Queer Whore Collective: Manic Pixie Dream Whores Pt. 1
The 'manic pixie dream girl' (MPDG) trope and its discussion have been done to death - ironic, given its premise is that she was never realistically 'alive' in the first place. Its author, film critic Nathan Rabin, coined the term after watching Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), saying the MPDG "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." And yes, the phrase was born during a wave of such films, for example, Natalie Portman in Zach Braff's Garden State (2004) and then, later, 500 Days of Summer (though this is said to more critically portray the pitfalls of an idealistic, objectifying male gaze). By 2014, Rabin was a self-identified Dr Frankenstein, referring to the MPDG and her now many uses and iterations (often misogynistically hurled at female actors rather than the characters they played) as an "unstoppable monster", calling for her to be retired and "put to rest".
However, she hasn't gone anywhere; she's rejected her creator entirely and now roams freely anywhere from Tinder bios to Guardian long reads to antifeminist subreddits. As in the old literary tradition, her author has died. There's a certain poetry in the fact she's no longer caged within her intended definition.
The MPDG used her wings to soar off into countless other multiplicities, just like Rabin originally depicted. In fact, she has flown the nest and become a cultural phenomenon in her own right, for better or worse. This mirrors other, more rebellious versions of the MPDG trope, for example, Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who declares, "Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours."
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Most recently, Charlie Kaufman pushed this thought even further in I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020), which depicts a male/female relationship located exclusively in the man's mind's eye, shapeshifting across the surreal terrain of his many memories, fantasies, ideals and illusions. This 'young' man, Jake, exists only as the internal self-image of an elderly high school caretaker, something that is revealed to us at the film's end - and so we realise the young woman he brings to meet his parents, Lucy, doesn't truly exist either - she's a product of all the girls he envisions himself dating. She quotes his favourite authors, embodies characters from his favourite musicals - it's a film that's set in Jake's own personal delusions, and yet, somehow, Lucy is 'thinking of ending things' with him, as the film's title anticipates
Despite being Jake's fantasy, Lucy's voice and internal monologue narrate the film's events, although she often unravels into quoting other authors or literary characters. She seems concerned that she can't remember whether she's a poet, an artist, a scientist - she can't even remember her own name, though it keeps popping up on her cell phone as an incoming call. The film goes further than other MPDG narratives because it interrogates whether a construct of someone else's imagination can take on a life and identity of its own, whether Pinocchio can become a real boy. The push-and-pull tension between repressed reality and dreamlike delusion is shown as the film portrays the elusive nature of fantasy itself. Fantasy is, by its nature, both present and absent - defined by its presence in the mind but lack of attainability. It can be beautiful escapism or a dangerous drug, and far too many men wield it as a means to control, rather than accept, their own reality.
For me, the strangest part of watching the film was relating so much to a character who wasn't real, or who was trying to exist against the backdrop of the male gaze. I think most, if not all, women and other marginalised genders relate to that. A product of a male fantasy may eventually work out who she really is, but it's a disorienting process. I feel the term 'manic pixie dream girl' exploded so wildly because of its prevalence in real-life scenarios, not film. Every woman I know has wondered if she'd look or behave the same without the influence of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality and a socialised need for male validation. The phrase captures the fragmented nature of womanhood under patriarchy - we painstakingly self-actualise via putting ourselves together from what we find down the cracks in the pavement, the self-truths in our souls that are excluded from the dominant patriarchal ideas that once paved our sense of identity. I've heard it said in academia that 'women's fiction' is, by definition, inherently experimental because it is written from the margins. It is involuntarily avant-garde because it shouts against the soundtrack of what we are raised to believe we are or should be.
I've been called quirky all my life, and I still don't know why or if that's true. I feel I'm pretty normal. I identify more with the manic pixie dream girl's unloved little sister, the 'basic bitch’, who has grown up in her shadow. I love reality TV, drink Aperol spritz, stress out about my gum health, and I know I'm sounding like the Kate Nash song now, but I do try to floss. Manic Pixie Dream Girls do not worry about such menial things as tooth decay. Yet I've been idealised by depressed, DSLR-toting, Johnny Cash-listening, soft bois ™ all my life, and in the process, become the subject of many a shitty poem. So I can only really look with an objective curiosity through the archives of portrayals of myself in their words. Was I actually like that? Did I ever (real quote) "go to war with my battleship blue eyes"? Was I ever "complex, unfathomable, and a wonder on earth so worth exploring or getting lost in"? (That's also verbatim, vomit).
The answer is no. I was just your average disassociated closet lesbian with a fringe and decent music taste. A blank canvas on which to project their ideal woman, to fill in the gaps in my emotional continuity. They would selectively ignore my obsession with pop stars like Britney or Miley (probably viewing that as some ironic party trick) and instead revered my knowledge of punk music. Not all punk music, just the type that spoke to them. The MPDG has to love subcultures in a way that doesn't intimidate, alienate or threaten her more straight-laced boyfriend. She can be into anything that challenges them artistically and intellectually, but never something that challenges their cultural hegemony in a way that undermines the ego boost they get from owning one of us. As in 500 Days of Summer, it's impressive and captivating if you know The Smiths. But definitely don't go as far to say that no matter how achingly lovely Morrissey's voice, he is still an entitled creepy prick whose book won the 'bad sex in literature' awards for stuff like "bulbous salutation" and "You raised the kundalini... like an electric snake in your spine."
