Mentioned last week the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term used in film to refer to a female — not a woman, mark you, but a girl or perhaps female, depending on the level of [im]maturity — who exists in a story not for herself, more deeply not as a Self, but only for the guy.
Maybe to move the story along, since you need a girl or two for tales. Even author of the über guy story Tolkien knew that.
[There’re some links there, talking of the MPDG or just do the Google.]
So she has no Self.
If people were things she’d be nothing.
But people are not, though we treat them as such.
We should love people and use things,
but we do it the other way around.
Schopenhauer said it. He wasn’t a particularly cheery guy — or even a fellow who got the deep things rightly. But he nailed it there. We do that.
They’re nothing, the MPDGs.
No self, and not real.
Break it down.
- Manic is illness
- Pixie’s the myth
- Dream isn’t real
- Girl isn’t grown
Shan’t we rather have the sane, human, awake, woman?
Wouldn’t we rather have the Jane Austen heroines from the ends of the books rather than the beginning? Not that they are all MPDGs, tho hmm some of them could be.
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There is perhaps the reverse MPDG: the one who needs no man a’tall or short, though most eventually do.
They’re mature in some ways and prolly more so than males — the kinds who are kind, artistic, even brilliant.
But also haughty, almost sneering, believing bad ideas about ones less than she.
Even if they are.
In older females, still not yet women despite several decades of being here, it is believing the bs of badassery.
In young females, though and for whom there is still hope, the MPDG is merely an appendage of one who is always a doofus and unworthy even if he is charismatic or apparently powerful. At base, and it is very base he is small and sad and creepy.
Like a smart kid in high school, he just knows how to write the essay.
Orson Welles said a happy ending depends on where you stop but to some degree it depends also on where you start.
In the last year or so I’ve known at least two females I can think of, both and each of whom hung on every random notion or gesture, they are less than words and deeds, the male emitted.
Speaking of … the guy is a sad sack sort, too.
The creep also shall one day die deeply alone.
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Said in that previous post I’d talked with my daughter of Harley Quinn and whether she’d be a version of the MPDG. The conclusion was no, despite the chaos, she has more self than that.
And she’s trying to be good.
Good picture, too.
Image:
Terry Dodson
& DC Comics,
Warner Bros.
