Falling in Love with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Transformations of Masculinity in the 21st Century

Gordon So Research Master’s Thesis Department of Media Studies Universiteit van Amsterdam 2 July 2019

Supervisor: Toni Pape Second Reader: Abe Geil SO 2

Abstract

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a stock character type in American millennial cinema labelled as a young, lively, whimsical girlfriend who takes the hand of her male partner to show him the delightfully adventurous side of life. She can be found in numerous popular and critically acclaimed films such as (500) Days of Summer (2009) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which demonstrates the character’s prevalence in popular culture.

Existing discussions regarding the manic pixie dream girl are mostly led by feminists who criticize the character trope for rewriting women in service of male fantasy. Little attention, however, is paid to investigating the origin of this figure, the masculinity alongside it, and the gender relations it reveals in contemporary society. This study addresses these issues by proposing character analyses of several manic pixie dream girl films in connection with critical literature in film and cultural analysis. Results show that these films indicate a masculine desire to transform oneself as a means to escape a state of arrested development from indulgencing in pre-adolescent fantasy to shouldering adult responsibility.

A closer look on the manic pixie dream girl reveals that the character is moulded by postfeminist ideology which emphasizes individual freedom and choice; and she is found in male-centred films wherein the pursuit of her love always issues lessons of masculine self- improvement. These embedded notions of femininity and masculinity closely adhere to the construction of the self-enterprising neoliberal subjectivity. In the conclusion of these films, men tend to end up better adjusted to the neoliberal social order through partnership with manic pixie dream girls or overcoming their juvenile desire for them.

Keywords: Manic Pixie Dream Girl, masculinity, postfeminism, romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer

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Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Toni Pape. This project would not have come to be without the time, effort, and patience he has generously dedicated to guide me through the process in the past year. I also want to thank Abe Geil for kindly agreeing to be the second reader of this thesis.

In addition, I am forever in debt to the staff and fellow classmates of the Media Studies Research Master’s program at the University of Amsterdam. They create a professional and affectionate environment for me to learn as a student and grow as a young adult. The passion and wisdom they pour into the program make this project and me possible. SO 4

Contents

Introduction: Approaching the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ….….….… ……………………. 5 Extending Feminist Discourse: Towards Masculinity …………………………………….. 5 Corpus …………………………………………………………………………………….. 8 Method: Character Analysis ……………………………………………………………… 10 Thesis Outline ……………………………………………………………………………. 12 1. Rom-Com for Boys: Contextualizing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ………………….. 14 1.1 Hommecom: Men’s Search for Love ………………………………………………… 15 1.2 Indie Cinema: Off the Beaten Path ………………………………………………….. 23 2. A Story of Boy Meets Girl: Femininity & Masculinity in the Postfeminist Age …….. 35 2.1 The Postfeminist Girl ………………………………………………………………… 36 2.2 The Postfeminist Boy ………………………………………………………………… 42 3. Making an Imaginary Friend: Relationship in the Age of Cruel Optimism ………… 56 3.1 Diverging Narratives: Male Fantasy & Disillusionment …………………………….. 57 3.2 The Hero’s Journey: The Boy Hero & The Herald ………………………………….. 61 3.3 A Cruelly Optimistic Relationship: Desire for Self-Improvement ………………….. 65 Conclusion: Farewelling the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ………………………………….. 75 Origin: Hommecom, Indie Cinema & Postfeminism ……………………………………. 75 Grow up!: Postfeminist Masculinity & Male Transformation …………………………… 77 A Cruelly Optimistic Relationship ……………………………………………………….. 78 To Be Continued …………………………………………………………………………. 79 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………………….. 81 SO 5

Introduction: Approaching the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl 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.

– Nathan Rabin (2007)

Extending Feminist Discourse: Towards Masculinity

There is a scene in (500) Days of Summer (2009) where the featured young couple, Summer

(Zooey Deschanel) and Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt), play house in IKEA. “The sink’s broken,”

Summer puts her hands on her hips, showing a mischievous smile. “Well, it’s okay,” Tom walks

over to the next kitchen installation, “because that’s why we bought a home with two kitchens.”

Summer rushes to his side and grabs his arms, “You’re so smart. I’ll race you to the bedroom.”

She runs down the IKEA corridor in her vintage dress startling fellow shoppers to hop to the side. Tom chuckles to himself then follows her lead. Summer arrives at a bedroom installation and leaps onto the bed. She turns to face Tom and whispers, “This is fun! You’re fun!” then pulls him in for a kiss.

I cite this scene to sketch an image of a female character type that enjoyed considerable popularity in American cinema between the early 2000s and the mid-2010s. This cinematic figure is typically portrayed as an attractive young woman who with an overwhelming enthusiasm lives life the unusual way as she pleases. She is mostly featured in the role of the protagonist’s girlfriend, and with her sex appeal and dynamic personality, in the eyes of some audiences she is the ideal girlfriend. SO 6

Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (2005) features Kirsten Dunst in such a role. In the film she is a sunny flight attendant who takes an interest in Orlando Bloom’s grieving character.

With her charm, enthusiasm for life, and persistence, Dunst is finally able to affect Bloom to see the bright side of life by falling in love in the end. What stands out to film critic Nathan

Rabin (2007) is the intensity of the life-loving passion that beams out of Dunst’s character who he describes as “psychotically chipper” (fig. 1). He calls this character “The Manic Pixie Dream

Girl” and defines it as stated in the epigraph.

Fig. 1. Claire approaches Drew in Elizabethtown

Little did Rabin know at the time he invented more than just a name to describe a character, he gave shape to a prevalent idea in American culture and initiated a public debate.

The manic pixie dream girl is not only a description of a free-spirited, life-loving female character, it tells a trope revealing a cultural fantasy that chronicles women lifting men out of their misery. Rabin’s invention coincided with the rise of Zooey Deschanel who had become a

Hollywood It girl through her breakout performances in (500) Days of Summer and New Girl

(2011–2018). The sticky term coupled with a recognizable face prompted the Internet to a game of spotting manic pixie dream girls in popular culture. Soon, media audiences discovered the SO 7 ready availability of the character type in cinema (Wikipedia 2019). Simultaneously, the term’s widespread cultural currency drew severe criticism with regard to its misogynistic undertone.

Rabin’s invention has struck a nerve in American culture, it touches upon the long- standing issue of women representation in media. Feminist critics take issue with the manic pixie dream girl trope for rewriting women in service of male fantasy (Greco 2012; Penny 2013;

Beaumont-Thomas 2014; Yuan 2015; Allison 2016). Their criticism can be summarized into four points: (1) The trope places women in secondary roles whose only reason to exist is to help men achieve their arcs; (2) since the female characters are supportive in nature, they lack independent goals and desires, and are therefore rarely imbued with real life; (3) the lack of interiority causes the characters to be primarily defined by their exterior, which is often manifest in eccentric appearances and behaviours, perpetuating the stereotype of women being irrational;

(4) the trope reduces women’s individualities to a type in a disparaging manner, similar to the

“dumb blonde” stereotype where a type is used to mock women who possess certain traits.

Furthermore, these critiques are voiced in consideration of real-life consequences the cinematic figure may bring about. In the most referenced critical piece, Penny (2013) argues that the female character is a harmful model for contemporary women because:

Manic Pixies, like other female archetypes, crop up in real life partly because fiction

creates real life, particularly for those of us who grow up immersed in it. Women

behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men who know better,

and men and women seek out friends and partners who remind them of a girl they

met in a book one day when they were young and longing.

Penny’s criticism comes from the assumption that fictional stories can affect the real world because they inform the audience’s world view. In this view, Penny continues, “Men grow up

expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting

actress in somebody else’s.” In addition, some critics attribute the problem to sexism in the film SO 8 industry. For instance, Beaumont-Thomas (2014) contends that “[critics] are rightly uncomfortable in thinking about women in terms of stock subgroups, and yet this is exactly how a male-dominated film industry thinks about them – and after a trickle-down process, how

ordinary men will end up thinking about them.” In other words, feminist critics raise the issue of gender inequality in the film industry which leads to sexism in storytelling that will ultimately skew the way the audience make sense of the world.

As demonstrated above, existing discussion on the manic pixie dream girl is singularly

framed by feminist discourse preoccupied with identifying, criticizing, and protesting against

the figure and the wounding influences she effects to female audiences in real life. If the figure

is indeed a product of male fantasy, the masculine aspect of this phenomenon is certainly

overlooked in the current discussion. Furthermore, little effort is devoted to investigating the

flourishing of the manic pixie dream girl in millennial cinema and the gender relations it may

unravel in contemporary society. This study then aims to further the discussion by proposing

the following key questions: (1) What is the origin of the manic pixie dream girl and why does

it become popular in millennial cinema? (2) If the character type is a product of male fantasy,

what exactly is this male fantasy and what kind of masculinity is being constructed? (3) What

is the nature of the gender relations in the trope? Besides the unfair treatment of women in

representation, I will examine relevant subject matters including genre, audience, masculinity,

and narrative structure. I believe situating the manic pixie dream girl within these domains will

provide answers to the questions.

Corpus

The following analyses will frequently reference examples from the films (500) Days of

Summer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), and Ruby Sparks (2012). Since I am interested in

the manic pixie dream girl as a generic figure and cultural artefact, my analyses will focus on SO 9 similarities between the films and frequently discuss them together to bring out the overall characteristics of the figure. These films not only commonly contain the manic pixie dream girl, they are also indie productions. The self-conscious quality of indie cinema provides critical distance to the subject matter. As I will further elucidate in Chapter 1, the tension between the indie and the mainstream is contained within the film text itself, in particular, the indie often comments on the conventions of the mainstream. This allows the audience as well as the analyst to take a slightly removed position when engaging with the film and its characters (Newman

2011; King 2017). This vantage point opens up a clear view on the subtleties that constitute the manic pixie dream girl phenomenon.

(500) Days of Summer is one of the most iconic manic pixie dream films. The award- winning film debuted at the 25th Sundance Film Festival and was subsequently opened for

theatrical release in 2009. The story is presented as Tom Hansen’s recollection of his relationship with Summer Finn. The narrative thus features a non-linear structure highlighting the selective nature of memory when remembering love. The interweaving of Tom’s good and bad moments with Summer creates a dialectic of love which functions to foreground the fantasy aspect of romantic relationship to the audience. In this view, the representation of Summer is constructed through the eyes of Tom, which demonstrates the manic pixie dream girl is a concept of woman from the male point of view.

In comparison, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World features a relatively straight-forward manic pixie dream girl trope. The story is a heroic tale of Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) who falls in love with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), yet in order to completely win her heart he has to battle and defeat her seven evil exes. The roles are clearly defined in this film – Scott plays the hero destined to rescue Ramona the damsel in distress. This character constellation is common in romantic fantasies that feature the manic pixie dream girl trope. Conventionality nonetheless reveals a pattern in the said trope – a transformation of the male hero. How do SO 10

Ramona’s ever-changing hair colours factor into Scott’s masculine transformation? The following analyses will strive to make clear the relation between the male hero and the manic pixie dream girl.

Last but not least, Ruby Sparks is the most self-reflexive and critical film about the manic pixie dream girl trope. It is no surprise that the screenplay is written by a woman, Zoe

Kazan, who also plays the female lead Ruby. In fact, when she was asked about the term the manic pixie dream girl which some audience conferred on her character, Kazan said that she thought the term was misogynistic and that the audience were misunderstanding the film if they saw her character that way (Greco 2012). Ruby Sparks tells the story of young novelist Calvin

Weir-fields (Paul Dano) falling in love with a fictional character Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan) whom he has created. As the creator, Calvin has the capability to modify Ruby’s personality at will. The surreal tone of the film, the blending of fantasy and reality, accentuates the manic pixie dream girl as a product of male fantasy. As such, Calvin and Ruby, the imaginator and the fantasy, personify the manic pixie dream girl trope. The ways in which these characters behave and treat each other will provide clues for understanding the manic pixie dream girl phenomenon.

Method: Character Analysis

Since the manic pixie dream girl is a film character, character analysis will serve as a starting point in understanding the ways in which the character is constructed, received, and its potential meanings. I follow Jens Eder’s (2010) definition of film characters as “identifiable fictional beings with an inner life that exist as communicatively constructed artifacts” (18). This definition recognizes, on one hand, the audience’s tendency to talk about characters as if they are real living entities with perceptions, thoughts, motives, and emotions, and on the other hand, their status as fictional beings in media texts. Murray Smith (2010) also recognizes the SO 11

“twofoldness” of characters by placing them under the frame of what he calls “mimetic hypothesis” (234-238). The hypothesis is based on the assumption that fictional characters are just like real people. Yet, it remains a hypothesis because fictional characters do not actually exist like ordinary people; they owe their existence to the text. The “twofoldness” of fictional characters is crucial for approaching the manic pixie dream girl in a comprehensive manner because this view recognizes that film character is a complex entity shaped by many factors outside of the screenplay.

As a starting point to capture the many facets of the manic pixie dream girl, I consult

Eder’s (2010) heuristic model “the clock of character.” The model outlines four aspects of a fictional character: artefact, symbol, fictional being, and symptom. These pose key questions when approaching fictional characters. Analyzing characters as artifacts focuses on the means by which a character is represented. This concerns the aesthetic structures and textual features that are employed to construct a character. For instance, Deckard (Harrison Ford) in Blade

Runner (1982) is shaped by film noir aesthetic. As a typical noir character, he is portrayed as an anti-hero who is anti-social, cynical, disillusioned, and morally ambiguous. As symbols, characters are vehicles to convey indirect, higher-level meanings. In this view, characters essentially function as signs that hint at something abstract to be grasped by the audience. The

Wizard of Oz (1939) features the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion who respectively gain a brain, a heart, and courage throughout the narrative. After WWII started, these characters have become symbols for nationalist values – standing for the three qualities Americans needed to win the War. The fictional being aspect examines how characters act and behave. They possess certain features and relations as inhabitants in fictional worlds. In the Batman franchise, the superhero is a playboy billionaire by day and a crime-fighting vigilante by night; he drives the Batmobile down the streets of Gotham City to combat his nemeses – these specific features and settings constitute the Batman character. Finally, understanding characters as symptoms is SO 12 to recognize the cultural mentalities that shape the characters as they are. In the Bourne series,

Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is a rogue spy trying to recover his former identity. The character’s

mastery over high-tech surveillance technologies and his arc of redemption as a former CIA

hitman prove he is a character that negotiates the capabilities and ethics of post-9/11 counterterrorism in America. Eder suggests that artefact, symbol, fictional being, and symptom are the most general domains of features that can be ascribed to characters. This study will consider all four aspects when approaching the manic pixie dream girl.

