Girls on Film: Why it's time to retire the term 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl'

This once-useful piece of critical shorthand has devolved into laziness and sexism

Kirsten Dunst "Elizabethtown"

As long as men have written female characters, entertainment has been packed with girls whose individuality is just a means for some tiresome hero to work out his own ennui. From William Shakespeare's Juliet Capulet to Truman Capote's Holly Golightly, the characters' uniqueness was like an ideological rib-eye that the down-on-his-luck hero could feast on to thrive and prosper in his own life. These idiosyncratic muses were finally given a common name in 2007: The "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" — and now, in 2013, it's time to put the term to rest.

The term — which is often shortened to MPDGs — was originally coined by The AV Club's Nathan Rabin to describe Kirsten Dunst's character in Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown. Rabin wrote:

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Monika Bartyzel

Monika Bartyzel is a freelance writer and creator of Girls on Film, a weekly look at femme-centric film news and concerns, now appearing at TheWeek.com. Her work has been published on sites including The Atlantic, Movies.com, Moviefone, Collider, and the now-defunct Cinematical, where she was a lead writer and assignment editor.