When I studied abroad at La Universidad de Sevilla in Spain, I took an art history course. As the class was in a foreign language and many, many years ago, I can only remember the most general of lessons. Zeus and his lightning bolt; Ares and his helmet, Poseidon and his trident; we pair these gods with their respective symbols because of a long evolution in art that culminated in a kind of shorthand; a way of identifying the meaning in a canvas from a moment’s inspection. In other words, my professor wanted us to understand that we could look at a depiction of Zeus and know exactly when he was created and how he relates to the god’s evolution through time and across culture based entirely on what he was or wasn’t holding.
All this talk of gods brings me to a topic a bit better suited to a Queer Cinema Catchup blog post. I’m thinking, as I’m sure you are, of the film Call Me By Your Name. Specifically, I’m recalling the moment when Oliver and Elio watch Elio’s father pull a long-lost Roman statute from the sea. Mr. Perlman tells his son and his student that it’s one of a set, though the other was melted down and turned into a “particularly voluptuous Venus.” Venus, as in Aphrodite, as in the goddess of love, a particularly poignant female deity to reference in a film that queers a love that’s at once fleeting and timeless.
I’ve been thinking about Elio for a few weeks, largely because of a film Joe and I reviewed for Queer Cinema Catchup: Luke Gilford’s National Anthem. National Anthem centers around another young man experiencing a first queer love. While very different in setting (National Anthem takes place in a decidedly Western locale, where the symbols are all Americana, rather than the stuff of ancient Rome), Elio and Gilford’s protagonist Dylan feel similar. In fact, the final image of both films centers on the boys’ shattered, yet graceful, even statuesque faces as they contemplate the love they’ve lost and the beautiful, enduring, heart-wrenching impact it will have on them for their rest of their lives.
When I saw Dylan’s face at the conclusion of National Anthem, I scoffed, this is a Call Me By Your Name rip-off. While I don’t particularly like National Anthem (you can hear why in our episode), I’ve come to see the parallel in a new light with the help of another recognizable, if less classical reference: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. No need to pretend you haven’t heard of her; she’s the flighty, artistic eccentric who can help a male character find himself while lacking any real interiority or complexity of her own. Famous examples include Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown; Natalie Portman in Garden State; and Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer. I’ve been thinking of her, just like I’ve been thinking of Elio, because of National Anthem, which arguably has its own woman-who-helps-its-central-male-protagonist-grow in the form of the character Sky.
I wanted to roll my eyes at this latest iteration of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (still dreamy, still lovely, still underdeveloped, but queer!), but then I began to research the origin of this term I’ve used quite frequently throughout my years of movie-watching from a queer and feminist lens. The first surprise Wikipedia yielded was that the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl was coined by a man (Nathan Rabin); the second was that many actresses accused of portraying versions of the “MPDG” find the term offensive and reductive. Zooey Deschanel even said, “I don’t feel it’s accurate. I’m not a girl. I’m a woman. It doesn’t hurt my feelings, but it’s a way of making a woman one-dimensional and I’m not one-dimensional.”
Rabin himself seemed to back the criticism of his own terminology. In 2014 , he wrote an article bemoaning his creation of a term that became (and remains) ubiquitous in pop culture analysis. His initial article came out in 2007 but only became a flashpoint reference when his colleague suggested they create a list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls a year later. In the article, Rabin goes on to cite writers like John Green and Zoe Kazan who created art that specifically served to undercut the very idea of the manic pixie dream girl (or what John Green calls the “patriarchal lie…that must be stabbed in the heart and killed”). She, they argue, is a tool the male-dominated culture can use to dismiss female characters and the women who play them. In the end, Rabin feels “…deeply ashamed at having created a cliché that has been trotted out again and again in an infinite internet feedback loop” and wants to put the term Manic Pixie Girl to rest forevermore, even if quirky girls stay on our screens (preferably without a man around to use her ethereal strangeness for his own gain).
In the podcast, I flippantly proclaimed that National Anthem proves there’s a male version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Something I deemed the Shy, Soulful, Tortured, Twink, or the queer, queer-coded, or just plain sensitive but otherwise vaguely defined youth who has the privilege of the most magical, poignant, and significant journey in our culture: boy-to-man. In addition to Call Me By Your Name’s Elio and National Anthem’s Dylan, I would include Boyhood’s Mason, Stand By Me’s Gordy, and the Way, Way Back’s Duncan as examples of this trope.
While preparing to write this post, I felt thrilled by the prospect of coining my own culturally sticky and analytically eviscerating term, until I looked into the characters who could define my own invented trope, as well as the history of the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Did I really want to tie the character (Gordy) I related to most in the film I’ve loved since I was a kid (Stand By Me) to a term that could mock and diminish the shy, soulful, tortured, sensitive young boys on the screen who perhaps are too quickly assumed deep and acclaimed critically? How could I reconcile those perhaps less compelling and too easily well reviewed version of those boys-becoming-men with the standouts; the ones who are nuanced and specific found in films like Moonlight, 20th Century Women, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Call Me By Your Name, and maybe even National Anthem?
I come back to the classroom in Sevilla, in a moment I once naively hoped, precisely because of all the stories I’ve consumed, could become my own magical coming of age moment. I hear my professor explaining how a god in a painting has certain symbols that begin to shift as time moves on and culture changes. Maybe someday the god even transforms into a particularly voluptuous goddess (or at least is said to transform into such a goddess in a story that intends to explore queer love). A student of art, or perhaps a critic like Nathan Rabin, might be able to see that goddess and know who she once was; understand what she represents. Perhaps a term gets invented that pithily explains; a shorthand; a stereotype that reduces her image down to something offensive and ugly yet digestible and descriptive. Sure, there’s harm in words that don’t capture the full picture, the entire context, but there’s also use. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl and the Shy, Soulful, Tortured Twink are but tools we can use to identify and unpack the characters who drive our stories and help us define ourselves. Notice when they appear but accept that there’s more to them than a handful of words intended to reduce. Like all of us, symbols have depth and evolution, too.
