it became frighteningly possible—even necessary—to cultivate not just a new persona but a new type of persona. Of the options available for poaching, few were as dependent on voice as the dithering new dream chick. E-mail was the perfect contagion for an ideal defined by her physical and metaphysical absence. For the cohort coming of age just as intranets spread through college campuses, e-mail offered a new forum for an old romantic exercise. Inventing both one’s self and one’s ideal reader is the epistolary prerogative, and in e-mail’s first, great epistolary era, I was not alone in playing Edison at the keyboard.

  Especially in the early, sweaty stages of acquaintance, e-mail opened up a kind of perpetual empty stage, an endless call for encores. Though courtly protocols lingered into the age of digital woo, the distancing, disposable aspect of e-mail was also a kind of equalizer. In the unregulated realm of online communication, women didn’t worry in the same way about appearing too forward, too interested, too available. What was this back-and-forth anyway but a pixilated game? Private correspondence was soon confined to screens that homogenized the idiosyncrasies of text, temperament, and time into the rigid uniform of font, format, and instantaneousness. We learned to work around these deficits—explaining our moods, drafts, and deletions, and using space, ellipses, and emoticons to develop a grammar that might somehow mimic the intimacies of longhand.

  What remained—and will remain, as long as there is language between us—is the extent to which one could glean, between and beyond a lover’s words, a sense of what is being sought. It didn’t take long for young women still conducting intersex experiments to notice that the combination of constant availability and spectral absence had a kind of incentivizing effect. Long-distance relationships cropped up at awkward and often insurmountable coordinates, emotional infidelity was midwifed into the lexicon, and all around the world, certain girls were discovering that what uncertain young men often responded to—off-line too, but somehow more palpably on—was the perpetration of a dream girl whose allure was based in her being not quite there.

  This is not the elusive, untouchable quality—the presence—that writ the dream girls of old so large. This is the banal absence—of stability, of ambition, of selfhood, of sexual threat, of skirts that pass midthigh—now associated with the approachably edgy, adorably frantic, real-person-who’s-got-problems. Maybe it was a class-action-size case of codependency: though she reached the status of dream girl, she feels more like a fun-house reflection of millennial masculinity in crisis. Her widespread attraction suggests the extent to which she reflects a young man’s fears about finding a place in the world, much less figuring out the opposite sex. Like a girly mini-me, she follows in the proverbial hipster dude’s shadow, filling his ear with life-coaching tips or just adorable chatter, skipping behind him on the path to mutually assured regression. In the movies, the new version of a happy ending for these stunted young men is not marriage or more than a provisional suggestion of romance. Instead the stories revel in the bittersweetness of edging a reluctant boy into manhood, whether his twittery comrade merely disappears at the end or indeed dies trying to get him there.

  Often, as with Portman in Garden State, Charlize Theron in Sweet November (2001, RIP), and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), avatars of this ideal attach themselves to the mixed-up young man with blithe aggression. They forge rehabilitation programs, scatter aphorisms (“Men see things in a box, and women see them in a round room” and “I’m impossible to forget but hard to remember” are two from the latter), and declare faux-obscure cultural allegiances that feel written in a particular way: they reek of the self-conscious blather of wee-hour e-mails, the personality-as-taxonomy rubric of online profiles, the ideal as an unending feedback loop of references mucked into a vaguely female form.

  I’m a Substitute Person, I Like It That Way

  It was in fact Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe’s unintentionally self-reflexive meditation on a man’s first, headlong failure, that inspired the critic Nathan Rabin to finally put a name to this trend in 2007. Christening her the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Rabin riffed out a few salient qualities: “[She is] that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that 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’s also divisive: “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 name, of course, is perfect. And in his first pass at wrangling the phenomenon Rabin struck upon its paradox: the MPDG seems to be both someone else’s one-dimensional idea of a dream girl and a general rejection of the dream girl tradition. Since 2007, Rabin and others have worked backward to legitimate the coinage, drawing up a lineage that includes actresses like Claudette Colbert and both Katharine and Audrey Hepburn. Contradictions and inconsistencies in the search for forebears (Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim? Seventy-five-year-old Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude?) have cheerfully been cited as part of an ongoing, trial-and-error effort to establish her as a player across film history. But to deny the ephemerid nowness of the MPDG is to deny her of her full, fluttery due, and to deprive the genesis story of a uniquely flimsy nonpareil of its telling modernity.

  How Happy Is the Blameless Vessel’s Lot

  Rabin is not alone in struggling to pushpin the iridescent wings of the MPDG to the page. Two of our best screenwriters have taken a crack: one result is sneakily self-aware, the other a dismal satire. Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) puts Clementine, the pushy, damaged dream girl played by Kate Winslet, where she belongs—in Jim Carrey’s besieged memory. Kaufman absolves Clementine of patented MPDG behavior by making her wise to the jig, as it exists in both the film and Carrey’s imagination: “Too many guys think that I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive,” Winslet says. “I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.”

