This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange Page B

loop of references mucked into a vaguely female form.

    I’m a Substitute Person, I Like It That Way
    It was in fact Elizabethtown , Cameron Crowe’s unintentionally self-reflexive meditation on a man’s first, headlong failure, that inspired the critic Nathan Rabin to finally put a name to this trend in 2007. Christening her the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Rabin riffed out a few salient qualities: “[She 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.” She’s also divisive: “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.”
    The name, of course, is perfect. And in his first pass at wrangling the phenomenon Rabin struck upon its paradox: the MPDG seems to be both someone else’s one-dimensional idea of a dream girl and a general rejection of the dream girl tradition. Since 2007, Rabin and others have worked backward to legitimate the coinage, drawing up a lineage that includes actresses like Claudette Colbert and both Katharine and Audrey Hepburn. Contradictions and inconsistencies in the search for forebears (Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim ? Seventy-five-year-old Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude ?) have cheerfully been cited as part of an ongoing, trial-and-error effort to establish her as a player across film history. But to deny the ephemerid nowness of the MPDG is to deny her of her full, fluttery due, and to deprive the genesis story of a uniquely flimsy nonpareil of its telling modernity.

    How Happy Is the Blameless Vessel’s Lot
    Rabin is not alone in struggling to pushpin the iridescent wings of the MPDG to the page. Two of our best screenwriters have taken a crack: one result is sneakily self-aware, the other a dismal satire. Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) puts Clementine, the pushy, damaged dream girl played by Kate Winslet, where she belongs—in Jim Carrey’s besieged memory. Kaufman absolves Clementine of patented MPDG behavior by making her wise to the jig, as it exists in both the film and Carrey’s imagination: “Too many guys think that I’m a concept, or I complete them, or I’m gonna make them alive,” Winslet says. “I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.”
    Often cited as evidence that Kaufman has the inside track on the phenomenon of sassy savior girls, the line is set off by Carrey’s wistful reply: “I remember that speech really well.” In fact Winslet’s edict is an advanced MPDG-ism—articulating the illusory crux of the attraction is part of maintaining one’s aura of beguiling insight. “I had you pegged, didn’t I?” Winslet gloats. “I still thought you were going to save my life, even after that,” Carrey admits.
    â€œI’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind” is not a disclaimer, but Clementine’s statement of allegiance to her kind. It’s believable because neither of them really believe it.
    In Anything Else (2003), Woody Allen broadened the pathologies of the MPDG into morbid unwatchability. Earnest, young every-schlub Jason Biggs falls in love with Christina Ricci’s tiny emotional grifter on sight, and why not: she couldn’t be more pixieish if she coughed stardust. But Allen, attempting to ingratiate himself with a new generation, seized upon this new type with startling contempt. He also puts a little old-school Woodman backspin on her: Ricci is a diabolical litany of narcissistic tics and tortured neuroses; the worse she behaves, the