Thesis Outline

Accordingly, the following three chapters will each focus on specific aspects of the manic pixie dream girl. Of course, the four aspects sometimes overlap and have implications on each other.

Nevertheless, each chapter mainly concerns one or two aspects in order to maintain focus while developing insights towards unravelling the gender relations surrounding the figure. In general, this study engages with the characters in the manic pixie dream girl trope to extract broader insights on gender and relationships. Chapter 1 will focus on the artefact aspect of the manic pixie dream girl, namely issues of genre and audience address. I situate the character type within generic contexts of romantic comedy and indie cinema. This chapter shows that the rom-com genre’s turn to male audiences creates the manic pixie dream girl as a sexy girlfriend. The aesthetic of indie cinema imbues her with quirky traits in order to appeal to its hipster audience.

Hence, I argue that manic pixie dream girl films cater specifically to a hipster male audience.

Chapter 2 concerns the fictional being and symptom aspects. Regarding issues of gender, I begin by showing that the manic pixie dream girl is representative of postfeminist ideology. The femininity she displays is physically attractive, sexually agentic, and individualistic. On the other hand, the masculinity of the male protagonist is identified as culturally adept, emotionally vulnerable, and juvenile. This chapter establishes the gender performances of the couple, setting SO 13 up for the discussion of gender relations in the next chapter. Chapter 3 examines the symbolic aspect which relates to the narrative functions the girl and the boy performs in the films under discussion. I demonstrate the two narrative patterns of manic pixie dream girl films, both of which feature masculine transformations to maturity, albeit occurring in different ways. Joseph

Campbell’s (1949) narrative framework The Hero’s Journey allows me to examine the manic pixie dream girl as a symbolic archetype. I suggest that she performs the role of the Herald who challenges the Hero on an adventure so that he can experience a transformation. Finally, I examine this fantasy of masculine transformation through the lens of Berlant’s (2011) cruel optimism. From this perspective, I argue that love and relationship place the self above romantic commitment in the neoliberal age. SO 14

1. Rom-Com for Boys: Contextualizing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

“You haven’t written a person, okay?

You’ve written a girl.”

– Harry, Ruby Sparks

This chapter concerns the artefact aspect of the central characters in manic pixie dream girl films. From this perspective, I consider the characters as artefacts in films who possess certain textual features and are influenced by specific aesthetic structures. As I will explain, this also involves issues of genre, audience address, and modes of production. The first step to begin the

investigation is to situate the character type within film genres. The manic pixie dream girl

began to appear in American cinema in the early 2000s in films like Garden State (2004) and

Elizabethtown (2005), and continued to flourish until the mid-2010s. I argue that the figure

arose in this specific period due to historical developments in two generic contexts. The first is

a shift in the romantic comedy genre from female- to male-centred narratives starting from the

mid-1990s. At this time, a new type of rom-coms tailored for male audiences appeared in the

market. This means that the manic pixie dream girl emerged out of a need to satisfy male fantasy

in the context of romance. The second context is situated in what Michael Newman (2011) calls

the “Sundance-Miramax era” which designates a peak of interest in indie productions between

the late-1980s and the end of the 2000s (1). As I will discuss in detail, indie cinema has a

preoccupation with quirky, odd characters. This part of indie aesthetic stylizes the behaviours

and fashion of the manic pixie dream girl.

Nevertheless, when talking about the manic pixie dream girl attention ought to be paid

to her male counterpart as well. While she has a reputation in popular discourse, she is typically

not the main character in these films. Instead, it is the male character who usually takes the SO 15 centre stage and is supported by the manic pixie dream girl. If these films are produced to entertain male fantasy, there is a need to study the kind of masculinity that is constructed through the fantasy of the manic pixie dream girl. The female figure thus provides an entry point for this study to understand the construction of both male and female characters in these films.

1.1 Hommecom: Men’s Search for Love

Manic pixie dream girls are found in stories of boy meets girl in which the boy is at the centre of attention. The narrative of (500) Days of Summer is presented as Tom’s recollection of his relationship with Summer; Scott Pilgrim vs. the World chronicles Scott’s heroic journey of defeating Ramona’s seven evil exes; and Ruby Sparks tells a novelist falling in love with his own creation. The central element of love and relationship shared by these films make them fall under the romantic comedy genre. Jeffers McDonald (2007) defines the rom-com as such:

“A romantic comedy is a film which has as its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearted way and almost always to a successful conclusion” (9). An oddity presents itself: manic pixie dream girls are found in romantic comedies which feature men taking the centre stage. This may sound counter-intuitive to media audiences since romantic comedy is often stereotypically assumed to be a female genre (Mortimer 2010; Jeffers

McDonald 2007). What is being dealt with here is a special type of romantic comedies that caters to men.

Jeffers McDonald (2009) observes that within the rom-com genre there is a shift in emphasis in narrative from women to men starting from the mid-1990s, beginning with

Swingers (1996). This conscious effort to oppose the hitherto dominant female-centred narrative is marked by a renewed focus on male protagonists and their quest for love. Jeffers

McDonald designates this new type of male-centred rom-com the “hommecom.” SO 16

Coincidentally, manic pixie dream girl films were released in the 2000s, this makes hommecoms an appropriate backdrop on which to read the manic pixie dream girl.

Jeffers McDonald (2009) suggests that the rise of hommecoms is a deliberate effort to attract male audiences into the genre. Rom-com has been commonly assumed to be a women’s genre for its emphasis on female concerns, female stars, and female audiences within the narrative and marketing. The typical romantic comedy’s hallmarks are “female-centred narratives charting the rockiness of the road to true love, and including such well-used tropes

as the initial mutual antipathy, the subsequent accord, the misunderstanding that break up the

couple, the sacrifice or quest or embarrassing public gesture that stands as an apology and re-

establishes the pair” (Jeffers McDonald 2009, 147). Hommecoms emerged in reaction to the

female-centred conventions at a specific time. This time was what Jeffers McDonald calls the

Ephronesque turn, designating a period in the late 1980s and 1990s when writer-director Nora

Ephron was immensely influential on the genre. Famous works such as When Harry Met Sally

(1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You’ve Got Mail (1998) consolidated Ephron’s reign as well as her signature treatment of romance: the avoidance of sex in rom-com. Hommecoms rose to counter the sexless convention of rom-com by conversely emphasizing sex in the narrative. Films like There’s Something About Marry (1998) and American Pie (1999) enjoy revealing the bodily, sexual elements of romance, and are widely known for their explicit content. Hommecoms, then, operate on the stereotypical cultural assumption that men want sex in relationships (while women withhold it from them) and so would go for films that satisfy that desire (Jeffers McDonald 2009).

I align myself with writers such as Diane Negra (2006), Kathleen Rowe (1995), and

Claire Mortimer (2010) in proposing that in addition to the sex appeal to male audiences, the rise of male-centred narratives indicates a cultural desire to reflect a certain masculine anxiety at the turn of the millennium. The spotlight on masculine troubles in romance, detailing men’s SO 17 rocky road to true love, is also a response to changing gender relations in society apart from a response to the (female-dominated) market. This point will be discussed in detail shortly.

Hommecoms bring into focus the male perspective of romantic relationships which is associated with male fantasy and the idealization of women, which in this case is embodied by the manic pixie dream girl. Jeffer McDonalds (2009) states that hommecoms “set out to explore and test the contours of the genre by repositioning the centre, rehearsing all the generic basics

– dating rituals, feigned indifference, heartfelt passion – but making them new by considering them from a male point of view” (147). From the male perspective, the manic pixie dream girl is constructed as an ideal image of women. In this regard, Ruby Sparks is self-conscious of the

artificiality of women’s representation in works of art. In the film, having come up with the

character Ruby for his upcoming novel, Calvin shows his brother Harry (Chris Messina) the first draft. Harry responds by telling Calvin that he is a writer who knows nothing about real women: “You haven’t written a person, okay? You’ve written a girl.” This self-reflexive moment elucidates that the manic pixie dream girl is a product of male fantasy. As a cycle of films that appeals to male audiences, hommecoms are specialized at delivering male fantasy within the context of romance. Accordingly, the manic pixie dream girl is constructed as the ideal girlfriend for men.

Furthermore, with the emphasis on sex, hommecoms idealize the manic pixie dream girl as the girlfriend who is always up for sex. Hommecoms prioritize sex and the body which is based on the conservative cultural assumption that only men are interested in sex in romantic

relationships (Jeffers McDonald 2009). The manic pixie dream girl trope, having emerged out

of the hommecom cycle, then seems to challenge this stereotype by portraying women desiring

sex. In (500) Days of Summer, for instance, Summer seduces Tom by lying naked in bed. The

sexual initiative, however, should not be interpreted as progressive just because it breaks the SO 18 traditional stereotype. The sexually agentic girl is still within the domain of male fantasy, only this time men do not have to do the hard work of convincing women to have sex with them.

Fig. 2. Summer seducing Tom in (500) Days of Summer

As demonstrated above, hommecoms are founded on problematic representations of

women. The manic pixie dream girl is a product of the fevered imagination of male writers.

Therefore, this representation of women is manipulated in order to satisfy male fantasy. In Ruby

Sparks, Harry makes another self-reflexive comment to Calvin: “Quirky, messy women whose

problems only make them endearing are not real.” This points to how male writers throw reality

out the window when they create feminine characters that are attractive for problematic reasons.

Another example is Ramona in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World where she plays the role of damsel

in distress so that Scott can pull off the heroic act of rescuing her.

The manic pixie dream girl is found in the rom-com genre at a time when the genre

turns its attention to male audiences. Hommecoms, as designated by Jeffers McDonald, tell

stories of men’s search for love. These films, however, consider romance in a manner that

entertains male fantasy. In this context, the manic pixie dream girl is a manifestation of the

ideal girlfriend who enjoys sex (to the satisfaction of the male character, filmmaker, and

audience). This runs the risk of creating representations of women that are unrealistic and even SO 19 disparaging, which explains in part the feminist criticism directed towards the manic pixie dream girl trope.

※

Hommecoms open up a space to explore masculine troubles by portraying men suffering emotionally. Jeffers McDonald (2009) points out that hommecoms “enjoy revealing that its

central male characters worry about relationships, dating rules, makeout conventions, what to

say and wear, just as women have been doing in rom-coms for so long” (154). There are plenty

instances in which male protagonists worrying about their chances with the manic pixie dream

girl. For example, Tom in (500) Days of Summer consistently consults his teenage sister for

dating advices throughout the film. The reverse consultation relationship between the young

adult and teenager is meant to be comedic, but it also reveals the former’s insecurity. Similarly, the male characters of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Ruby Spark worry about losing their romantic partners (fig. 3). It seems that representations of men in romantic relationships have lost their “cool” in comparison with more classical romantics like James Stewart and Richard

Gere. These new young men are emotionally vulnerable, perhaps even described as “feminized” for it is typically women who are portrayed to be worrying over relationships. As such, hommecoms allow men to appear emotionally vulnerable and presents male suffering as a recurring theme. SO 20

Fig. 3. Scott confides in his roommate about his fear of losing Ramona in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World In hommecoms, the audience witness a wider expression of masculine emotions. As the narrative shifts to the male point of view, the audience gain access to the anxiety men experience in situations of romance. Critical literature indicates that there are precedents of films displaying male emotional suffering even before hommecoms. Kathleen Rowe (1995) traces rom-coms from the classical age of Hollywood cinema and observes a major shift in masculine representation compared to post-classical rom-coms. Whereas in classical Hollywood period

“male authority is something to be mocked, and masculinity the subject of laughter,” in post- classical rom-coms the audience is asked to sympathize with the suffering the male hero endures

(185). In general, there had been an increased use of melodrama to tell the story of men’s lives and male suffering, and thus Rowe coins the term the “melodramatised man.” The infusion of masculine melodrama into rom-com, she argues, began in the late-70s in a body of rom-com films called “nervous comedies,” exemplified by Woody Allen films like Annie Hall (1977) and

Manhattan (1979). Rowe describes the men in these films as “feminised” and “victimised,” and links this emergence of melodramatised men to socio-cultural changes at the time: SO 21

The origins of this shift lie, I believe, in the widespread assault to structures of

masculine authority that occurred in the 1960s – the Civil Rights movement, the

revival of feminism, the Vietnam War, the Pill, Stonewall and the demand for gay

rights, Watergate, inflation – all of which rattled institutions built on racial and

sexual privilege to such an extent that masculinity could no longer serve as a safe

subject for comedy (185).

Nervous comedies in the late-70s “reflected the angst and world-weariness of the period, where there is no longer any certainty about relationships and [gender] identity (…)” (Mortimer 2010,

17). These films came out of commonly held fears about how changes in the status of women would impact on men.

In the 2000s, the manic pixie dream girl represents a relatively new type of empowered femininity that began in mid-1990s. Vazquez Rodrigeuz (2017) was the first to identify the manic pixie dream girl as an embodiment of postfeminist ideology. The character’s spontaneous, thrill-seeking behaviours align with the ideology’s emphasis on individual choice and sexual freedom. According to Rosalind Gill (2007; 2008; 2009), postfeminist women are empowered by advertisers who borrow narratives of empowerment from feminist movements. For example, an empowering advertisement tells women: “New hair, new look, new bra. And if he doesn’t like it, new boyfriend” (Gill 2009, 100). The empowerment of

women in the form of prioritizing the self over men upsets the latter’s sense of security in romantic relationships. The male protagonists’ worry over the fickleness of their romantic partners in manic pixie dream girl films are therefore founded in this context.