  Often cited as evidence that Kaufman has the inside track on the phenomenon of sassy savior girls, the line is set off by Carrey’s wistful reply: “I remember that speech really well.” In fact Winslet’s edict is an advanced MPDG-ism—articulating the illusory crux of the attraction is part of maintaining one’s aura of beguiling insight. “I had you pegged, didn’t I?” Winslet gloats. “I still thought you were going to save my life, even after that,” Carrey admits.

  “I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s lo
oking for my own peace of mind” is not a disclaimer, but Clementine’s statement of allegiance to her kind. It’s believable because neither of them really believe it.

  In Anything Else (2003), Woody Allen broadened the pathologies of the MPDG into morbid unwatchability. Earnest, young every-schlub Jason Biggs falls in love with Christina Ricci’s tiny emotional grifter on sight, and why not: she couldn’t be more pixieish if she coughed stardust. But Allen, attempting to ingratiate himself with a new generation, seized upon this new type with startling contempt. He also puts a little old-school Woodman backspin on her: Ricci is a diabolical litany of narcissistic tics and tortured neuroses; the worse she behaves, the more gravely Biggs is bound to her. This despite Allen’s own warnings (he plays Biggs’s misanthropic mentor), which fairly gong with rue for a time when it was the seventeen-year-old bird who wound up blowing your mind with her philosophical backhand. “She’s a hormonal jitterbug,” Allen cries, “who’ll have you holding up filling stations to keep her on mood elevators!”

  The Hud Principle

  If explaining this crash-helmeted Kewpie doll’s sudden ubiquity or even throwing fences around the matter seems like too massive an undertaking, there is something simpler to consider, and that is whether calling her any kind of dream girl is bogus chiefly because she wasn’t properly dreamed up in the first place.

  In referring to the early era of cinema as “the golden age,” in part we refer to a time when movies were experienced in a state of aesthetic innocence. Our first impulse was to build palaces around them: opulent wombs lit up with new life, they encouraged us to dream together. Theaters of war, literature, religion, myth, nationalism, and technology have all served the same purpose: they open a forum for the telling of stories about who we are and might be. Inevitably those stories shape our sense of what is best and worst in us. The movies were a new way to extend the gestation of human ideals into our dreaming lives.

  As a culture and its conduits fragment, the dreams we dream together become fewer and farther in between. The ideals we produce reflect this fragmentation: they work harder for less return; their influence is broad but transitory and superficial, or concentrated but esoteric. Thinking of the MPDG’s persistence, I am reminded of Melvyn Douglas in Hud, warning the teenager making pie eyes at Paul Newman’s tumbleweed hustler, “Little by little, the look of a country changes because of the men we admire.”

  That the new millennium’s first beacon of femininity is a gnomic grown woman in ankle socks and neon jelly shoes feels less like an organic outcome than a perversion of the process. I think of this much-admired her the way I think of natal wards and nurseries filling up with children whose fathers and mothers were selected from three-ring-binder profiles, without the assistance of those known and unknown bits of magic that ever drew us to our mates.

  I can’t imagine that I was alone, as the aughts wore on, in feeling a gorge of dread and mortification rise every time one of these painfully constricted specimens motormouthed across the screen. Her rate of replication seemed to suggest something dire about us. The idea that enough versions of the same type should add up to archetype seemed to bode poorly for the movies as well. As any woman who ever flirted with the trappings of frailty, flaunted her spectacular oddity, or advertised the depth of her knowledge of early Small Faces LPs knows, frailty, flaunting, and advertising are the dispiriting sum total of this ideal. For those still wrestling with the Monroe Doctrine—wonderful to whom?—she offers too sparse and specific an answer and adds too particular a melancholy to the perennial dream girl demurral—But you don’t even know me!—and its breathless protest: But I do.

  It’s Jess. That Girl Is Jess

  We live in a have-not era of feminine identity. I don’t know what else but an acute case of Stockholm syndrome could explain the fact that instead of formulating a meaningful response, or even just drafting a letter of apology to the next generation of girls, young female artists have internalized the MPDG and begun breeding her independently.

  The most conspicuous example of this is Zooey Deschanel and her wide, periwinkle eyes. A favorite on the independent circuit, Deschanel found mainstream success by specializing in mildly varied flavors of the MPDG, most notably Summer in 2009’s (500) Days of Summer. At thirty-one, she launched a single-camera sitcom called New Girl, the first major network series built around the charm ballistics of the dream girl du jour. Conceived and written by another young woman, playwright Elizabeth Meriwether, the show’s tagline is “Simply adorkable.” Deschanel, also a part-time chanteuse, sings the oopsy-daisy theme song: “Who’s that girl? It’s Jess!”

