It's Magical Quirksters, The Onion A.V. Club

So The Onion A.V. Club, which is, in my opinion, the best general culture-writing site on the internet, decided this week to take on the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" in film. It's a decent introductory list to an archetype, however, it's ultimately too far reaching, calling out the likes of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Natalie Portman in Garden State as two sides of the same coin. Lady-site Jezebel has been talking up the story all day, citing other examples and how in real life, manic pixie dream girls make them feel bad about themselves. So true, right?

It's too bad that they're wrong. (The Apartment?! Are you serious? She is not a cipher!) Yes, there has been a flighty lady archetype in screwball comedies, reaching down to Goldie Hawn and Meg Ryan's careers, slithering into the 00s in "romantic" comedies like Garden State and Elizabethtown. The A.V. Club do a good job of pointing out wacky lady characters throughout the years, however, failing to clarify between films where their wackiness is bolstered by good writing and acting and actual real motivations, and crappy movies featuring adorable girls who are mostly catchphrases and self-consciously "weird" and "quirky" in order to validate their persona. And it's an inherently negative term, relatively cutting, so why isn't every example a true and salient sign of girls as ciphers?

For example, you could call the Gilmore Girls Manic Pixie Dream Girls. But they're not, since they're the stars of their show. Walking and Talking is a fantastic movie following the friendship of two ladies that would certainly be Manic Pixie Dream Girls in another movie.

A Manic Pixie Dream Girl, in the A.V. Club's definition, is essentially a glossed up version of "the girlfriend," and that's where their examples don't jive for me (again, The Apartment). But your role has to be damm underwritten and you have to be unwilling, as an actress, to give it any sense of the gravity of a real girl to come off like a Magical Quirkster.

See? This is better: The Magical Quirkster! As embodied by Natalie Portman in Garden State, she is noxious and wholly deserving of her own category of modern cinema's scourges.

Screwball comedies, in particular, didn't jive with the A.V. Club's "girlfriendish" definition of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, because in screwball comedies, lady characters had the writing or the acting chops to give some impression of an inner life, even when they're egging Cary Grant on to commit a wacky crime. Magical Quirksters, on the other hand, who have flourished in the 2000s, they are arty versions of the "girlfriend." There is little to no actual sex or danger in their worlds. They are the pretty thing you can make out to a Shins song with. In Search of a Midnight Kiss, to cite a recent example, starts out with a girl who is a nightmare girl, and I inwardly groaned as it appeared that she'd be a Magical Quirkster, propping up the sad sack lead character, but, ultimately, I felt as if there were some surprises there. (Your mileage may vary, however, on that judgment.) Plenty of mumblecore films that I've seen in the past two years generally star the director and some lady actress that's supposed to be fascinating but ends up being simply gazed upon. (Hannah Takes the Stairs, although, was somewhat like a straight up study of the Magical Quirkster Girl and what she does...and yet, it still didn't feel like Hannah's movie!)

Films with Obnoxious, Terrible Magical Quirksters that are just Emblems of the Male Gaze?
Garden State
The Last Kiss
Elizabethtown (you could, if feeling persnickety, argue for Cameron Crowe's whole oeuvre)
Zooey Deschanel's public/media persona. Occasionally her films.

Films with Lady Characters who are Possibly Real Girls:
Amelie (sure, her indie influence has inspired a host of quirks. But in her film, she's a rounded character, with feelings and dreams and aspirations)
Hannah Takes the Stairs
Funny Ha Ha
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, is a film that features, in some ways, a textbook Magical Quirkster. Kate Winslet's Clementine dyes her hair and rocks Jim Carrey's world but between Charlie Kaufman's Oscariffic writing and Winslet's Academy Award-nominated performance, you can see the person behind the persona. I knew girls like Clem. In no way do I know anyone from the cast of Garden State.

The writing, the writing! It's too good. Imagine an actress lacking Kate Winslet's skills and what they'd do with these lines. And notice how it's practically a parody of the Magical Quirkster relationship in film.

Clementine: Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours.
Joel: I remember that speech really well.
Clementine: I had you pegged, didn't I?
Joel: You had the whole human race pegged.
Clementine: Hmm. Probably.
Joel: I still thought you were gonna save my life... even after that.
Clementine: Ohhh... I know.

As always, read Molly Lambert's writing on This Recording for a note-perfect distillation on Magical Quirksters, even if she didn't call them that yet. Heck, in my last citing of this trend, I wrote "magical quirky girl cipher archetype."