The “empowered” femininity does not alone explain the increased masculine vulnerability in hommecoms. It should be recalled that hommecom operates as male fantasies which takes women as objects of desire. This premise makes dubious any notion of female empowerment; still, to a certain degree this contributes to the masculine anxiety in question. SO 22

Another contributing factor is a main theme that runs through hommecoms that is identified separately by Mortimer (2010) and Negra (2006). When discussing the male hero in hommecoms, Mortimer (2010) references Jude Apatow’s rom-coms, such as Knocked Up

(2007) featuring Seth Rogen, which explore the common theme of “seeing the underdog, the male underachiever managing to achieve credibility through partnership with beauty (…)

Apatow’s movies are directed more at a male audience, giving them the opportunity to identify with the flawed hero” (66). Consider also Negra’s (2006) formulation of the

“deficient/dysfunctional single masculinity” in these films. She argues that these films feature

single men who have failed to take up their proper roles in the social order, and that

representational culture is here to “rehabilitate” them. Mortimer and Negra both demonstrate

hommecoms’ tendency to cater to men who do not live up to successful standards of

masculinity. Not all men are James Stewart or Richard Gere, but they can be Seth Rogen and

Michael Cera who happen to partner up with beautiful women within the cinematic fantasy.

This means that in order to capture the widest male audience, hommecoms appeal to all men

regardless of how successful they perform their masculinity.

The resurgence of melodramatic male characters in hommecoms placed in opposition

of manic pixie dream girls reveals that there are changes in the status of women in

contemporary society such that men feel threatened. In the 1990s and 2000s, postfeminism

articulated a young and powerful femininity that prioritized women’s own empowerment over

notions of commitment. The empowered femininity causes men to feel insecure in romantic

relationships, explaining the representation of emotionally vulnerable men. In addition,

hommecoms intend to capture the widest male audience possible by offering a fantasy that

permits character identification for “deficient men.” In the context of hommecoms, these two factors explain the masculine uneasiness in manic pixie dream girl films.

SO 23

1.2 Indie Cinema: Off the Beaten Path

Besides hommecoms, manic pixie dream girl films are also indie films. In academic literature,

“indie” is first and foremost negatively defined by existing outside the major Hollywood studio system and the megaplexes where they screen (Newman 2011, 1; King et al. 2013, 1). Although there had been little trouble within the academic community to come to a consensus that this is an inadequate definition, the negation serves as a starting point for understanding indie. “Indie” is often used in layman terms as a contraction of “independent,” academic debate, however, draws distinctions between the terms “independent,” “indie,” and “Indiewood” (Staiger 2013;

Tzioumakis 2013; King 2009). According to these scholars, “independent” is used to generally include the forms of American cinema that operated outside of the Hollywood mainstream.

“Indie,” rather than being a contraction, is taken here as a distinct mode of film practice that evolved out of the history of independent filmmaking with heavier commercial elements. As the 1990s saw an increasing popularization of independent cinema, that sector of filmmaking had been increasingly commodified by Hollywood through the establishment of subsidiary studios specializing in exploiting the indie sensibility and the corresponding niche markets.

Indie thus became a branding strategy for quality filmmaking which promoted “a conception of quality different than the one held by the practitioners in mainstream Hollywood” (Staiger

2013, 22; Newman 2017; King 2009). This time period also marked the start of what Michael

Newman (2011) names the “Sundance-Miramax era” which designates a distinctly indie era of film production and film culture. Following Geoff King (2009), “Indiewood” stands for the institutionalized form of this film culture: “an area in which Hollywood and the independent sector merge or overlap” (1). It is in this zone where manic pixie dream girls express themselves.

The manic pixie dream girl is an indie phenomenon because films that feature the character type tend to adhere to indie modes of production and textual qualities. In terms of production, these films are produced or distributed by “specialty” divisions of major SO 24

Hollywood studios in the Sundance-Miramax era, which Newman (2011) argues to have existed between the late-1980s and the end of the 2000s. In fact, (500) Days of Summer premiered at the 25th Sundance Film Festival in 2009; and with Ruby Sparks (2012) and Garden

State (2004), these three films were released in this period by Fox Searchlight Pictures which

is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studio. Other specialty studios that distributed manic pixie dream

girl films include Focus Features (subsidiary of Universal Pictures) for Eternal Sunshine of the

Spotless Mind (2004) and Fox Home Entertainment (Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment) for My Sassy Girl (2008). Of course, there were films distributed by major studios such as Scott

Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) and Paper Towns (2015). Even so, these films were produced by talents who possessed expert knowledge of the specialty market: indie director Edgar Wright directed the former, and the screenwriter duo of (500) Days of Summer wrote the screenplay for the latter. The finance/production conditions of indie films contribute to the emergence of the manic pixie dream girl due to the subsidiary studio’s arm’s-length relationship with major studios. This unique position targeting specialty markets provides filmmakers a space in which to cultivate a distinct indie culture, which in turn influences the textual qualities of indie films.

According to Newman (2017), indie culture is fundamentally an identity culture that acquires its identity from a cluster of ideas about creative production and experience. Its central appeals are autonomy, authenticity, and opposition. Indie prides itself on being outside of

Hollywood, which is an emblem of mainstream popular culture or mass media. It is therefore a culture positioned in relation to mainstream, mass media: “alternatives appealing more narrowly that reject the conventions of popular forms, or at least depart from or engage critically with them” (25). This makes indie the opposition of mainstream Hollywood in terms of audience address and reception (28). The autonomy cherished by indie culture refers to the way in which autonomy and its alternatives are imagined within the film industry, rather than the realities of production in Hollywood (ibid.). The notion of artistic expressivity SO 25 unconstrained by commercial or institutional pressures and demands is more an ideal than a reality even in the specialty division studios. Nonetheless, the appeal is based on the notion that artists within the indie sector enjoy relatively more creative freedom than those working in major studios. Finally, indie authenticity is a matter of artistic judgement (30). Indie’s claim to authenticity is founded on the opposition to mass or mainstream culture, which is often considered to have financial gains as its main goal and thus relies on formulaic expressions that are proven to efficiently achieve that goal. From this perspective, Newman argues that indie films are “more honest and personal and less formulaic, focused more on creative expression and less on making a successful commercial product, more realistic and less contrived” (ibid.).

Newman’s formulation on the three central appeals that constitute indie culture is key to

understanding how indie film’s textual qualities take shape. Consequentially, the manic pixie

dream girl is moulded by these qualities.

With regard to the textual qualities of indie films, the following sections will

respectively discuss three topics of interest that influence character construction in manic pixie

dream girl films: (1) Quirky sensibility, (2) an emphasis on creating realism, and (3) an intended hipster audience.

※

“Quirky” is a buzzword that is frequently used to describe the manic pixie dream girl as well as the films that feature the character type. For instance, some articles call (500) Days of

Summer the “next quirky cult classic” (Miraudo 2009) or laud the film for “killing with quirkiness” (West 2009). The Wikipedia entry for “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” defines the character type as “static characters who have eccentric personality quirks and unabashedly girlish” (Wikipedia 2019). In lay usage, quirky is a term associated with something being unusual or offbeat, that is in essence, different from the norm. This draws an immediate SO 26 connection to indie culture since it is defined by being different from the Hollywood mainstream. Therefore, indie films and characters’ quality of being quirky is a manifestation of indie opposition that Newman (2017) proposed. Quirkiness also attests to the notion of indie authenticity because it entertains the idea that what deviates from the norm yet remains interesting is new and original. Arguably, this idea of the quirky provides vitality for indie cinema. In American Independent Cinema: An Introduction, Tzioumakis (2006) writes that

from the mid-90s, “[s]upported by an increasingly expansive institutional apparatus (…) low

budget, edgier, offbeat and quirky pictures were (…) in a position to find a large enough

audience to return substantial profits” (282). This also hints at how quirky indie films seek a

specific audience, which I will discuss shortly.

There is no lack of examples in illustrating the quirkiness of the manic pixie dream girl.

Ramona in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World changes her hair colour every week-and-a-half, and goes

from pink to blue to green over the course of the film (fig. 4). In (500) Days of Summer, Summer

plays a game with Tom to see who can say the word “penis” the loudest in a public park in

broad daylight. And in Ruby Sparks, Ruby screams “Jump!” and leaps into the pool amid a

conversation. I have discussed briefly how the spontaneous and thrill-seeking behaviours of the

manic pixie dream girl is a manifestation of postfeminist ideology. The postfeminist girl is

playful and individualistic, and she enjoys pushing the boundary of socially acceptable

behaviour for her own entertainment. Her frolic desire to step out of line makes the active, fun-

loving, sexually agentic young women appear quirky and a fitting subject matter for indie films. SO 27

Fig. 4. Ramona with pink hair in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

While the quirkiness of the manic pixie dream girl is self-evident, the male protagonists in these films are also in a way quirky. Consider the casting of Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The star of Superbad (2007) and Juno (2007) is stereotyped by the film industry and audiences as always portraying an awkward, out of place white boy which is the personality he consistently performs in these films. The portrayal of young men and women with marginal status in manic pixie dream girl films seems to show an effort of indie films to capture a young audience which enjoys being at the margins. Newman (2013) calls them “movies for hipsters”

(see a dedicated section below).

In (500) Days of Summer, Tom is a young man in his 20s who is attached to his childhood belief of true love and thinks that he will never truly be happy until he meets “the one.” When he encounters Summer, he is so sure that she is the one he has been looking for.

Summer does not share this belief, leading to the subsequent heartbreak experienced by Tom and, by extension, the audience who shares his perspective of the romantic relationship. The film asks the audience to identify with Tom along his journey to true love. SO 28

To clarify what I mean by “identification,” I refer to Murray Smith’s (1995) Engaging

Characters. Smith proposes three ways to engage with film characters: First, the audience must recognize the character as a distinct being, then they may align with the character’s perception as a means to enter the story world, and finally, they may share allegiance with that character by the extent to which they agree with its morality.

In the case of Tom in (500) Days of Summer, the audience is asked to share allegiance with him since his quest for love develops out of pure moral intention. In terms of character alignment, although the audience access Tom’s perception most of the time in the film, there are moments when the audience is asked to look at him as well as events unfold at a slightly removed distance. These moments involve an unnamed narrator who tells the story to the audience as if he is narrating a fairy tale: “Tom walked to her apartment, intoxicated by the promise of the evening. He believed that this time his expectations would align with reality.”

In this scene where Tom attends Summer’s house party after they break up, the screen splits into two frames, the left labelled with “expectations” and the right “reality”. The frames depict the same events unfolding in real-time, but they play out differently. In Tom’s expectations, he expects to reignite passion with Summer that evening; but in reality, Summer is engaged to another man. In this scene, the audience is asked to feel bad for Tom, but also critically evaluate his naivete from a distance (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. The audience gains critical distance away from Tom in this scene in (500) Days of Summer SO 29

This simultaneous moral allegiance and judgement upon central characters, James

MacDowell (2010; 2013) argues, is part of what he calls “quirky sensibility” commonly found in indie films. Quirky sensibility is harnessed in a tonal balance of “sincerity” and “irony”: the audience “view characters’ schemes and achievements as comically absurd or potentially bound for failure – and thus open to a certain amount of ridicule – at the same time as they are treated with degrees of sympathy” (2013, 49). This means that quirky indie films ask the audience to sympathize with a quirky character for its pure moral intention, but the quirk, which deviates the character from the norm, subjects it to critical evaluation. The male protagonists in manic pixie dream girl films share a common quirk that is associated with childhood, which constitutes another element of the quirky (MacDowell 2010). Like Tom, these male characters maintain lingering ties with their puerile selves. They may be obsessed with childhood playthings or behave like children. The childish behaviours exhibited by these men, such as

Tom’s naïve devotion to the notion of true love, are portrayed in an ironic light such that the behaviours make these men appear “deficient” in Negra’s words.

The male “heroes” of the manic pixie dream girl films are treated in what Northrop Frye

(1957) defined as the “ironic mode,” meaning that the protagonists are portrayed to be in some way “inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves” (33-34). Their dedication and commitment to the quest of love, however, are simultaneously presented as laudable and worthy of the audience’s sympathy. The dual address of sincerity and irony shapes the way the male protagonists are represented in these films. They are sincere enough for the audience to tag along on their quest of love, yet the ironic judgement the audience place upon them is a testament to the rockiness of the road to true love. In other words, the audience are supposed to like these central characters because they are young and innocent, but also for this reason the characters make eyebrow-raising mistakes. In Chapter 3, I will discuss how the mistakes serve SO 30 as opportunities for these young men to grow in their character arcs and the manic pixie dream girl’s role in their growth.

※

According to Newman (2011), the representation of naturalistic setting and human behaviour is conventional for indie cinema’s character-centred narrative: “Characters have no magical powers, no exaggerated bravery or intellect or sexual attractiveness, and the world they live in follows the same rules as the world the audience know from real human experience. A significant objective of the narrative representation seems to be capturing recognizable, typical lived experience” (87-88). This mode of realism in storytelling not only once again affirms

indie authenticity at work, it is also a matter of artistic autonomy (Newman 2017). One

expression of indie autonomy is the degree to which the film’s narrative is personal, such as

capturing the filmmaker’s recent coming-of-age. For instance, the screenwriter for (500) Days of Summer, Scott Neustadter, wrote himself into Tom and his ex-girlfriend into Summer

(Neustadter 2009). As well, when Zoe Kazan wrote Ruby Sparks, she created Calvin with her real-life boyfriend Paul Dano (who plays Calvin) in mind (Brady 2012). As such, the lead characters in these films are largely based on real, ordinary men.

Let’s consider the backstories of the male protagonists. In (500) Days of Summer, Tom

Hansen is a greeting card writer in downtown Los Angeles who finds his job mundane and unfulfilling. He initially studied to be an architect but he needed a job so he ended up writing cards for years. In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Scott Pilgrim graduated from high school and is now a bassist in a floundering garage band in Toronto. Ruby Spark’s Calvin Weir-Fields is an L.A.-based novelist who is struggling to recreate the early success of his first novel.

What is immediately discernible is that these young men are fairly ordinary people facing common problems (except Calvin is a “genius” novelist who enjoys early success; but SO 31

I will discuss in the next chapter his “genius” is a self-reflexive plot device which says something about the audience). They are by no means larger-than-life personalities pulling off epic stunts. Instead, they are everyman characters dealing with everyday problems in recognizable locations which allows the audience to easily identify with them. Filmmakers writing themselves into the story in order to create relatable characters and settings is indie’s distinct method of creating an air of realism. This method, however, mainly concerns the character construction of male protagonists. The manic pixie dream girl, on the other hand, does not much adhere to reality. Although the character type may be inspired by postfeminist sensibility, it is still largely subject to manipulation in order to portray the ideal sexy girlfriend.