  Deschanel, who wears butt-skimming rompers, ballet flats, a springer-spaniel perruque of hair, and baby-doll stamps of rouge in and out of character, capitalized on her epitome with a girly service Web magazine, also launched in 2011, called Hello Giggles. Aimed at Manic Pixie Dream Girl Scouts, the site’s contents fall under headings like “Treats,” “Social Studies,” “Home,” and “Beauty,” and its exercises in cooking and craft tutorial suggest the collecting of merit badges.

  In New Girl, recent dumpee Jess moves in with three young men. By pretending these men find Jess to be a huge and highly aggravating drip, the show activates an ultimate MPDG premise: it takes a special man to recognize this girl’s sui generis appeal. In the first few episodes, Jess often slides from speech into song and back; an early subplot involves her inability to say the word penis without atomizing in a sparkly puff. “I just got out of a long relationship” goes a typical declaration of self-insufficiency, “and I don’t know what I’m doing emotionally, or—let’s be honest—sexually.”

  That such a self-conscious, ghettoized romantic ideal is now the center of a network television show has been hailed as a kind of breakthrough. The traditional, live-audience sitcom has been dead for a decade. To revive the half-hour format, shows like The Office and Modern Family adopted a meta-documentary style, as though constantly seeking the camera for a slow burn or pausing to debrief what just happened in a talking-head interview captures something essential about both modern life and modern entertainment. With channels proliferating to accommodate the endless niches and crannies of our viewing desires, and manifold delivery systems for the latest episode of 30 Rock, television is not the audience mobilizer it once was. The viewership for today’s most popular series is nowhere close to that of a top show over the last decades of the twentieth century.

  Which is why New Girl’s arrival only highlights how everything about this character has been forced upon us. It’s a case of a bush-league ideal finding its fractured level. To attract even a niche audience, Deschanel has to stretch the MPDG personality to a painful extreme, performing the desperate bricolage of her weirdness to the point of exhaustion. It makes the issue plain, which is that whether you are trying to create an archetype or hoping to pull at the bar, calculation will always work to a certain extent, but the things we seek and cherish most in life and in each other are beyond measure. The only surprising thing is how well television’s smaller stakes suit this big-screen creation. The context of a sitcom is just artificial enough to can and preserve her meager illuminative powers, like a firefly in a mason jar.

  A General Call for Submission

  Often when we talk about the way movie and television landscapes are peopled today, we are talking about equal representation. Seeing one’s self reflected in the culture has become a moral imperative. A white woman complaining about the way (overwhelmingly) white women are represented might seem a little rich when other ethnicities are rarely seen—much less promoted as ideals—at all. And yet I think what has happened within the relative majority tends to enforce the point. It is not enough to be represented for representation’s sake; there is a larger, more elusive morality to consider. Because although we are born into the world with some sense of everything that is beautiful and true, like our palettes and our retinas it needs to be switched on—by storytelling, illuminations, ideals that remind us of what it me
ans to be alive and how it feels to dream.

  We seek the big stories and examples instinctively; the question is what we are leaving to be found. Without a rich cultural serial to follow, we become vulnerable to the persuasion of extremes. Today we measure our worth against impossible beauty standards and the nebulous metrics of personal branding. We police public “role models,” as though it were preferable—or possible—for any one of us to see any other exactly as she is. As though a perfect example is the only one worth following. Or we worry about unrealistic expectations, the flawless body that gets more distant even as it crowds us further into a corner. Well-conceived ideals require space to take hold, but they leave space too, for the determination of some ultimate self, and for self-respect.

  My call, more general: we must find a way to continue dreaming of each other. If it seems simple, it should. If we could just rest our minds for a minute, it might even be easy. The more difficult it gets to clear the necessary space, the more necessary that space becomes. Our ideals will occupy some other theater, perhaps, as yet unimagined; embody some other truth, still to be conceived. It need not—it must not—be designed in the image of any one thing, past or future, heightened or hyperreal. It just has to be a dream, and it has to not be this.

  Have a Beautiful Corpse

  1

  At fifteen I knew I had a lot of living to do, especially if all went according to plan and I was dead by twenty-four.

  That kind of timeline doesn’t really allow for things like grade-ten English class, yet there I was every Tuesday and Thursday, chafing under the rule of a new recruit named Mrs. Klapstein. Looking back, I would put her around twenty-five, fresh out of teachers college. At the time she registered only as someone of teaching age, an indeterminate bracket that had nothing to do with me. Mrs. Klapstein didn’t see it that way; I suspect she had ideas about playing the pupil-friendly radical at a regimented Catholic school. It was 1990—Dead Poets and all that. This shook down in various ways for me during our semester together. She once stoked a class discussion about unreliable narration by wondering aloud whether I had the hots for Holden Caulfield. A few weeks later, after I busted some fresh moves to “Let Your Backbone Slide” for a school assembly, she casually noted my “very sexual presence onstage.” I waited for the right opportunity to retaliate.