This manifested in my own life when a boyfriend (I only ever had two, both shit) said he didn't expect me to like his idol David Bowie because he was "too experimental" for women. I said I used to like Bowie, but it grossed me out to hear he slept with underage girls. That was a buzzkill for him. The MPDG is supposed to revitalise and reinforce, not ruin, male role models. She's not a 'feminazi', and she's never a 'Debbie downer'. So I selectively omitted my own 70s rock/punk icons in our conversations, such as Poly Styrene or Kathy Acker. They were too full of feminine rage, not alluring or beguiling at all. And I did that because our relationship was transactional. I exchanged this MPDG service for a roof over my head. I leveraged my so-called quirkiness for survival.
“Sex work is a topic that, as far as I know, hasn't yet been included at all in MPDG discourse. It's what I do now for survival, and somehow the closest I've ever felt to the MPDG archetype.”
In return, I was put on a pedestal that gave me a place to live when I was homeless, that let me get away with forgetting his birthdays (so kooky like that), and allowed me to put distance between me and an abusive childhood home. It gave me a male partner who did all the cooking and cleaning (way too away with the fairies to look after herself!). And on some level, this was an intentional strategy, though I would have called it love at the time. I physically couldn't cook or clean, do self-care, etc. I had CPTSD, and I was grieving the death of my younger sister. When I was able to function better on my own, I immediately left him and came out as gay. He couldn't argue with that. Someone who was never attributed 'real, in-depth character development', can, at least, easily reinvent herself.
Plus, he had exploited what he knew he offered me, survival, and tried to solder it into a cage. It was a strange dynamic - Peter Pan and Tinkerbell - a perennially immature boy plus his pet fairy. And the condition of my care was that I had to remain a fairy. He once took me down the high street where we lived and pointed out every girl who was skinnier than me because he wanted me to look like that in clothes. Ephemeral, waif-like. As little of me as possible. If I didn't embody his ideals, I'd experience verbal and physical abuse from him. So yeah, it was a toxic relationship, born out of my desperate need for safety and his desperate need for a fairytale he could control. Our male friends cast me as the villain when we split. They told me I was "off living my best life", and they had to witness him lose two stone because he was too heartbroken to keep food down. But he wasn't mourning me. He hadn't ever known me at all, and how the tables had turned.
Transactional dynamics in which the MPDG benefits equally is not something I've seen discussed as often. But it is a form of compensatable erotic labour. Her role isn't just spiritual awakening. It's sexual awakening too. She is the wild, wayward freak, both in the streets and sheets, which was how I was immediately taxonomised on first meeting that same boyfriend, who described me to his best mate as "cute art girl, likes poetry, good for threesomes*". This is a nice, reductive shorthand which I now use as advertising text on my escort profile.
*Threesomes with other women, by the way, proved too much for him to handle in the end, much to my disappointment as a secret lesbian.
Sex work is a topic that, as far as I know, hasn't yet been included at all in MPDG discourse. It's what I do now for survival, and somehow the closest I've ever felt to the MPDG archetype - because did someone order an unrealistic view of women as magical, spontaneous creatures only there to add whimsy and adventure to the otherwise underwhelming and under-stimulated life of men? Well, that's our whole wheelhouse! The difference is that we peddle it more straightforwardly as a sellable product.
At work, hookers don't want real character depth; that's off limits to my clientele. Prostitutes don't want their punters to 'truly know and understand them' because, ew, gross. MPDG life, existing as a muse and an object, works for us. Clients are wingless, often stuck in a rut, so we broker a trade in which we fly them off somewhere beautiful (a world in which somehow we want nothing more than their dick down our throats!) in exchange for money and all that empowers us to gain. The difference is now I set better boundaries and take the cash upfront. It's a much better way of keeping a roof over my head - I live alone with my cat and have never been happier. Sex workers are fetishised like anyone else, but we decide to charge by the hour for it. My self-autonomy is in the money it gives me and the financial freedom to make decisions I couldn't otherwise. I took my mum, poor for all my childhood, on holiday to Italy. I spend my 'fast money' on decadent gatherings with hooker friends, which don't actually often pass the Bechdel Test, but only in that we can't stop talking about how much we hate our clients.
And we do, often, really hate our clients. There are just different types of feminists out there. Some are off-shattering the glass ceiling, but us, the sluts and the bimbos are down here picking up the fallen shards and fashioning them into knives. That's where our power lies. The illusory, male-gaze-approved version of myself is finally fighting back, acting in service of my own needs. My work persona, who is she? I honestly don't care because it doesn't matter. She reimagines herself second by second according to someone else's bespoke desires. She's not real, but she's radiant, has superpowers, and is removed from life and trivial minutia. She can't remember either what her 'official' story is sometimes (A scientist? A poet?), but she floats effortlessly from one sexual ideal to another.
Ultimately, when the time is up, she's let out of there furnished with an envelope of crisp notes. It's a temporary prison where your inner monologue swirls in a frenzy of silent declarations like "Ouch, I need lube!" or "Wow, I can't believe he just said that!" but is transformed outwardly by some well-practised alchemy into smiles and giggles, paid-for patience and expensive endurance. Then, like Cinderella's carriage at midnight, that simulated sympathy returns to its true form, disgust and rage - texting the group chat to vent, counting and re-counting the money, planning on how to spend it in ways that, should he ever find out, would enrage him completely, like donating to a trans rights charity and all that other 'millennial nonsense'.
To be continued next month…
Words: Bella Violet Quinn | Part of Queer Whore Collective