※

The intended audience for indie films has implications on character construction. Characters have to appear to share similar concerns with the audience so that they are relatable. People’s concerns may differ across categories such as age, race, class, gender, and culture. I have already discussed in the context of hommecom that manic pixie dream girl films cater to male audiences for its spotlight on male concerns. Now in the context of indie films, I further narrow down the intended audience to young, white, middle-class, urban males. This conclusion is not only based on the represented demographics in the films, it also has to do with the specific niche audience sought after by indie films.

In his article titled “Movies for Hipsters,” Newman (2013) argues that indie films appeal to a hipster audience, because “to be indie is to aspire to hipness, and to be a hipster is to invest one’s identity in the aesthetic legitimacy of indie” (71) for “the cinema of hip is a cinema of aesthetic distinction, of outsider identities and cultish admiration” (72). The hipster is a category of audience that seeks to culturally define itself by means of rejecting anything that is too popular or overexposed. The hipster identity is thus formed by consumption of SO 32 cultural commodities that are not commonplace, such as fashionable items that are retro or foreign. This means that the hipster has to possess a certain level of purchasing power and mobility to cultivate the hipster identity. Newman suggests that the hipster is found in the

Millennial generation who come of age in “a hypersaturated consumer capitalism and also a world of fluid identities and hyperconsciousness of cultural difference, meritocracy, and egalitarianism, especially within the privileged communities of white, elite cosmopolitan culture wherein educational institutions promote such ideals as received wisdom” (75). In the films the characters are also white cultural elites living in cosmopolitan areas (the central characters engage in cultural work such as music and literature). Presuming that the protagonist is a source of audience identification, this matching of demographics confirms the intended audience are hipsters, typically young millennials from white, elite, cosmopolitan backgrounds.

Furthermore, the hipster’s rejection of mass culture and love for unusual commodities is a manifestation of indie authenticity and has direct impact on the construction of quirky characters. If the hipster is someone who seeks to culturally distinguish oneself from the despised mainstream, the hipster performs authenticity in cultural practices that are “showing doing” (Newman 2013, 63). They tend to wear on their bodies quirky clothing articles which mark their cultural sophistication. This affects the representation of women more than men in manic pixie dream girl films. Since the manic pixie dream girl is above all a bodily character due to the emphasis on her sex appeal, she wears her quirkiness on the body. The ever- changing hair colours of Ramona in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World exemplifies the character type’s appeal to a hipster (male) audience. In other words, the manic pixie dream girl is constructed to impress the male hipster.

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SO 33

In this chapter I have examined the artefact aspect of the manic pixie dream girl, that is the means by which she is represented. The textual features and aesthetic structures that compose this character type can be found in the contexts of hommecom and indie cinema. Placing her into these two film categories provides insight in how not only the manic pixie dream girl but also her male counterpart come to be. Hommecom is a cycle of male-centred rom-coms that emerged in the mid-1990s. In order to attract male audiences into the rom-com genre, the manic pixie dream girl is shaped to be an ideal girlfriend who excites male fantasy. The male protagonists, too, service the fantasy by offering a point of identification. The relatability of the male hero depends on how well the character functions as a conduit to explore male concerns in romantic relationships. This narrative function translates to representations of emotional vulnerability which is hitherto a representational domain for women in rom-coms, thus making men appear anxious and “feminized.” The masculine anxiety also reflects changing gender relations at the time with the rise of postfeminism. The young, empowered woman embodied by the manic pixie dream girl is a source of anxiety for men looking to secure romantic relationships. These men’s rocky road to true love serve as the standard plot for manic pixie dream girl films.

Locating manic pixie dream girl films within the context of indie cinema narrows down the intended audience to male hipsters who are predominantly white, middle-class, and urban, seeking to culturally distinguish themselves. The indie aesthetic appeal to this audience with quirky characters. The manic pixie dream girl’s quirkiness is expressed by her behaviours and fashion style; for the male hero, it is typically expressed by his failure to relinquish juvenile desires. This aspect of his masculinity will be further discussed in the next chapter. Furthermore, the central characters are generally ascribed realism by indie filmmakers who write their own coming-of-age into films. While this method of producing realism creates male protagonists who have room to grow over the course of the narrative, the manic pixie dream girl remains a SO 34 one-dimensional narrative crutch whose only function is to facilitate that growth. As demonstrated, the conditions of production for hommecoms and indies contribute to the problematic representation of women as seen in the figure of the manic pixie dream girl. The problem mainly rises out of the agenda to fulfil male fantasy coupled with an asymmetrical ascription of realism to male characters in indie rom-coms. SO 35

2. A Story of Boy Meets Girl: Femininity & Masculinity in the Postfeminist Age

“This is a story of boy meets girl (…)”

– Narrator, (500) Days of Summer

Fig. 6. Summer singing “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” in (500) Days of Summer

Tom walks into the elevator, Summer gallops in before the doors close. Tom is completely absorbed by The Smiths’ “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” blasting through his headphones – or he pretends to be so, as he caught word about Summer’s disinterest in a male colleague’s approach – and stares at the ceiling facing away from Summer. “Smiths?” She asks.

Tom feigns a smile. Summer leans closer, “I love The Smiths.” Tom finally puts off his headphones, “Sorry?” “You have great taste in music,” she says, and cheerfully sings a line of the song (fig. 6). The elevator reaches the office. Summer walks out, leaving Tom stupefied.

I intend to set the tone for this chapter with the illustration of Tom and Summer’s first interaction in (500) Days of Summer. In this brief encounter, the boy is too anxious to make an advance at the girl. By contrast, it is the girl who breaks the ice. She not only recognizes but also compliments the boy’s taste in music. After having impressed the hipster in the boy, she casually leaves the scene with no intention to further commit to the interaction. SO 36

This chapter takes the manic pixie dream girl as a starting point to analyze the specific kind of masculinity that (500) Days of Summer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Ruby Sparks portray. Hence, what is being considered here are the characters’ features and relations in the fictional world (fictional being aspect) in association to the cultural mentalities that cause the characters as they are (symptom). I will first address the manic pixie dream girl as a representative of postfeminism with three distinct features, namely, her (1) physical attractiveness, (2) desiring sexual subjectivity, and (3) self-serving mentality. Subsequently, I will elaborate the male protagonist’s masculinity also in terms of features: (1) a priority of the mind over the body, (2) emotional vulnerability, and (3) psychological immaturity.

When discussing femininity and masculinity, I follow Judith Butler’s (1999 [1990]) formulation of gender. In her seminal work Gender Trouble, Butler puts forward the view that gender is performative: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”

(33). In other words, “gender is always a doing” (ibid.). It is the expressive acts one does in relation to the gendered stylization of the body that sustain gender identity. Therefore, gender in the film text is a representation of the various practices through which women and men conduct gendered lives. As such, in the following sections, femininity and masculinity will be defined by the practices that are portrayed in order to express the characters’ gender identities.

2.1 The Postfeminist Girl

In this section I demonstrate how the manic pixie dream girl is an embodiment of postfeminist ideology. In a number of books and articles, feminist scholar Rosalind Gill (2007; 2008; 2009) charts the rise of a new figure in advertising constructed to sell to women since the mid-1990s:

“A young, attractive, heterosexual woman who knowingly and deliberately plays with her sexual power and is always ‘up for’ sex” (Gill 2008, 438). This figure as seen in the cover of SO 37

Cosmopolitan, for example, depicts women’s body sexually and marks a shift in the media representation of women. Rather than passivity and victimization, women are shown to be having fun and empowered. Gill (2009) terms this figure the “midriff.” The midriff refers to the part of the body between the chest and the waist that women display in fashion to flaunt their sexuality. It is a fashion trend particularly prevalent between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, signalling a generation of young women primarily in their 20s and 30s following this trend

(ibid.). And it is no coincidence that it was in the 2000s when audiences witness the rise of the manic pixie dream girl in American cinema.

Gill (2009) suggests the shift in representation is the advertising industry’s response to the feminist critique of unhealthy, idealized beauty standards. To this effect, advertisers strive to incorporate the cultural power of feminism and develop a form of “commodity feminism”

(Goldman 1992). The new advertisements thus promote “a discourse of playfulness, freedom and, above all, choice. Women are presented not as seeking men’s approval but as pleasing themselves; in doing so, they just happen to win men’s admiration” (Gill 2009, 101).

Gill (2007) identifies this type of commodity feminism as part of postfeminist media culture. She further posits that postfeminist sensibility is constituted by several themes, three of which are directly relevant to my discussion. (1) In postfeminist media culture, femininity is a bodily property: “the possession of a ‘sexy body’ is represented as women’s key (if not sole) source of identity” (149). (2) There is a shift from objectification to subjectification. Women are no longer represented as a passive sex object, but an actively desiring sexual subject. (3)

Perhaps most importantly, is a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment. With examples from the films, the following sections will discuss respectively how these postfeminist themes inform the representation of the manic pixie dream girl.

※

SO 38

Firstly, the most apparent feature of the manic pixie dream girl is her physical attractiveness.

As the desired object for the protagonist and for the audience, the female actresses casted for this role, such as Zooey Deschanel, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Zoe Kazan possess a certain degree of desirability. In particular, Deschanel was the Hollywood It girl when she was filming

(500) Days of Summer. In the films, varying degrees of emphasis are placed on the characters’ physical attractiveness. This may be implied by comments or advances made by male characters, or done more explicitly such as in (500) Days of Summer. When the narrator introduces Summer to the audience, he speaks of “the Summer effect” which manifests in the two-fold sales she effects when working in an ice cream parlour, the below market value rent she always pays, and the double-takes she receives in her daily commute to work. In the fictional world, the manic pixie dream girl is an attractive, desirable young woman.

In addition, the character’s attractive appearance is often complemented by eye-catching fashion quirks that signify her uniqueness and spontaneous personality. A popular choice of quirky appearance comes in the form of flamboyant, ever-changing hair colours, as worn by

Ramona in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. When Scott first encounters Ramona, her hair is in pink.

Later in the film, she changes the colour to blue which surprises Scott, “I change my hair every

week-and-a-half, dude. Get used to it.” In Ruby Sparks, Ruby is recognized by her white dress and purple tights, details Calvin writes into her character (fig. 7). As such, the manic pixie dream girl is first and foremost a bodily character. She features an attractive physical appearance and fashions herself in unusual, eye-catching clothing articles. These make her stand out as an object of desire that is unique and wilfully stylish. SO 39

Fig. 7. Ruby in white dress and purple tights in Ruby Sparks

Echoing the discussion of hommecom and indie cinema in the last chapter, the two film genres have impacted on how the body of the manic pixie dream girl is stylized. The film’s

emphasis on the female figure’s sex appeal is to make her a sex object for male audiences. On

the surface of the body is also where her quirky personality is inscribed so as to cater to hipster

audiences. Deschanel, the Hollywood It girl of the mid-2000s, is an epitome of the sexy quirky.

She represents a new type of awkward, goofy femininity that is at the same time considered

sexy. As part of a marketing campaign to market her show New Girl, Fox Broadcasting

Company created a word to describe her – “adorkable”, a portmanteau of “adorable” and “dork”

(Blickley 2015). The offbeat sexy Deschanel displays is a manifestation of indie sensibility

being exploited by the entertainment industry. The exploration towards alternative markets

forms a new type of femininity that has become the ideal girlfriend for male hipsters.

※

The second feature is the way in which the manic pixie dream girl practises her desiring sexual

subjectivity. In (500) Days of Summer, after Summer finds out that Tom is interested in her, the SO 40 next day she goes up to Tom in the copy room and kisses him. A month later, the two retreat to

Tom’s apartment after a date. While Tom needs a moment in the bathroom, Summer lies naked in bed ready to have sex. And when the couple are shopping in a record store, Summer sees the

“ADULTS ONLY” sign and eagerly drags Tom into the curtains. They purchase a porn film featuring shower sex and do it themselves in the following shot. The manic pixie dream girl actively participates in sexual activities and seems to enjoy them.

Gill (2007) understands the newfound sexual agency of postfeminism with Hilary

Radner’s (1999) concept “technology of sexiness.” Radner purports that sexual knowledge and practice are central to the modernization of femininity. The technology of sexiness therefore represents a shift in gender power in postfeminism. Power turns from “an external, male judging gaze to a self-policing, narcissistic gaze” (Gill 2009, 151). For Gill, this is deeply troubling as

it represents a higher form of exploitation than objectification: “one in which the objectifying

male gaze is internalized to form a new disciplinary regime” (152). As a necessary means to

perform femininity in postfeminism, it is an imperative for women to be sexy and actively seek

sex. In this view, the manic pixie dream girl is part of a representational regime that affirms this

new discipline. Hence, the sexual liberation she displays should not be hailed as progress but

recognized as a guise for a new, deeper form of the exploitation of women.

※

Towards the end of (500) Days of Summer, Tom chances upon Summer sometime after they

break up and finds out that she is married. “You should’ve told me,” he says, referring to the

time when they briefly reunited and danced at an old couple’s wedding. “Well he hadn’t asked

me yet…” “But he was in your life.” “Yeah,” she nods. “So… Why did you dance with me?”

Summer pauses for a second, and replies, “because I wanted to.” SO 41

Summer’s behaviour exemplifies what Gill (2007) considers as the most important theme of postfeminism, that is the emphasis on individualism, choice, and empowerment. This theme expresses itself most forthrightly in a mentality of “pleasing oneself”: “The empowered female subject is presented as simply following their own desires to ‘feel good’” (154). This is the result of advertisers pushing messages of empowerment to women, telling them to take control for their own pleasure. An advertisement for She-Bear underwear employed the slogan

“Wear it for yourself”, encouraging women to dress for themselves rather than for men (Gill

2009, 101). The call to please oneself convey the message that empowered women ought to be narcissistic. Gill (2008) highlights this self-serving mentality of postfeminism: “Femininity here is powerful, playful and narcissistic – less desiring of a sexual partner than empowered by the knowledge of her own sexual attractiveness” (441).

When it comes to the manic pixie dream girl, such emphasis on the self becomes a paradox that teeters between female empowerment and exploitation. On one hand, women putting themselves before men is a sign of taking control. It signifies the manic pixie dream girl as a female subjectivity unconstrained by male wishes. On the other hand, as I will discuss in the next chapter, a type of male-centred narrative is able to co-opt the self-serving mentality into serving male fantasy. In this narrative pattern, women are represented as selfish trouble- makers that require the rescuing of men. The fine line between empowerment and exploitation is a sign of the constant negotiation between heterosexual gender identities.

