Grimes Wants to Reclaim the Concept of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and I'm So Exhausted I Say We Just Let Her
name a more iconic duo!
It’s humbling knowing that nothing that I do professionally in the years and decades ahead will have a fraction of the impact of something I did when I was thirty-one years old back in 2007.
That was the magical year I coined the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in the first My Year of Flops entry to describe Kristen Dunst’s flibbertigibbet stewardess in Elizabethtown.
I was pretty damn proud of myself. I thought I’d captured something pervasive and troubling in the culture but I had no idea the phrase and concept would take off the way that it did.
I never could have imagined that it would some day lead to me being an answer on Jeopardy, or join the cultural lexicon alongside similarly irresistible concepts like Milkshake Ducks and humblebrags.
I apologized for coining the term in a viral article for Salon because I felt it had gone from being a term used to identify and fight misogyny to a term that was all too often infused with sexism.
I felt bad for actresses and filmmakers who had to defend their films and characters against charges that they were exploiting the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, an inherently sexist and reductive conceit rooted in juvenile male fantasies of redemption and liberation and a conception of femininity that does not exist in real life.
watch where you’re going lady! You’re liable to get hit by a car!
It bummed me out that Kirsten Dunst, one of my favorite actresses, hated the phrase and her role in its coining.
I always thought that women who embraced or appropriated it were missing the point but I’ve come to accept that it’s not going anywhere and will probably be my enduring legacy, what I will be remembered for.
When people see the Manic Pixie Dream Girl being referenced somewhere they tend to bring it to my attention. I’m generally amused and flattered by the persistence and pervasiveness of my creation and sometimes I am legitimately gobsmacked at the surreal, crazy places it has gone.
Just yesterday a member of my Facebook group, Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin, informed me that professional eccentric and mother of three of the richest man on earth’s children Grimes had defended Manic Pixie Dream Girls in a Vanity Fair profile.
I checked it out and my first response was, “Holy fuck this is a long article. It just goes on and on and on.” Halfway through I felt like I was on mile thirteen of a marathon or perhaps an ultramarathon and I didn’t know if I could go on or make it to the finish line.
Then, when I had finished the article, I though, “Holy fuck was that ever a long article! It just went on and on and on.”
My second impression was that Grimes was both a pure Manic Pixie Dream Girl and also an exhausting, ridiculously over-the-top parody of the MPDG.
These are all genuine excerpts from the Vanity Fair profile:
If you fall into the category of people who’d never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015’s “Kill V. Maim,” one of the biggest hits off her fourth album, Art Angels, is the perfect four-minute crash course. It’s a pulsing, menacing dance-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, only in the Grimes remix, he’s a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Just your garden-variety pop disquisition on the nature of man and the inexorable pull toward brutality and chaos.
(Grimes) speaks so fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and club-kid slang.
Book 1 is Grimes’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and it was partly inspired by a theory of Musk’s: that she’s a simulation. “We keep having this conversation where E’s like, ‘Are you real? Or are we living in my memory, and you’re like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?
(Grimes) would pay for drugs by doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks.
(Grimes) connected with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they’d made the same pun about a dark theory of A.I.-authorized torture called Roko’s basilisk.
When Musk and Grimes first met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more like the Incredibles.
Exa Dark Sideræl (the name of Grimes and Musk’s second child) was actually something of a compromise, and she worries it’s a little boring.“I was fighting for Odysseus Musk,” she writes. “A girl named Odysseus is my dream.”
“Bro (Grimes nickname for Musk) does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?” She is well aware that many see Musk as some embodiment of luxurious excess, and Grimes is here to tell you she fuckin’ wishes.
The length of the article is exhausting but not as tiring as Grimes and her eccentricities. She comes off terribly in the article, as does Musk.
The ink-stained scribe who penned the piece sets out to prove that Grimes is the coolest, hippest, most awesome and misunderstood genius ever, and also their new best friend. Instead they both come off as pretentious jackasses perpetually high on self-regard.
Grimes is right on one count. Manic Pixie Dream Girls do exist in real life. As she herself asserts, she exemplifies the archetype. She swept into the life of a depressed, joyless man so emotionally rigid and dead inside that he thinks Babylon Bee articles about identifying as various things represents the height of wit and taught him about life and love.
If Grimes wants to reclaim the Manic Pixie Dream Girl I say more power to her. As a man, it is not my place to tell women who they can or cannot be or how they can or can’t define themselves.
So Manic Pixie Dream Girl it up, Grimes but realize that in doing so you’re taking something that’s already complicated, messy and ambivalent and elevating it to giddy new heights of insufferability.
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