Thread by @jholbo1

MY is screwing with us but I lectured on this! The Ur-Indie era MPDG run is Lulu to Leeloo. That is, Demme's "Something Wild" (1986), largely forgotten - although it makes the MPDG lists - to Besson's "The Fifth Element" (1997) which clearly qualifies but is seldom counted in. 1/

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1416514244682690560

In film, it goes back to classics like "Bringing Up Baby" (1938) and "My Fair Lady" (1964) - the latter is later but, due to its "Pygmalion" origins, makes the clear connection to earlier English drama. 2/

The English original MPDG is Gilbert's "Pygmalion and Galatea". These were originally described as 'fairy comedies', showing the aptness of 'pixie', later. 3/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion…

Anyway, the origin of "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" was as off-hand disparagement of "Elizabethtown", by Nathan Rabin. 4/ avclub.com/the-bataan-dea…

Rabin has since repented the over-sized afterlife of his offhand coinage. 5/ salon.com/2014/07/15/im_…

But it's a good term for something real! But obviously taking as swipe at "Elizabethtown" is no way to encompass Pygmalion, as a mythological archetype. MPDG comedy is classic comedy, including great films and crappy films. 6/

It's tricky to analyze right. It's not that she isn't a 'real character' and he is. The guys in these comedies are as one-note as the gals, from Henry Higgins to Grant's 'I'm a silly dinosaur scientist' schtick to Daniel's nebbish-y yuppie Charlie in "Something Wild". 7/

It's not that the trope isn't reversible. It is. As has been pointed out, "Twilight" is reverse MPDG. Another example I've never seen anyone note: "Silence of the Lambs" is reverse MPDG, with Hannibal teaching Clarice a few life-lessons. Manic Demon Nightmare Boy. 8/

In a weird sort of way "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is Manic Pixie Dream Boy. Think about it, and what it means that his girlfriend, Sloane, is so oddly a non-presence in the narrative. Many buddy comedies are Manic Pixie Dream Bro (no homo). 9/

But the difference reversal make points to real differences, and obviously the trope encodes all sorts of very sexist assumptions about 'proper' gender roles. I think the best way to think about it is this: 10/

The MPDG trope seeks to achieve escape velocity from a basically Victorian construction of ideal femininity and only half-succeeds. Victorian wives are childlike and domestic. The husband retreats into this safety zone from the tribulations of the modern world. 11/

The MPDG is childlike and anti-domestic. It's as though the MPDG tries to achieve a higher synthesis of that split between an ideal home, presided over by a gentle, childlike 'good fairy', and the wild - harsh - modern world of real adult life. 12/

The job of the 'ideal woman' is to get a man's head on straight so he faces modern life as a man should: fearlessly & forthrightly, with a sense of who he really is. She can do that by being a presiding Good Fairy, at home, or an MPDG who drags him on a wild ride around town. 13/

Note the divide between versions in which the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is made, in the home - maybe literally sculpted from stone, in the home - and in which she is found, in some conspicuously accidental 'meet cute' collision, outside the home. 14/

The film that most perfectly interrogates this tension is, of course, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", which strongly thematizes the accidental meeting AND how it's all in Joel's head. She's a wishful projection out of him (as she tells him). 15/

"The Fifth Element" is also good to focus on. Compare and contrast Leeloo with Neo, in "The Matrix". Masculine vs. MPDG incarnations of what it means to be 'the One'. Anyhoo. 16/

Final thought: in a way, the battle between the Victorian ideal of domestic femininity, and the MPDG ideal of wildchild femininity - these dueling formulas for 'completing a man', getting him to be his healthy, balanced self, in the crazy, mixed up modern world - 17/

turns the classic Madonna-Whore binary into a Three Faces of Eve three-corner struggle: you've got the wife, the sexy bad girl, and the child. The Victorians combined wifeliness with child-like-ness. Enchanted dull domesticity as childcult. That's one type of 'fairy' ideal. 18/

The MPDG, by contrast, combines the sexy bad girl with the child - not that you are having sex with a child. But her 'bad' character is softened by making her naive and childlike and impulsive, not deliberately manipulative - not a seductress. That's another 'fairy' ideal. 19/

So you've got a sort of 'two out of three faces of Eve ain't bad' thing going on. @nathanrabin is probably sick of talking about it. But the MPDG is not a dispensable trope. It was only a bit unfortunate to introduce it in reference to a bad, disposable film. 20/

Footnote. @jays_ear objects to "Bringing Up Baby" - by extension, classic filmic comedies of remarriage - getting shoehorned into MPDG. Maybe I can round out my new-born 'two out of three ain't bad' theory, like so:

https://twitter.com/jholbo1/status/1416640743393746946?s=20