I have discussed how the manic pixie dream girl is shaped by postfeminist ideology.

Examples from the films show that the femininity displayed by the character type is constituted by the possession of an attractive body, a desire for sex, and a self-serving mentality. While the message of female empowerment is central to postfeminism, Gill (2007) argues that it is actually a form of internalized self-discipline which conceals a deeper form of exploitation. As part of the postfeminist representational regime, the manic pixie dream girl operates under the SO 42 same agenda. What seems to be an active female figure acting on behalf of her own interest is actually still a lay figure for the entertainment of men. Even so, the manic pixie dream girl is a distinct manifestation of postfeminism. Specifically, her quirkiness and approachability are modifications on top of the postfeminist template. These modifications are results of cinematic devices. The quirkiness comes from indie aesthetic; and in the narrative, the approachability has the dramatic function of challenging the male protagonist to change (see Chapter 3). In this sense postfeminist sensibility adapt to the media, and the manic pixie dream girl is the early-

2000s manifestation of postfeminism in the film text.

2.2 The Postfeminist Boy

The recent change in the status of women has introduced new variables in gender relations

which produce responses by men who endeavour to find their place alongside (post-)feminism.

This is the context in which the type of masculinity as portrayed in the films is situated. Gender studies and film studies literature call this new category of masculinity for the twenty-first century the “postfeminist man” (Genz and Brabon 2009; Gwynne and Muller 2013). These

scholarly studies into masculinity and its representation in cinema theorize the postfeminist man

following several “canon” masculinities within academic discourse, namely, the “new man,” the “metrosexual,” and the “new lad.” These expressions of manhood starting from the 1960s to the present are said to have developed in sequential order and in reaction to the one before, finally leading up to the postfeminist man which captures the current state of masculinity in the

West.

According to Genz and Brabon (2009), the postfeminist man is an unstable and troubled subject position who is defined by his problematic relationship with the remnants of patriarchy

(143). It displays a compound identity, a “hybrid script” in which “numerous representations of masculinity may coexist in new, hybrid forms” (ibid.). It is suggested that the hybrid script SO 43 attests to the weakening effect of a regulatory script issued by patriarchy, which has been debilitated over the years by feminist movements. As a result, the postfeminist man is described as “slightly bitter about the ‘wounded’ status of his masculinity” and “self-aware, displaying anxiety and concern for his identity while re-embracing patriarchal responsibilities” (ibid.).

While the authors do not explicitly provide an explanation as to why there is a re-embracing of

patriarchal responsibilities, they imply that it is a means to redefine masculine identity as a

band-aid to the “wound” from feminism.

The postfeminist man’s compound identity is formed by mixtures of the “canon”

masculinities listed above, and they each contain historical contexts that I will not go into detail

here. What is important to note is that these masculinities iterate the same themes over time that

impact the representation of masculinity. These themes include the impact of economic shifts

on masculine identity, the impact of feminism on men, men’s relationship with patriarchal

responsibility, and consumerism. The postfeminist man is valuable to our study because these

themes are expressed by the male characters somewhat consistently in manic pixie dream girl

films. In the following sections, I argue that these themes contribute to a certain type of

masculinity that contains three features: (1) a priority of the mind over the body, (2) emotional

vulnerability, and (3) psychological immaturity.

※

The new millennium experiences the full force of informatization in economic production

which has radically transformed the workforce (Hardt and Negri 2000). The shift from

industrial to postindustrial economy restructures the worker who now engages in various forms

of “immaterial labour” (Lazzarato 1996). As different skill sets are privileged in the new

economic paradigm, masculine identity also undergoes restructuring. In representing a new

masculine identity, the films seem to fall back on the old dichotomy between “mental and SO 44 manual labour” as proven by how the male protagonists assert their manhood through

“immaterial” rather than “material” means. Set in the current postindustrial economy, the films

feature male leads who display a type of masculinity which prioritizes the mind over the body.

The protagonists in (500) Days of Summer, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Ruby Sparks

are writers and musicians. These occupations engage in immaterial labour which Lazzarato

(1996) defines as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the

commodity” (133). The work of writers and musicians involves producing cultural

commodities that create and manipulate feelings. The affective nature of immaterial labour is

discussed by Hardt and Negri (2000) who associate affective labour with “women’s work” or

“labor in the bodily mode” (293). Caring labour such as nursing and child care tend to the

corporeal and the somatic and produce affects through communication. In the same way, writers

and musicians communicate affects to their audiences and sell them as commodities. From this

perspective, there is a “feminization” of work in postindustrial economy (ibid.).

The shift from industrial to postindustrial economy suggests that the society has moved

away from an economy that foregrounds conventionally masculine values to one that favours

conventionally feminine values. The industrial labour process is often associated with

manliness. For instance, Steven Maynard’s (1989) study “Rough Work and Rugged Man” demonstrates industrial labour’s pervasive appeals to manliness (160). The dangerous labour process, skill, and work experience involved in heavy industries like steel manufacturing and logging become sources of gender identity for men. They take pride in the ability to endure the harshness of manual labour which is considered an expression of sportsmanlike machismo.

Here, manual labour produces images of masculinity that emphasize the male body: “sweaty, hard-muscled steelworker” and “brawny bushworker” (159). Accordingly, representational culture in the industrial era constructs masculinity around the male body. The male body in cinema is often connotative of power and strength, and celebrated as manly spectacle (Kirkham SO 45 and Thumim 1993). For example, the muscled and oiled torso of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold

Schwarzenegger are eroticized for the admiring eyes of women and the approval of men. Either as a triumphant assertion of male power or an articulation of anxieties about masculine identity, such “spectacular bodies” (Tasker 1993) tend to address an industrial, working-class audience, for whom “muscle work” is “masculine work” (Boyle and Brayton 2012). In this sense the possession of a hard body is an attraction as well as source of masculine identity for men in the industrial age.

The male protagonists in manic pixie dream girl films, however, lack spectacular bodies.

Ruby Sparks deliberately characterizes Calvin with an inadequate physique. Early on in the film,

Calvin’s older brother Harry invites him to workout at the gym. “Great way to start the day, right?” Harry asks. “I think I’m gonna puke,” Calvin replies while struggling on the treadmill.

Harry proceeds to inquire about Calvin’s sex life, a topic which Calvin tries to avoid to no avail.

Calvin expresses his frustration in the dating scene, lamenting that women are only interested in the idea of dating a genius writer rather than the person he is. To which Harry responds,

“That’s why you should keep working out. That way, they’ll want you for your body.” This

scene sets up a stark contrast between the brothers. Harry is physically strong and sexually

proactive, whereas Calvin is feeble and cynical in his sexuality. Nonetheless, Calvin’s weak body is a characterization which accentuates his otherwise superior intellect. Even though he has an unattractive physique, he is still competent for courtship with his literary genius. SO 46

Fig. 8. Calvin in Ruby Sparks is a meagre yet talented writer

Like Calvin, the source of masculine identity for the male characters in manic pixie dream girl films comes from the mind rather than the body. These characters’ masculinity is expressed through their creativity, cultural knowledge, and taste. Specifically, it is practiced by the use of cultural capital in courtship. For Bourdieu (1986), cultural capital is defined by a person’s accumulation of knowledge, behaviour, or skill that demonstrates his or her cultural competence, which plays a part in determining that person’s social standing. The young men in the films are culturally adept in one way or another. In (500) Days of Summer, Tom’s relationship with Summer hinges on their mutual appreciation of pop music like The Smiths.

And later on, Tom takes Summer on a city tour where he shares with her his knowledge and passion for architecture, to which Summer intimately responds by asking him to draw on her wrist. In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Scott’s signature move to impress girls is by telling the story of how the video Pac-Man got its name. He also writes a song for Ramona who seems to be impressed and rewards him with a make-out session. The creative nature of these protagonists may be a projection of the authors themselves, or that the films are intended for a postindustrial, middle-class audience who has the interest and cultivation to appreciate the art SO 47 and culture within. In any case, the primary use of cultural knowledge and creative skill in courtship defines the characters’ masculinity.

The great transformation in economic production has over the years restructured the worker as well as masculine identity. The new postindustrial economy values service jobs that are “characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 285). The most competitive workers in this economic paradigm therefore equip and master these attributes. A new type of masculinity that contains these mental qualities is produced accordingly. In light of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) discussion of immaterial labour, the increasing role played by affective labour, which is previously predominantly women’s domain, leads to a feminization of work in the postindustrial age. The introduction of conventionally feminine values in the workplace has a sizable impact on masculine identity, which in the previous industrial economic paradigm is largely defined by physical power and strength. This is proven by how representational culture used to heavily centre masculinity on the hard-muscled body. Arguably, the hardened male body had offered support for the rhetoric of natural sexual difference that provides security for masculine identity.

Now that the body has become less relevant in defining masculinity, masculine identity is up for re-negotiation. And the male protagonists in manic pixie dream girl films exemplify the transition of masculine identity in the new millennium.

※

In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Scott opens the door and is surprised by Ramona’s new blue hair.

In the next scene, Scott spills to his gay roommate Wallace, “She changed her hair.” “So? It looks nice!” “I know, but she did it without even making a big deal out of it or anything. She’s fickle, impulsive, spontaneous.” The camera closes up on Scott laying one palm on his cheek,

“God! What am I gonna do?” To which Wallace comments, “Can’t believe you worried about SO 48 me gaying up the place.” Here, Scott’s masculinity is portrayed as anxious, self-conscious, and

emotionally vulnerable, which is another feature shared among the male leads. In the films the

male characters constantly worry about the manic pixie dream girl not returning their affection

to a point where they become achingly aware of and insecure about their own sexuality. This

may be partly due to the emotional wounds they suffered from past relationships. As Scott is

sharing a passionate kiss with Ramona, she touches his hair and says, “Your hair is pretty

shaggy.” The comment sends Scott into a stab of panic, “Oh god! I need a haircut, don’t I?” His

explanation follows that he got a bad haircut right before his ex-girlfriend dumped him.

Apparently, the traumatic experience causes Scott to be acutely sensitive to his self-image.

Alternatively, Ruby Sparks has a different take on Calvin’s anxiety over his romantic

relationship. Early on in the film Calvin bemoans his last relationship with a woman named

Lila (Deborah Ann Woll) who he claims to have treated him badly. Later, Calvin runs into Lila

at a party and the audience gets to hear the other side of the story. Lila reveals that Calvin is in

fact a narcissist who wants things exactly his way, and so he was only interested in dating an

image of Lila and whenever she contradicted this image he would ignore her. This account

resembles Calvin’s relationship with Ruby in that whenever Ruby does something Calvin

dislikes, such as wanting some personal space and time off away from Calvin, he would rewrite

her personality with the typewriter: “Ruby was miserable without Calvin.” And Ruby would

immediately fall back into his arms. This demonstrates that behind Calvin’s anxious demeanour

is a narcissistic desire to control other people.

The self-reflexivity of Ruby Sparks suggests that, for men, loss of control is at the centre

of a relationship problem with the manic pixie dream girl. Earlier in this chapter I discussed the

self-willed nature of the postfeminist girl. The empowered female subject follows her desire

and therefore appears fickle and spontaneous. She is more interested in pleasing herself than

committing to a partnership, which would limit her freedom and choice. This hyper SO 49 individualistic mentality troubles the men who seek the return of their affection, for they can lose the girl at any moment. Tom in (500) Days of Summer has expressed this very concern to

his little sister, who advises him to ask Summer directly about the nature of their relationship.

When Tom does so in the next scene, Summer replies, “I don’t know. Who cares? I’m happy.

Aren’t you happy?” She then reassures Tom with playful intimacy. The reassurance does not

last long until Summer finally loses interest and dumps him.

It is timely to recall Kathleen Rowe’s (1995) “melodramatised man” of the 1970s

nervous comedies. The introduction of melodrama and male suffering into rom-coms reflects

masculine anxiety regarding the impact of feminism on men. In manic pixie dream girl films, I

see a resurgence of the same concern. Postfeminist female empowerment once again causes a

dent on the masculine ego, sending men into a state of hysterical restlessness. In the greater

scheme of gender relations, feminism has over the years circumscribed the automatic

dominance of patriarchy. The advent of greater equality in heterosexual relationships has

offered women more choices in selecting their partners, and correspondingly less control for

men in relationships. Hence, the anxious, emotionally vulnerable masculinity portrayed by the

male characters is an image of men struggling with the loss of male privileges in the private

domain.

※

The last feature of masculinity has to do with these characters’ lingering ties with childhood. In

(500) Days of Summer, the narrator introduces Tom to the non-diegetic accompaniment of fairy-

tale music: “The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he’d never

truly be happy until the day he met ‘the one.’ This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad

British pop music and a total misreading of the movie The Graduate” (fig. 8). Scott Pilgrim vs.

the World has such a distinct visual style that it is a film that reads like a comic book and plays SO 50 like a video game. “CRASH”! The first evil ex that Scott encounters comes crashing down through the roof with the onomatopoeia visually displayed in the frame of this dramatic entrance.

Scott’s eventual defeat of all the evil exes and getting Ramona back in a happy ending makes him the nerd hero of the story. Leading up to the climax of Ruby Sparks, Ruby threatens to leave

Calvin due to his overly restrictive relationship rules. Calvin finally reveals to Ruby the nature of her existence and demonstrates his power over her by rewriting her character on the spot. He makes Ruby strip and sing, crawl on all fours and bark like a dog, and finally cheer repeatedly

“You’re a genius!” to which Calvin satisfyingly smashes his fists on the desk again and again like a child. All these young men display a juvenile side which to a large extent defines their characters. Therefore, it may be more appropriate to call them “boys” rather than “men.”

Fig. 9. Tom watching The Graduate as a child in (500) Days of Summer

MacDowell (2010) observes that the theme of childhood runs through many indie films and constitutes quirky sensibility in indie films. Certainly it has to do with the indie convention of the narrative often retelling the filmmaker’s coming-of-age, and thus creates a sense of nostalgia and a sentimentalizing of childhood. The celebration of innocence and simplicity may take the form of fetishization of childhood objects – like the comic book and the video game which lend Scott Pilgrim vs. the World its visual aesthetic – or the characters behaving like SO 51 children – such as Tom’s naïve view of romance and Calvin’s juvenile desire to be praised as genius. As such, a juvenile identity is central to these male protagonists.

