Understanding the Manic Pixie Dream Girl
I caught pneumonia and watched all 14 episodes of "One Day" on Netflix in a fever haze. Here's what I learned.
Hard launch.
For the past too many days, my life has been derailed by pneumonia. An old time-y illness that we all kind of forgot about in our collective covid-19 era, pneumonia combines high fevers and delirium with painful coughing. The illness and I negotiated hour by hour: I’ll try going for a walk today! The hell you will. Humbling, exhausting, it’s horrible. The best tactic I could come up with was to lay very still, try not to trigger the coughing, take medications that I’m sure destroyed my precious microbiome and let time pass.
While having a daily fever between 38-40C doesn’t leave much brain power, I had enough cognition to feel bored. I needed entertainment I could pass out during, storylines that required maybe 3 brain cells. Enter: One Day.
Image of the two main characters, Emma and Dexter, belongs to Netflix.
One Day is a story written by David Nicholls, a middle aged white guy from England. Originally published as a book, One Day was first adapted into a film with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess before being remade into the currently streaming 14 episode mini-series.
In the story, Emma and Dexter meet at the end of their university years and connect in some way for several years after. The reader/viewer watches as life takes them into different directions and then back together again, over and over, with the struggles and life lessons one might expect along the way. The ending is sad and dramatic. I cried, but resentfully. How did this stupid show get me??
I suppose I was watching with an agenda. I wanted to see how the characters approached the transitions involved in coming of age, how love evolves from the sweetness of youth to the nuance of middle age. I wanted to be told that all my own life transitions could eventually lead to deep, heady, romantic love.
What I watched was a story about Dexter and his journey through life, Emma relegated to the role of helping him to understand himself, reflect his life back to him, open her time, heart, and legs to receive him when his moods were stable enough for that to be an option.
In short, Emma played the part of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Required viewing:
Special thanks to my friend, Nathan, for sending this to me while I was ranting about One Day. Those who respond to rants with resources to go deeper are the *chef’s kiss* of life.
The original Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the one who inspired the phrase, is said to be Natalie Portman in the movie Garden State.
Image from thescriptlab.com.
A brilliant woman, Natalie has done interviews about regretting the role, while the writer, director and lead character, Zach Braff, told Rich Roll on his podcast earlier this year about how proud he was of that work. Men and women predictably respond differently to the notion that one is there to serve the other, enlighten the other, change the other, somehow.
Why care about this?
Are you reading a blog written by a man-hater?
Like the other female characters we’ve explored in Heart Work, the Pick-Me Girl and the Chill Girl, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists as a sort of Jungian archetype. Carl Jung came up with archetypes that he said were passed down to us from our ancestors, comprised of innate human knowledge. He identified four major archetypes but admitted there is no definite number. They are:
The Persona - or the face we present to the world, altering it to fit the circumstances we’re in
The Shadow - our unconscious mind and repressed ideas about taboos and what cannot be said, it’s a wild, chaotic, unidentifiable realm
The Anima or Animus - the anima is a feminine image in the male psyche, and the animus is a male image in the feminine psyche. Our gender roles are wrapped up in this
The Self - we’ve talked a lot about the Self as Internal Family Therapists see it. Jung, like most others, has his own idea about how Self is created and maintained. Themes of unity and cohesiveness are familiar.
I’m not a Jungian scholar or practitioner, but I can appreciate how his work informed the modalities I do use. Jungian archetypes form the basis of the characters we identify in narrative therapy, and the parts that step forward in IFS.
In therapy sessions, one of the most common recurrent themes from people of all genders is the frustration of being placed into a role that no longer serves their interests. Too much time spent living a storyline that doesn’t fit will result in disorientation and a lack of trust in our own choices. Knowing how to identify and circumvent roles that pull us away from our own heart’s desire creates liberation.
We study the Manic Pixie Dream Girl like we study any role that exists to support a dominant form of power: to help us understand how we’ve been recruited into storylines that serve others, identify warning signs that we’re on a path of self-betrayal, and strategies to return back on the path that leads to your heart’s desire.
Become a paid subscriber to get the full Manic Pixie Dream Girl analysis, including:
*how MPDG is a modern archetype presented as femmes as a role to play and a duty to take up to support men
*the ways MPDG is especially common for those who work in the helping professions
*how to identify the sneaky ways you’ve already been recruited in relationships (romantic but also in families and at work)
*guided inquiry offered throughout the analysis to support you to check in with your own life and relationships.