This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange

manifesting mainly in referential fragments and glistening body parts, the dream girl had finally been wholly reinvented. Aggression, autonomy, sexual agency, and several varieties of stature had been bred out of her prototype in the screenwriting lab. Fully realized, she transmutes the rebellious energy of third-wave feminism into a set of soothing eccentricities to be applied directly to the culture’s cowering manhood. Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, a prurient focus on the body stood in for a more fully imagined ideal. By the turn of the century, ingenues were still beholden to the warped terms of this kind of realism, but the focus had shifted from purely physical objectification to the tyranny of “personality.”
    If you really wanted to, you could find modest overlap between this new type and every innocuous female character to cross the screen with a few marbles either missing or swirling around upstairs. What sets the modern dream girl apart from vaguely similar creations of decades past—like Shirley MacLaine’s lovelorn gamine in The Apartment , for instance, Liza Minnelli’s divinely brazen Sally Bowles, and a host of early Goldie Hawn roles—is the extent to which she’s presented as both wildly original and straight out of the coffee shop. She lives in your world, somewhere between sex and safety. Not just believable, she’s so well within reach you may already have met her.
    (A question: If the true dream girl seems to have emerged from our imaginations, does the fact that this version feels familiar qualify her as the real thing? To me it doesn’t matter whether she was inspired by “real” women—something her creators often claim—or triggered an avalanche of jejune posturing. Some have called her a pure projection; with its suggestion of overlay, superimposition gets closer to the trouble. All two-dimensional tics and self-conscious dysfunction, she is more formula than fantasy, more personality than persona. Rather than distinguishing themselves, a wide array of actresses have been swallowed by the mantle of her mannerisms. The character is so stuffed with this fatuous, hipster fairy-tale idea of personality that she jams the imagination instead of colonizing it.)
    More insidiously a male creation than anything as obvious as Sharon Stone’s cervical cynosure or the newly mainstream porn stars, this was an exclusive, divisive ideal. Though she set off a kind of daisy chain of mimetic desire, real-life girls were not invited to share in her invention.
    It took real-life girls—many of whom wondered whether they were supposed to try on this new costume of quirks or congratulate filmmakers for finally getting them right—a while to figure this out. On the set of Garden State in 2003, actress Natalie Portman described her character, a literal spastic who draws the lead, Zach Braff, out of his world-phobic catatonia, this way: “Sam’s just a really … she’s a funny girl. Most parts written for women, especially romantic parts written by guys, are like some weird ideal of what a guy would want a girl to be. Like, she’s hot, she takes off her clothes a lot—she also really likes sports. And this is a real person who’s got problems, and she’s funny and she’s just as interesting and complex as the male character, and I appreciated that.”
    Having problems and being “funny” became leading dream-girl qualities. For those of us out in the field, the new girl appeared as both a watered-down affront to iconoclasm (or sadness, for that matter) and a willful force to be reckoned with.

    And Then There’s This
    There was a period, when the Internet was still a largely written medium, where it became frighteningly possible—even necessary—to cultivate not just a new persona but a new type of persona. Of the options available for poaching, few were as dependent on voice as the