The juvenile identity is not only celebrated by the filmmakers and characters, but also by the intended audience. In the last chapter I have established that manic pixie dream girl films are, in Newman’s (2013) words, “movies for hipsters.” The intended audience, the hipster, is constituted by privileged white, middle-class, cosmopolitan filmgoers. According to Newman, the hipster identity is fundamentally juvenile:

(…) one of the most fundamental and revealing themes to be found in indie

hipsterism: the questioning and challenging of adulthood and the sentimentalizing

of childhood, realized as the hipster’s refusal to grow up and articulated as a

performance of juvenile identity. Countercultures are generally movements of

liminal post-adolescents, between child and adult identities, struggling to negotiate

a place in society distinct from their parents’ culture without duplicating its

ideological failures. In indie hipster culture, the prolongation of childhood, the

unsentimental preservation of its style and ethos, is a way of perpetuating the

consumer identities of youth into adulthood, and of rescuing the worthwhile

consumption of the past from the becoming forgotten (63).

In this view, the sentimentalizing of childhood is expressed as a symptom of affluent post- adolescents failing to effect transition to adulthood. For whatever reason, they continue to indulge in the pleasures of commodity consumption even as they reach physical maturity. While there can be many reasons that lead to the failed relinquishment of juvenile desires, what one can be sure of is that consumer capitalism provided the environment for the hipster man-child to persist.

In his study of the Playboy magazine of the last century, Osgerby (2005) terms this environment the “bachelor pad”: “A place where men could luxuriate in a milieu of hedonistic SO 52 pleasure (...) [it was] the spatial manifestation of a consuming masculine subject that became increasingly pervasive amid the consumer boom of the 1950s and 1960s” (100). The bachelor

pad provided the mid-20th Century “playboy” an escape from the traditional expectation that

required men to grow up, marry, and support their families. It seems that at the turn of the

millennium the bachelor pad continues to support the hedonistic lifestyle of the indie hipster.

Arguably, indie cinema plays a part in perpetuating the bachelor pad in modern men’s lives.

Nevertheless, the celebration of childhood in indie films seems to reflect this malady of

prolonged adolescence that inflicts affluent young men.

Alternatively, McDowell (2017) provides a positive interpretation for the

sentimentalizing of childhood in indie films. McDowell’s notion of the quirky sensibility is

defined by a tension between sincerity and irony. The quirky tone of indie cinema invites the

audience to simultaneously feel an allegiance with the character but also judge him or her at a

critical distance. In (500) Days of Summer the audience is invited to laugh at Tom’s naivete

(knowing that true love is a fantasy construct) but also feel bad for his subsequent heartbreak.

As such, the dual address constantly places the audience in-between the two poles of childish

enthusiasm and grown-up cynicism. MacDowell (2017) interprets these two poles as

representative of two distinct “structures of feeling.” The term borrowed from Raymond

Williams (1979), describes the way in which sociohistorical moments can manifest themselves

in terms of “feeling much more than of thought – a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones” (159).

The tones that are characteristic of the period are sometimes picked up by artists and expressed

in their works. In this view, the celebration of childish innocence is an aesthetic resistance to

the attitudes of cynicism and numbness associated with the cruel reality of the adult world.

In the films there are elements of cynicism particularly associated with the grown-up

society that the male protagonists actively resist with their child-like enthusiasm. In (500) Days

of Summer, Tom has been torn between scenarios of “expectation” and “reality” also with regard SO 53 to his career prospects (a subplot of the film). He studied to be an architect and expected to be one. But reality came crashing down when he needed a job. He could only settle for a greeting card writer position which is a job he resents. The resentment culminates to a rant in a sales meeting in which he condemns the greeting card company and himself for fuelling inauthentic expression in society. He finally quits his job to pursue his architect dream. In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the final boss and the leader of “The League of Evil Exes” (an association of villains who used to date Ramona) is a record label executive who buys out Scott’s band and owns

Ramona with a mind-control device. In order to save Ramona, Scott uses the power of love and self-respect (both manifest as flaming katanas) to defeat the evil (fig. 10). In these examples,

adult characters or the workings of the adult world are portrayed in a vile, cynical light. It is the

boys’ naïve enthusiasm and innocent emotionality that provide motivation to overcome the

adversaries.

Fig. 10. Scott squaring up to the evil record label executive in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Although naïve enthusiasm may strengthen resolve or inspire moments of bravery,

preoccupation with childhood has the dangers of being trapped in fantasy, leading to the

individual’s inability to face life’s challenges and take adult responsibility. MacDowell (2017) SO 54 points out that sentimentalizing childhood not only risks appearing simply “backward” or

“naïve,” but it also opens up an insurmountable distance between childish desire and actual achievement (91). The male protagonists in the films seem to be stuck in a state of arrested development – still holding on to childish desires and also appalled by the cynicism of adulthood. In the end of these films, however, they learn valuable lessons that prepare them to take on adult responsibilities with the help of the manic pixie dream girl. This concerns the symbolic interaction between the boy and the girl which will be discussed in the next chapter.

※

This chapter has examined the femininity and masculinity represented in manic pixie dream girl films and proposed three features for each gender expression. As a representative of postfeminist ideology, the manic pixie dream girl is first of all a young, attractive woman whose sexy body is her source of identity and power. With the appealing body as her great asset, she knowingly plays with her sexiness for her own entertainment. Last but not least, she is an independent individual who does not compromise the desire to please herself with the wishes of men. On one hand, the self-serving mentality is a sign of greater gender equality as the audience witnesses women taking control of their own life. On the other hand, while postfeminism seems to be empowering for women, it can be an exploitative representational culture that commandeers the female body for the entertainment of men. In the case of the manic pixie dream girl, she is a cinematic creature who is hyper-sexualized to become the ideal girlfriend for male audiences. The other half of the heterosexual couple that makes up the manic pixie dream girl phenomenon is the postfeminist man. He is a twenty-first century young man who uses his cultural knowledge and creativity to his advantage in the dating scene. In this sense he represents a “brainy” type of masculinity in the information age. Also, he is an emotionally vulnerable man in the postfeminist age, desperately trying to come to terms with SO 55 his losing privileges in the lull of patriarchy. Finally, he is a child at heart even in post- adolescence. He is portrayed to have difficulties in taking up adult responsibilities, seeing the adult world as a baneful domain where he is reluctant but expected to enter. Now that I have foregrounded the features of femininity and masculinity in manic pixie dream girl films, in the next chapter I will look into how they come into play alongside each other. SO 56

3. Making an Imaginary Friend: Relationship in the Age of Cruel Optimism

“This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should

know up front, this is not a love story.”

– Narrator, (500) Days of Summer

This chapter investigates the gender relations between the manic pixie dream girl and the male protagonist. In previous chapters I have discussed the aspects of artefact, fictional being, and symptom of the characters; now I finally arrive at the symbolic aspect to find out what indirect meaning they convey to the audience. Critiques of the manic pixie dream girl reprimand the character type’s secondary role in the narrative, pointing out that she exists only to complete the male lead’s character arc. Specifically, the character type is frequently likened to the figure of “the muse” in popular criticism, meaning that the manic pixie dream girl often stands for a source of inspiration for her male counterpart. I intend to push this analogy further in this chapter by examining the specific ways in which the manic pixie dream girl inspires young men.

I will first sketch out and discuss two general plot structures found in manic pixie dream girl films. The different plot arrangements have an effect on how gender relations play out in the narrative and reveal implications of self-reflexivity on the genre. Next, in light of the common structural elements found in these films, I map the symbolic roles played by the male protagonist and the manic pixie dream girl onto The Hero’s Journey and critically assess gender relations in the context of narrative function. Finally, I discuss the gender relations with reference to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and what it means for romantic relationships in contemporary society.

SO 57

3.1. Diverging Narratives: Male Fantasy & Disillusionment

There are two types of plot structures that involve the manic pixie dream girl. The first is “boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back,” and the second “boy gets girl, boy loses girl.”

Placing representations of the manic pixie dream girl into two such categories is helpful in capturing the wide range of expressions in terms of gender relations within the phenomenon.

Even though the two categories of films differ in outcome – in the latter, the couple do not reunite as often expected in romantic comedies – they share a structural similarity that is definitive of the manic pixie dream girl trope.

The structural resemblance is built around some moral lessons that “teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures” (Rabin 2007). The moral lesson is essential to the manic pixie dream girl trope. Structurally, it is sketched out by the male protagonist’s character arc. This means that the male lead starts off as one sort of person and then transforms into a different sort of person in response to changing developments in the story. The moral lesson therefore demarcates the character’s “before/after”. Such transformation of the male character adheres to the “boy/man archetype” which is characteristic of hommecom (Mortimer 2010, 63). The protagonist starts off as a boy who is naïve and immature, typically due to indulgence in childish pleasures or infliction of childhood trauma.

Either way, the boy is held back by some childish sentiments which prohibit his transition to adulthood, and is therefore stuck in a state of arrested development (fig. 11). This is until the boy encounters the manic pixie dream girl. Completely captivated by her beauty and unique personality, the boy falls in love with her and decides to pursue her. Courting the manic pixie dream girl constitutes a challenge for the boy to become a man, and a moral lesson is learned somewhere in the process. The ways in which the challenge and the lesson unfold come down to the difference between the two plot structures – the “boy gets girl back” and the “boy loses girl” endings. SO 58

Fig. 11. Dissatisfied with his job, Tom believes that he will never truly be happy until he meets “the one” The “boy get girls back” scenario unfolds in Scott Pilgrim vs. the Wo rld and other films such as My Sassy Girl, Elizabethtown, and Garden State. There are two variations of this scenario, both of which nonetheless end with the couple living happily ever after. In the first variation, the boy becomes a man primarily through his efforts to obtain the favour of the manic pixie dream girl. His endeavours often comprise of acts of heroism which allow him to assert his manhood in the process (see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and My Sassy Girl). These

endeavours are to solve the manic pixie dream girl’s personal problems. As I have discussed in

the previous chapter, the postfeminist girl follows her unruly desires, but her personal

adventures sometimes create trouble for herself. This is when the male hero steps in to save the

day. In this case, the unruly nature of the manic pixie dream girl constitutes the main challenge

for the boy. If he is successful in resolving her problems, he becomes worthy of the boon of

love and hence manhood. In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Ramona is introduced as a mysterious

character with a troubled past. As the narrative unfolds, Scott gradually learns about her wild love history which comes back to haunt her in the form of “The League of Evil Exes.” Scott

proceeds to defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes at her behest. In the end, the couple hold hands

walking towards the sunrise. SO 59

The second variation is a more melodramatic version of the “boy gets girl back” scenario.

In this case, the boy gets the girl not by rescuing her but by his total dedication. The boy usually starts off affected by grief that is caused by some sort of childhood trauma (as in Garden State and Elizabethtown). The girl comes into his life with not only her beauty but also an innocent enthusiasm about life which helps the boy to overcome his grief. The challenge of this variation is the boy’s capacity to be affected by and see the value of the girl’s exuberant outlook on life.

He falls in love with the girl and makes a romantic gesture at the climax of the narrative. The heterosexual union in the end symbolizes the boy’s overcoming of his childhood trauma by being able to see the bright side of life as well as his attainment of manhood.

The two variations of the “boy gets girl back” scenario chart the most straightforward

iteration of the manic pixie dream girl trope, but are also the most revealing of the trope’s

problematics. The manic pixie dream girl is represented either as a trouble-maker that requires

rescuing or as an all-inclusive, life-loving girl who happens to be interested in the protagonist.

These representations of women place men at the centre of attention where he plays the role of

a praise-worthy hero or an adorable lover. These cinematic fantasies set forth a problematic

outlook of heterosexual relations for the audience, that men can take women’s attention for

granted. This patronizing treatment of women is not only regressive but also unrealistic,

delivering a notion of love and relationship where men always end up on top. In the end, this

skewed view of gender relations hurts not only young women who try to mimic the manic pixie

dream girl but also young men. This is because when they finally have to make attempts at love

and relationship in real life and find out that their expectations and reality do not align, they

will suffer the consequences. The devastating disillusionment of male fantasy is exactly the

subject matter of the “boy loses girl” scenario.

The “boy loses girl” plot structure presents a fundamentally different type of manic pixie

dream girl film. This group of films include (500) Days of Summer, Ruby Sparks, and Paper SO 60

Towns (2015) which articulate the manic pixie dream girl trope differently by taking a swing at the standard love story plot – in the end the couple go separate ways. In this scenario, the boy grows into maturity by losing the girl. For the boy, the loss of love is also a loss of innocence.

This is because the narrative sets out to show that the boy’s infatuation with the girl is one-

sided and filled with prejudice. He falls in love with an ideal image of the girl and disregards

the wishes of his love object. On the other hand, the self-willed postfeminist girl refuses to cater

to his fantasy. In fact, she is “not comfortable with being anyone’s anything” and enjoys “being

on her own,” as the character Summer explains her philosophy to Tom in (500) Days of Summer.

The girl’s free-spiritedness and unattainability become a source of frustration for the boy. At

the same time, the failure to get the girl back eventually liberates the boy from his own illusions.

He is humbled by the experience of failure, and with his newfound wisdom and freedom he

grows to become a more mature man.

This type of manic pixie dream girl film self-reflexively demonstrates the nature of the

character type as a product of male fantasy. As the modern Pygmalion tale, Ruby Sparks sets out to show that the manic pixie dream girl trope is none other than the male writer’s struggle with his own ego (fig. 12). The boy does not fall in love with the girl but rather a sexual fantasy which takes the girl as its object. Interestingly, it takes the postfeminist wilfulness of the girl to break the boy’s heart and with it his illusions. This self-reflexivity of the manic pixie dream girl trope comes to show that this is not a love story, instead this is a story of masculine disillusionment. SO 61

Fig. 12. At the climax of Ruby Sparks, Calvin grounds Ruby with his typewriter

3.2 The Hero’s Journey: The Boy Hero & The Herald

At the centre of the manic pixie dream girl trope is the transformation of a boy into a man with the assistance of a girl. In terms of narration, the boy and the girl occupy distinct symbolic roles so as to provide meaning to the story. This section delves into the constellation of symbols that activates the manic pixie dream girl trope. I contend that the trope shares structural elements with The Hero’s Journey which is a common template of tales. Understanding these elements and their use in the films will be productive for identifying the specific symbolic roles the characters play in the said trope.

