I love this article, found via Racialicious’s review of this blog’s current deeply superficial obsession: He’s Just Not That Into You.

I’ve written before about the “alternative” female stereotypes in films like Garden State and Elizabethtown, but I’ve never seen it articulated quite so well or completely.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls are bright, quirky and whimsical, bringing sass and joy into the lives of otherwise joyless men. The difference between MPDGs and real life friendly/sassy/quirky/whimsical women, however, is that MPDGs seem to exist for no other reason than to light up the lives of male protagonists.

As I wrote in my own analysis:

…while I understood Zach [Braff] and Orlando [Bloom]’s interest in Natalie [Portman] and Kirsten [Dunst] - they were open, engaging and adventurous - I didn’t quite get why the girls were so into the guys, other than the fact that it made for a good plot. What was it about these guys that made these girls want to invest so much time into charming them? Why would Kirsten Dunst’s Claire - a strange but, as Orlando points out, pretty fantastic girl - go to so much effort to connect with Drew, when he seemed to provide so little for her to connect with? Aside from the obvious of course, which is that the guy looked like Orlando Bloom, and most girls would overlook most personality defects for cheekbones like that.

Then there was the fact that, yep, I get quirky, I get friendly, I get being prone to doing all sorts of random crap that can be either endearing or annoying depending on who the person doing the perceiving is. Like I said, all characteristics I possess myself. But no one is provocative, open, engaging and whimsical all the time in the way the female catalysts of Garden State and Elizabethtown are. It’s simply not possible. Especially when you’re playing against characters like Andrew Largeman and Drew Baylor, who don’t give you all that much to work with.

In a way, it felt like Claire and Sam were male fantasies of an alternative ideal woman with about as much real depth as a paddling pool - on the surface, they seemed like women of substance, but they didn’t act like real people. Unlike the male characters, their actions didn’t seem to result from logical motives. They existed purely as catalysts to help their respective male protagonists along on their journeys. 

By the by, has anyone seen Last Kiss (starring Zach Braff and Rachel Bilson)? Because based on the trailer, at least, it looks woefully bad. I wanted to throw a shoe at Braff based on those two minutes alone.