Kirsten Dunst, ‘Elizabethtown’, and the problematic rise of a the “manic pixie dream girl”
Seemingly, the suggestion that Kirsten Dunst has played any role at all in coining this slightly problematic, certainly eye-roll-inducing term was enough of an insult that the actor ended the interview with her PR representative coming into the room and doing the classic hand-wave – cut the cameras.
The awkward moment happened to a writer from Oh No They Didn’t when time with Dunst was cut short due to a touchy line of questioning. But in reality, the gripe goes back further, to a different journalist: Nathan Rabin.
In 2007, Rabin had just seen Elizabethtown, a 2005 movie from Cameron Crowe, deemed a ‘romantic tragicomedy’. Orlando Bloom stars as Drew Baylor, a failed designer who decides to commit suicide before postponing it to return to his hometown due to his father’s death. Dunst stars as Claire Colburn, a bubbly flight attendant who yaps his ear off on the flight home and then abandons her own plans simply to cheer him up.
It’s a classic archetype – the miserable, outcast, loner man and this woman, a woman who appears from nowhere and changes everything. She’s mysterious and alluring and wild, she’s spontaneous and more free than he is. She’s intoxicating but with obvious depth and clearly some secrets. She comes crashing into his life as a lesson, and she usually makes him better.
We have a term for it now – she’s a manic pixie dream girl. But, in 2007, it was Rabin who first wrote that and first coined the term when he was looking for a way to explain how Dunst’s role felt.
The term quickly was picked up and took on a whole life of its own. Generally, though, that life was in the hands of male writers who were both the people typically crafting female characters and the ones obsessed with them. Meanwhile, for female movie makers, critics and fans, these roles and the way the term manic pixie dream girl was often used to romanticise characters lacking in depth, or characters with their own personal issues that were ignored in favour of their male counterparts’ obsession with them, felt minimising. It felt like a limp label to escribe, one that doesn’t give credit to complexity, but merely objectifies it.
“What’s your opinion of the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl?” the journalist asked Dunst, to which she responded, “What is that?” Seemingly, she’d yet to hear the term that first started being used to describe her own role. After they explained it, she put it bluntly, “I don’t like it, to be honest,” adding, “I think it’s weird sounding,” before her publicist came in and pulled the plug.
Dunst’s reaction is valid, though, especially when Rabin himself has since apologised for the beast of a term he created. “It’s an archetype, I realised, that taps into a particular male fantasy: of being saved from depression and ennui by a fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done,” he wrote in his own essay titled simply, I’m sorry for coining the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”.
Other actors followed suit with Dunst’s disgust. Zoe Kazan once said about the label, “I think it’s basically misogynist,” calling for the phrase to be killed off. If its originator had his way, it would be, and it’s clear that Dunst, as its inspiration, never wanted a part in it in the first place.