The Hero’s Journey was first developed by mythologist Joseph Campbell in his seminal work The Hero with A Thousand Faces (1949). Campbell gathered lore and tales across multiple cultures around the world and found a common pattern which he described as follow: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (23). In other words, SO 62 the standard path of the adventure of the hero adheres to the following basic structure: The hero goes on an adventure, seizes victory in a crisis, and then comes home transformed.

A shrewd reader may immediately notice a fundamental mismatch between the manic pixie dream girl trope and the mythological adventure – the boy does not seem to benefit society with his personal victory. Indeed, the manic pixie dream girl trope is not exactly a myth but more akin to a fairy tale. Campbell makes a distinction between the two: “Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-

historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former – the youngest or despised child who

becomes the master of extraordinary powers – prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter

brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole” (30).

As in a fairy tale, the boy in the manic pixie dream girl trope is a youngster who achieves a

domestic triumph in an adventure that is courtship with the girl; the so-called extraordinary

power he has mastered is symbolized by the moral lesson which makes him worthy of manhood;

and his personal oppressors over whom he prevails may be other entities in the story, but much

more likely himself (his own illusions) as discussed in the self-reflexive iteration of the trope.

Myth or fairy tale, they both fall under The Hero’s Journey as they adhere to the basic structure

above.

In the hero’s adventure, he encounters different characters who may assist him in

achieving his goal, pose as a threat, or simply stay neutral. Campbell formulated these

characters as archetypes since he was influenced by Jungian psychoanalysis when he developed

The Hero’s Journey. The archetypes are further simplified and adopted for film analysis in

Christopher Vogler’s screenwriting guide The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers

(2007). For Vogler, the concept of archetypes is an indispensable tool for understanding the

purpose or function of characters in a story. In his formulation, two archetypes are relevant to

my analysis of the manic pixie dream girl trope – the Hero and the Herald. SO 63

Vogler (2007) defines a Hero as “someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others” (28). Therefore, the idea of Hero is fundamentally connected with self-sacrifice.

It is difficult to identify the male protagonist of the manic pixie dream girl trope as a Hero, however, because he has to sacrifice his boyhood to become a man which is not necessarily meaningful for anyone else besides himself. For this reason, he can at most be called a Boy Hero as in a fairy tale. This seems more appropriate because the trope is about a young man’s confrontation with his own inadequacies to self-actualization.

Even so, the Hero archetype is useful for my analysis due to its element of growth. In psychological terms, the Hero archetype represents what Freud called the ego, the “I”, which is a part of personality that is considered separated from everyone else (Vogler 2007, 28). The

Hero starts off as flawed or incomplete, which represents the ego’s search for identity and wholeness throughout the journey (ibid.). As he grows throughout the journey, he will eventually reach a point where he is able to transcend the bounds and illusions of the ego, meaning that he will learn to let go of the “I” and makes the necessary sacrifice. The sacrifice, which is the actualization of his growth, will mark the overcoming of his flaw and makes him whole. At that point, he will find his identity in the world.

In manic pixie dream girl films, the audience can easily identify instances of symbolic deaths, which is the moment when boyhood is sacrificed for the protagonist to become a man.

In (500) Days of Summer, Summer invites Tom to a party after they break up. Tom naively expects to reunite with Summer in that evening, only to find out that Summer is engaged. He storms out of the party and walks to the middle of the road where he turns into a silhouette and the world around him fades into a black-and-white sketch. This image renders the revelation’s devastating impact on Tom – completely heart-broken, he experiences a symbolic death (fig.

13). Here, it is Summer who indirectly disillusions Tom and rings the death knell of his innocence and naivete. The death of the boy in Tom is necessary for the rebirth of the man SO 64 which is when he determines to pursue his dream of becoming an architect in Act Three. The sacrifice of his childish Self makes Tom the Hero of his own story.

Fig. 13. In (500) Days of Summer, Tom’s world falls apart as he learns that Summer is engaged to another man

The manic pixie dream girl, on the other hand, plays the symbolic role of the Herald.

The Herald is a figure that appears in Act One to bring a challenge to the hero (Vogler 2007,

40). Typically, in the opening phase of a story, the hero has “gotten by” somehow. Tom, for

instance, despises his job of writing greeting cards. He studied to become an architect but he

needed a job so he has settled for this position for years. One day, Summer appears in the office

and sets the story in motion. She challenges Tom to date her and in the process she encourages

him many times to pursue his dream of becoming an architect. When they break up, she leaves

Tom disillusioned with his way of life. Inspired by his time with Summer, Tom determines to

pursue his dream in the end. As such, Summer is representative of the ways in which the manic

pixie dream girl performs the role of the Herald. As the postfeminist girl, she provides

motivation for the hero to change with two distinct features. First, the postfeminist is sexually

agentic. She is often the one who approaches the boy in the narrative and by doing so issues the

challenge. Second, her physical attractiveness provides great motivation for the hero to change

with the promise of sex. These two features make the manic pixie dream girl an ideal Herald

for the young men in the films under discussion. SO 65

The symbolic roles of the Boy Hero and the Herald illuminate the analogy between the manic pixie dream girl and “the muse” in popular criticism. The female character type plays an indispensable role of motivating the male protagonist to change for the better. It is often the case that in Act One she issues a challenge to the boy using her irresistible sexuality and in Act

Two she triggers his symbolic death so that he will be reborn as a man in Act Three. This division of symbolic roles remains rigid in the trope. The roles never reverse and it is always the male protagonist who gets to have an arc and learn something. The female character stays one-dimensional and does not develop over the course of the narrative. The symbolic roles respectively occupied by the male and the female demonstrate gender inequality in storytelling.

In the manic pixie dream girl trope, women remain to be supporting characters for men, and

masculine self-improvement is achieved at the expense of negative representation of women.

3.3 A Cruelly Optimistic Relationship: Desire for Self-Improvement

So far, I have argued that there are two iterations of manic pixie dream girl films, the non-

reflexive and self-reflexive types, in both of which the male protagonist and the manic pixie

dream girl respectively occupy the symbolic roles of the Boy Hero and the Herald. The self-

reflexive iteration reveals that the manic pixie dream girl trope is a male fantasy wherein the

young man at the centre of the narrative embarks on a journey of self-improvement that is made

possible by the impetus of an attractive young woman. Following Lauren Berlant (2011), I

describe this relationship between the young couple as one of cruel optimism. Berlant’s

formulation of the way in which people remain attached to unachievable fantasy in the milieu

of neoliberalism provides a framework to conceive romantic relationships in the present-day

society as exemplified in these films. The notion of enduring reciprocity in romance is

nowadays regarded as a fantasy that is unattainable yet continues to bring lovers together.

Indeed, I contend that the self-reflexive manic pixie dream girl films’ project consists in SO 66 overcoming said cruel optimism. I will discuss cruel optimism in contemporary romance and what it means for romantic relationships if it were to be overcome.

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an

obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a

fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler,

too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being.

These kinds of optimistic relation (…) become cruel only when the object that draws

your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially (Berlant

2011, 1).

The boy desires the fun, fearless, and sexy manic pixie dream girl with whom a partnership holds the promise of driving him to completion. I have argued that for the boy, the girl not so much stands for a kind of romance or simply the promise of sex – these are only motivators for the boy to strive for something – but she represents an opportunity for the boy to become a man.

This occasion for the boy to rid himself of juvenile attachments so as to grow up, however, is an obstacle to the goal itself, for the manic pixie dream girl only exists in his own fantasy. This is proven by the self-reflexive films which expose the illusion of the trope. Therefore, insofar as a young man naively expects a girl would somehow turn his life around, he engages in a cruelly optimistic relationship.

Berlant’s way of capturing the sense of the present is the “impasse” which fittingly describes the state in which the audience first meets the male protagonists in manic pixie dream girl films. According to Berlant (2011), “an ‘impasse’ designates a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward” (4). Recalling the Boy Hero archetype, at the start of his character arc he is a boy who is stuck in a state of arrested development. His remaining ties with childhood prohibit his transition into adulthood. For instance, Calvin in

Ruby Sparks starts off struggling to recreate the early success of his first novel because he SO 67 cannot psychologically renounce his “genius” ego; the genius label stops him from producing work because he believes none would ever again live up to that standard. In order to overcome his impasse, Calvin desperately needs an inspiration.

Calvin imagines his manic pixie dream girl into real life, and it is Ruby who inspires him to complete his novel at the end of the film (after she disappears). Ruby exemplifies the function of the manic pixie dream girl in the narrative as the “apostrophe,” which is a concept

Berlant (2011) borrows from Barbara Johnson to explain the mechanism of attachment in cruel optimism. Berlant contends that the object of desire in a relation of cruel optimism is really a cluster of promises we want that something to make possible for us (23). While it may seem that Calvin desires Ruby, what he really wants is the inspiration that would bring him out of his impasse. Therefore, Ruby stands for an apostrophe, which is defined as:

a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover…) is

animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be

imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening. The

condition of projected possibility (…) creates a fake present moment of

intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place (25).

In other words, the manic pixie dream girl is a projected fantasy of the imaginator. He is able to project any desire he wishes onto her given her “convenient absence” (ibid.). Hence, while desiring the manic pixie dream girl seems to be a “reaching out” motion, it is actually a “turning back”: “an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that

realizes something [in him] that makes [him] more or differently possible” (ibid.). That is, the manic pixie dream girl as the apostrophe permits the imaginator to suspend himself in the optimism of entering with her into an imaginary relationship which promises to make possible a potentiality of himself. This promise, however, is inherently false, for that which holds the promise is an imaginary entity. The manic pixie dream girl is a fantasy of the imaginator, and a SO 68 fantasy is an image that is produced to satisfy a psychological need. While fantasy takes place entirely in the imaginator’s head, as long as it suffices in satiating that need, no change is needed

to occur in reality. In this sense fantasy actually keeps the promise of change from ever taking

place in the real world.

The apostrophe as a critical element in the mechanism of optimistic attachment can be

linked to the figure of the Herald. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the Herald is defined as

“One who proclaims or announces the message of another” (“Herald”). In this role the manic

pixie dream girl by challenging the Boy Hero on a date symbolically announces the advent of

transformation. On a similar note, the apostrophe is defined as “A figure of speech, by which a

speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person

or thing, either present or absent” (“Apostrophe”). In this sense the imaginator of the manic pixie dream girl fantasizes the figure representative of change to address himself. Such act of fancy proves an inner psychological need for transformation which in reality is a means to escape the impasse. The connection between the Herald and the apostrophe highlights the way in which a narrative element provides fantasy content for the mechanism of optimistic attachment.

Fantasy in a specific form hampers transformation. In cruel optimism, Berlant (2011) asserts that fantasy comes in a predictable form of comfort. In the boy’s attachment to the girl, while the optimism appears to be prospective, it is actually retrospective. Berlant states, “one of optimism’s ordinary pleasures is to induce conventionality, that place where appetites find a shape in the predictable comforts of the good-life genres that a person or a world has seen fit to formulate” (2; my emphasis). This means that optimism always involves conventionality that is by nature retrospective. In the manic pixie dream girl trope, conventionality manifests in the naïve manner in which the boy imagines romance with the girl. This is linked to the theme of childhood that runs throughout quirky sensibility (McDowell 2010). Take (500) Days of SO 69

Summer for example. Tom’s optimistic attachment to Summer is based on his childhood belief of true love. The recalling of childhood memory is a nostalgic yearning for a simpler time when pleasures are within arm’s reach. The conventional notions of love (“the one”) is pleasurable because enduring reciprocity is expected to simply happen as it is “meant to be.” It takes no effort to realize this vision in a child’s anticipating eye. This kind of conventional good-life fantasy is implied in the quirky aesthetic which is responsible for producing the feeling of optimism which courses through these films. It is this kind of retrospective good-life fantasy that constitutes the optimism which not only sustains the boy’s attachment to the girl but also stymie the transformation he is actually looking for.

The retrospective element, the predictable comfort of conventionality, or the cliché good-life fantasy is what turns the attachment cruel. Berlant (2011) writes:

Optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually

makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a

people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being

inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation,

such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that

is, at the same time, profoundly confirming (2).

What actually keeps the boy from realizing his dream is the unrealistic expectation of having love to simply land on his doorstep. The non-reflexive type of manic pixie dream girl films perpetuates such a stereotypically patronizing notion of gender relations: the manic pixie dream girl is always there for the boy’s taking. This cinematic fantasy immediately satisfies the deeper psychological need for change by substituting the pleasure that ought to be experienced after transformation occurs. For this reason, the manic pixie dream girl is a placeholder fantasy that sustains optimistic attachment yet at the same time prohibits substantial change to take place. SO 70

Alternatively, the self-reflexive films offer a way out of this predicament. In order to overcome the cruel optimism, the young man needs to let go of the childish fantasy. As discussed earlier, in the self-reflexive films the boy loses the girl which violently brings an end to his illusion. In this case, the pleasures of conventionality – self-entertaining ideals of romance

– is countered by suffering. The failure serves as a wake-up call for the boy telling him to let go of the fantasy in which he is the centre of female attention, and that indulging in fantasy does not lead him to happiness but suffering. Instead, he ought to focus on effecting real change on

his own.

