(Via Sociological Images)
Check out Feminist Frequency's Anita Sarkeesian's explanation of the "manic pixie dream girl" phenomenon, the first in a series that looks at the ways women are portrayed in film and tv.
So what is a "manic pixie dream girl" you ask? TV Tropes defines her as "stunningly attractive, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies [...] often with a touch of hairdye and inexplicably obsessed with our stuffed-shirt hero, on whom she will focus her kuh-razy antics until he learns to live and love. Often presented as a case where Single Woman Seeks Good Man, though whether the hero qualifies varies."
Cute, quirky, and responsible for giving our hero a new lease on life, while not exactly having much of her own? How about every independently made romantic comedy I saw from the early-90s though the mid-00s? (I guess you even make a case for Audrey Hepburn being the manic pixie archetype. No, actually, you could make a very good case for it.)
As much as I love Hal Hartley's Trust, it really fits the template:
Here's the problem, I think, with the manic pixie dream girl trope: It provided an alternative to the overly sexualized image of women seen in a lot of mainstream movies, but she's not a fully nuanced character. The manic pixie dream girl trope is employed in a lot of independently made movies, or movies thought to be more rounded than your typically hollywood rom-com. But she doesn't really exist outside her role as muse.
The funny thing is that, although I've seen this trope before on tvtropes, I've never seen any of the movies she listed. It made me want to check it out so I could get a better example. Sometimes seeing is better than reading when coming across a new subject.
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