In (500) Days of Summer, following Tom’s moment of disillusionment, a montage

shows Tom picking himself up from the wreckage by pursuing his dream of becoming an

architect (fig. 14). He is seen sketching, reading about architecture, and applying for relevant

positions. The montage is accompanied by Wolfmother’s “Vagabond”, an upbeat song with a rousing chorus. The non-diegetic music piece begins with “this is a song about innocence lost” followed by lyrics that describe a vagabond who has gained wisdom and freedom from parting with a girl whom he used to hold dear. Lively yet subtly wistful, the song not only sets the mood for Tom’s upward movement but is also a metaphor of him having been inspired by his time with Summer. Tom’s innocence is lost with the heart-break, from which he has gained insight to life and freedom from an illusion that has been holding him back. He is symbolically reborn as a man. SO 71

Fig. 14. Tom begins sketching in his room following his disillusionment in (500) Days of Summer

※

The relation of cruel optimism in manic pixie dream girl films issues a compelling message to force men to adapt to unfolding change in gender relations in the millennium. The change is generally twofold: First, the rise of male-centred narratives in romantic comedies harbours masculine anxiety in response to losing privileges of men. As discussed in Chapter 1, the assault on masculine authority since the 1960s mainly effected by second-wave feminism has taken a foothold in the American cultural consciousness over recent decades. The call for greater gender equality has seen results not only in public but also private domains. The portrayal of personal masculine struggles in these films indicates that men no longer single-handedly set the terms for romantic relationships. On the other hand, multiple feminist movements have over time empowered women in personal relationships. In particular, the achievement of women’s

financial independence grants them bargaining power in the household. Relatively free from

men’s financial control, women enjoy greater freedom in selecting their partners. These changes

impact conventional ideas of romance. As these films show, romance nowadays requires re- examination – nothing is any longer “meant to be” like in the older days. Men need to re-

evaluate their position in an age of female empowerment. SO 72

In light of the moral lessons embedded within the films, the adaptive strategy for men seems to be an injunction to self-improvement. In contemporary media culture, with regard to gender, the imperative to work on the self is well-documented in postfeminist literature.

According to Gill (2007; 2008), the emphasis upon self-management is a major theme of postfeminism, which she finds resonance in contemporary neoliberalism. Neoliberalism’s shift from being a political or economic rationality to a mode of governmentality is highlighted by a number of writers (Brown 2003; Rose 1996). This mode of governmentality is understood as constructing individuals as entrepreneurs of themselves who must self-regulate in order to thrive in an increasingly competitive environment (Foucault 2008). With the emphasis on individualism and self-regulation, neoliberalism has become the reigning ideology that governs gender expressions. In the case of postfeminism, Gill (2007) points out that monitoring and surveying the self have long been requirements of the performance of successful femininity.

Women are offered “instruction in grooming, attire, posture, elocution and ‘manners’” which require “constant anxious attention, work and vigilance” (155). At the end of her article, Gill argues that women in particular are called on to self-manage and self-discipline.

Notwithstanding, the moral lessons issued by manic pixie dream girl films indicate an increasing pressure for men to self-manage as well. At the same time, the injunction to self- improvement seems to have the effect of reducing the desire for love and relationship. For men, manic pixie dream girl films ultimately issue the moral lesson that tells them to grow up. While the non-reflexive films indulge men in a sexual fantasy, the self-reflexive types aim for disillusionment and suggest that true coming-of-age requires men to leave behind the lovey- dovey fantasy. Deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl fantasy reveals that the girl is only an impetus for transformation. The analysis of cruel optimism in manic pixie dream girl films has shown that she is an imaginary figure that originates from an inner psychological desire of SO 73 men to excel beyond impasse. In this sense love is a distraction from the real desire to thrive in life.

The self-reflexive films have a narrative inclination to sideline love and instead feature the male protagonist’s personal growth. The narrator of (500) Days of Summer states in the beginning of the film: “This is not a love story.” Indeed, it is a story about love, or even one that questions love. The narrative highlights the role love, which manifests as Summer, plays in Tom’s life. Although it is infused with fantasy, Tom’s eventual disillusionment is key to his subsequent drive to achieve his dream of becoming an architect. In the end, the film remains uncertain as to whether Tom will ever find true love. Other self-reflexive films like Ruby Sparks and Paper Towns end on a similar note with the male protagonist losing the manic pixie dream girl but discovering an inner strength that is more important to his well-being. In these films, although love ends in uncertainty, what is rather clear is that these men become better equipped to “embrace life and its infinite mysteries” (Rabin 2007). At the end of the narrative, personal growth is presented as truly fulfilling for men, while love starts off as the main focus and is later lowered to a secondary status.

It seems that what neoliberalism has done to the female subject has now been equally applied to the male subject. Recalling what Gill (2008) writes about postfeminism: “Femininity here is powerful, playful and narcissistic – less desiring of a sexual partner than empowered by the knowledge of her own sexual attractiveness” (441). In light of the above findings, I argue that it is similar for neoliberal masculinity that contemporary male empowerment is also less about desiring a sexual partner (though sex remains important just as in postfeminism); yet it is different in that men are less empowered by their body than career success. In (500) Days of

Summer, Tom is graced by the outlook of becoming an architect; and in Ruby Sparks, Calvin manages to publish his second novel with critical acclaim. In this sense it seems that neoliberalism has returned to a conservative gender division between men and women – the SO 74 former focused on career and the latter on physical attractiveness. Nonetheless, neoliberalism’s

emphasis on individualism and self-regulation imposes a different view on love and relationship.

When the self comes first, love has become more of a by-product of individual success.

※

In this chapter I have examined the different plot structures that illustrate the manic pixie dream

girl trope. It is around the early 2010s when self-awareness of the trope begins to take shape in

American cinema. It reveals that the manic pixie dream girl trope is not a conventional love

story that details the falling in love of a heterosexual couple. Instead, it is a unilateral male

fantasy that takes a certain kind of female as its object of desire. The manic pixie dream girl has

a mission – one way or another she is to issue a wake-up call to the boy imaginator to grow up

and become a man. The relation of cruel optimism reveals that the girl in the trope is a mental

construction inside the boy’s head where the entire scene of The Hero’s Journey plays out. The

narrative of self-improvement, albeit an imagination, is indicative of an imperative for young

men to self-regulate in contemporary media culture. In the neoliberal milieu, nowadays it is not

only women who are imposed stringent demands in order to successfully perform their sexuality,

these films demonstrate and also create an increasing pressure on men to do the same. As a

result, love and relationship seem to occupy reduced importance among neoliberal subjects who

are preoccupied with individual success. SO 75

Conclusion: Farewelling the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

The manic pixie dream girl phenomenon began with film critic Nathan Rabin’s (2007)

invention of the term which was met with strong feminist critique indicating the various ways

in which the figure demonstrated a current of misogyny in American culture. I contend that the

singular focus on the unfair representational practice against women is insufficient for a

comprehensive diagnosis of the cultural problem. I proposed three key questions to further the

discussion: (1) What is the origin of the manic pixie dream girl in millennial cinema? (2) What

is the masculinity and male fantasy surrounding the figure? (3) What is the gender relation in

the manic pixie dream girl trope? To answer these questions, I have expanded the discussion to various aspects of the manic pixie dream girl character. I examined the character as an artefact shaped by the film text, a fictional being possessing certain features in the fictional world, a symptom manifesting cultural mentalities of the era, and a symbol connoting indirect meaning.

The four aspects loosely correspond to issues of genre, audience address, femininity and masculinity, and narrative structure. The analyses demonstrate a migration of focus from femininity to masculinity since I argue that the manic pixie dream girl is ultimately a character that results from masculine desire. It is in this judgment that I answer the three questions above.

Origin: Hommecom, Indie Cinema & Postfeminism

The manic pixie dream girl appeared in the early 2000s as a result of specific historical

developments occurring within American cinema. I suggest the origin of the character should

be traced in two contexts. The first context is the romantic comedy genre. Jeffers McDonald

(2009) astutely point out that since the mid-1990s the rom-com genre has undergone a shift of emphasis from female- to male-centred narratives, which she terms “hommecom.” In order to cater to male audiences, hommecoms offer what is assumed to be men’s ultimate desire in love SO 76 and relationship – sex (Jeffers McDonald 2009). The manic pixie dream girl is therefore portrayed to be the ideal girlfriend who is always up for sex – hence, the “dream girl.” This representational feature of women is also linked to the postfeminist discourse of sexual subjectivity, only that what is presented as sexual freedom is co-opted to serve male fantasy.

The second context to explain the rise of the manic pixie dream girl is indie cinema.

The character type emerged out of the indie cinema boom of the 1990s and 2000s. Simply put, indie cinema is an alternative cinema for an alternative audience. The buzzword for indie is

“quirky” referring to something that deviates from the norm in a palatable manner. I believe this notion contributes to the “pixie,” otherworldly quality of the character type. The manic pixie dream girl enjoys pushing boundaries by engaging in borderline socially acceptable behaviours. Once again, her transgressive quality is linked to postfeminism’s discourse of playfulness and individual freedom. In showcasing the character’s playfulness, the energy of female empowerment is often exaggerated that the character seems unusually elated and enthusiastic about life, earning her the “manic” description. Newman (2013) states that indie films are “movies for hipsters.” Hipsters are affluent millennials who seek to culturally distinguish themselves. They do so by consuming commodities that showcase their superior taste over the “masses.” Indie films exploit this demand by offering “novel” and “authentic” content. In this sense, what deviates from the norm yet still remains interesting is seen as new and original. The quirkiness of the manic pixie dream girl is therefore deliberate so as to appeal to a hipster audience.

At this point, the connection between hommecom, indie cinema, and postfeminism comes clear. As the rom-com genre turns its attention towards male audiences, it creates a sexy girlfriend for their entertainment; indie cinema stylizes this girlfriend as quirky to appeal to a hipster audience; finally, postfeminism offers the ideological content for the character type – sexually agentic and individualistic, she fits right into the demands of the two generic contexts. SO 77

These three movements that began at the end of the 20th century converged to the advent of the

manic pixie dream girl in the new millennium.

Grow Up!: Postfeminist Masculinity & Male Transformation

The current state of Western masculinity in the 21st Century is the postfeminist man. The

unstable subject position results from several factors including the informatization of economic

production, the rise of feminism, and consumer capitalism which implicate a renewal of

masculine identity and men’s relationship with patriarchal responsibility.

The transition from industrial to postindustrial economy introduces a shift in the

prevalent expression of masculinity. Accordingly, representational culture showcases this shift

with the gradual phasing out of the muscled body as the source of masculine identity. Instead,

cultural knowledge and creativity become the new hallmarks of masculinity in the information

society. Previously considered as women’s work, the new emphasis on communication and

affective labour in the workplace generates the impression of feminization of masculine

expression. The accentuation of feminine values goes hand in hand with the rise of feminism.

Greater gender equality in the public and private domains leads to men’s loss of patriarchal privileges. Men’s fall from grace manifests in a depressed image of masculinity. Male protagonists in rom-coms appear more anxious and self-aware for they no longer single- handedly take the rein of romantic relationships. Furthermore, consumer capitalism has cultivated a class of affluent millennials who indulge in the pleasures of consumption. For men, the “bachelor pad” (Osgerby 2005) prolongs their adolescence and decreases their incentive to take up adult responsibilities. The traditional patriarchal responsibility to nail down a career, marry, and support a family becomes less contingent. As a result, adult men retain characteristics of adolescent masculinity. SO 78

Nevertheless, manic pixie dream girl films exhibit a re-embracing of patriarchal responsibility. They tell stories of boys gaining maturity and taking up responsibilities in order to become men. This enterprise is achieved with the help of manic pixie dream girls who take their hand and guide them to a better future. The self-reflexive films reveal that the manic pixie dream girl trope is ultimately a fantasy of masculine transformation. Although reasons for men’s initial arrested development may be plenty – childhood trauma or, more commonly, youth hedonism – the solution is somewhat consistent across manic pixie dream girl films: men are encouraged to re-embrace their artistic passions or pursue creative careers. This forms an image of patriarchal responsibility in the information age.

A Cruelly Optimistic Relationship

In terms of narrative, the symbolic roles occupied by the male protagonist and the manic pixie dream girl in the films under discussion make clear the interaction between the two genders.

Under the lens of Joseph Campbell’s (1949) The Hero’s Journey, the manic pixie dream girl

plays the role of the Herald who announces the need of change and so challenges the Boy Hero

on an adventure to effect positive transformation. That women are constructed as a device for

men’s self-improvement is further foregrounded by Berlant’s (2011) cruel optimism. The manic

pixie dream girl is an object of desire that promises change for the men who fall in love with

her. She is ultimately men’s fantasy construct, however, and infatuation with a fantasy prohibits

change from taking place in real life. The masculine disillusionment in self-reflexive films

recognizes the fictional nature of the desired object and proposes that renouncement is the

sensible way to achieve self-improvement. Self-reflexivity in hommecoms problematizes the

notion of love and the role it plays in men’s lives. Love is exposed as a fantasy that hampers

personal growth. Putting aside that fantasy, men are portrayed to be free and upwardly mobile.

This injunction to work on the self aligns with the self-enterprising neoliberal subjectivity. In SO 79 other words, at the very core of the manic pixie dream girl trope is a vision of life that sees love and relationship not as an end goal but an ordeal for the entrepreneurial self to advance in life in order to “embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”

To Be Continued…

Having once taken American popular culture by storm, the manic pixie dream girl has become a rarity in cinema since the mid-2010s. I believe it has to do with the fact that self-reflexive

films like Ruby Sparks (2012) and Paper Towns (2015) have pushed the idea to the absolute

furthest to completely exhaustion. Similarly, online discussion about this subject has

diminished around the same time – arguments about sexist nature of the manic pixie dream girl

have been made and the day is saved. In my observation, traces of the character type can still

be found in the domain of television. For instance, Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World

(2017–present) and Sex Education (2019–present) both tell stories about young men who are

traumatized in childhood and as a result insecure about their sexuality and meaning in life. They

meet feisty, independent female partners who guide them to see the bright side of life and finally

come out of their shells (fig. 15). These female characters, however, are not manic pixie dream

girls. They assert the same narrative weight as the male leads: they have their own backstories,

goals, desires, and character arcs. I see this as a major step up in female representation in the

span of two decades. What deserves further attention is the continual development of the gender

relations in this type of match-up: depressed, insecure young men paired up with independent,

empowered young woman. This has become a trend in Western representational culture, which

announces that contemporary society has entered the postfeminist age. SO 80

Fig. 15. Alyssa teaching the formerly depressed James how to dance in The End of the F***ing World As gender expressions evolve with changing industrial and cultural contexts, they continually negotiate their own identities through each other. In the process, specific types of characters, tropes, and narrative patterns emerge and become widely accepted for some time.

In the history of cinema, the manic pixie dream girl remains an interesting case study. It marks a time when various dimensions of contemporary society are undergoing great change which all converge to manifest in this character type. The character came under media attention due to issues of gender representation and exits the lime light for the same reason. In the end, the manic pixie dream girl has laid the foundations for more egalitarian gender representation in the future years of the 21st Century, leaving behind a legacy of those “sensitive writer-directors” who brought the character to life. SO 81

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