Frantic Fairie Fantasy Woman: Problems and Issues with the MPDG in Garden State

Zach Braff’s freshman directorial effort, Garden State, has received a lot of criticism, and perhaps rightly so. It’s been criticized for its treatment of mental health, for its lack of focus on the protagonist’s privilege, and for its treatment of women. It’s been sixteen years since that movie came out, and honestly there isn’t much to be said that hasn’t been said already. However, I feel the need, for no particular reason, to drag this movie out again and fairly criticize it for an issue that it has been criticized for before, but perhaps without as much nuance as I feel necessary.

Many have argued that Sam, the female lead of the film played by Natalie Portman, is a manic pixie dream girl. This is a contention that, ultimately, I agree with. However, I feel that those who have made this criticism have often failed to grapple with the problematic nature of the term in and of itself, and have often made this claim, and simply left it, saying it is bad in and of itself or bad on an individual level, without consequence. I doubt my analysis will truly be revolutionary or without any precedent, but I think I have an interesting perspective and come to some interesting conclusions, and will reveal them to you now.

The term Manic Pixie Dream Girl is one that sort of haunts film and film criticism, and has done so since 2005 when critic Nathan Rabin coined it after seeing the movie Elizabethtown. He used the term somewhat pejoratively, saying that the trope “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures” (Rabin). Unfortunately for Rabin and the film community at large, this was a rather damning and rather vague description of a rather astute observation that he made. While he did see a meaningful pattern when he identified this trope, he failed to provide the context and analysis necessary to make it really muscular as a means of criticism, which he later acknowledged.  

Rabin himself says in an essay for salon, “I coined the phrase to call out cultural sexism and to make it harder for male writers to posit reductive, condescending male fantasies of ideal women as realistic characters,” and bemoans the “fuzziness” of his definition of the term, acknowledging that “labels and definitions are inherently reductive” and that the label he created soon overtook his original intentions and became a term which was in many ways both reductive and sexist in the common discourse (Rabin). All this to say, the term “manic pixie dream girl” is a problematic one not because of what it means and identifies, but because of what it’s begun to be ascribed to. There was a time when every quirky female character was being called a manic pixie dream girl despite the fact that they don’t function as one in the movies they’re in (e.g., Annie Hall in Annie Hall or Summer in 500 Days of Summer), and at one point actual people (e.g. Zooey Deschanel) were being referred to as manic pixie dream girls, which is nonsensical because women who are quirky are clearly not sprung from the imaginations of sensitive writer-directors. 

All this to say, the term manic pixie dream girl is problematic, in that it was extrapolated to mean much more than it was ever intended to mean, much like the Bechdel test. Its only real purpose is to offer a means of examining a trend in film which mirrors an aspect of our culture which deserves criticism. In the case of the MPDG, the cultural issue is that men, in general, tend to see women as useful only for what they can do for them, and fail to see women as fully realized people who have desires and objectives separate from them. Even if an MPDG was created without the intention to reinforce this cultural idea, it reinforces the idea both implicitly and explicitly by either presenting it without comment or even positively, or by failing to display women who are nuanced in the way that the men in the film are. Thus, the problem with MPDG is that it reinforces the idea that women have no agency and exist only to serve the needs of men, especially sensitive and depressed men.  

For these purposes, I would define MPDG, for the purposes of this essay and perhaps even criticism in general, as a trope which limits the purpose of a female character to helping a male character overcome his problems within the film, often characterized by their quirkiness and whimsical feminine nature. A woman who is quirky, whimsical, feminine, and even in love will therefore not be a MPDG if she has a meaningful purpose or intention outside of this that she pursues within the film. Conversely, if this intention is inferred to have either happened before the films start or after the film ends she is a MPDG, because her agency and purpose doesn’t exist within the film. By this metric, I would say that Sam is a manic pixie dream girl in the film Garden State, because outside of helping Andrew get over his mother’s death she not only serves no purpose in the film, she sees no development and pursues no other goals.  

I come from an acting and performance background, and within the theatrical community we identify agency within the narrative (action) differently from tasks performed within a narrative. If my character comes onstage or into frame and hands a letter to someone, that is not an action. It’s a task I perform, and it requires no acting; anyone off the street could perform the task well enough. Conversely if I pursue a tangible goal (an objective) onstage or in frame then I am performing an action. If I’m trying to convince someone to come with me so that I can save the one I love, then that’s an action. If I’m trying to convince someone to come with me because I have nothing better to do, then that’s not an action, because I have no tangible goal to pursue. I’m not acting, I’m simply performing tasks. Anyone off the street could do that. The task for actors therefore is to endow every task with a strong objective so that it can be action, and we will be acting, which gives nuance and dynamics and depth to the role we play. If we perform no actions, then we really have no role, we could as easily not be a character and do everything we do onstage. Critically, this can be used to examine whether a character has agency, or any actions to perform in pursuit of an objective.  

I would argue that Sam has no actions to perform (though Natalie Portman does pursue strong action within the film from her own acting work) because she has no individual objective or motivation to do what she does outside of Andrew’s needs. This can be seen in three scenes in particular: her second and final scenes in the film, and the scenes focusing on Mark getting Andrew’s mother’s ring back.

In the first scene I’m discussing (Sam’s second scene) we see Sam sitting in the parking lot. She gets him to give her a ride home and goes with him to his friend’s house because why not, and we later get introduced to her family. This scene is relevant to her manic pixie dream girl status because it establishes her condition at the start of the film. She’s a pathological liar, she has epilepsy (established by the helmet she has ready and confirmed later), she has an unorthodox but loving family and a lot of hamsters who die occasionally.  

This is all well and good, but it clearly establishes the first problem with the character: she has literally no problems. She has no issues to overcome or obstacles to face. Her life is fine, she isn’t realistically going to cure her lying or her epilepsy in this movie (and in fact doesn’t) so they can’t really be dramatic roadblocks, she has a job, she has a loving family, she’s pretty well adjusted for all the things that happen to her. She has zero room to grow as a character. One could perhaps make the argument that she might be looking for love, and a problem for her might be that her pathological lying and epilepsy make that hard for her. However, the film in no way establishes or supports this train of thought, which reinforces the idea that her purpose is not that of a character, but that of a trope.  

As an audience, we are supposed to recognize that this is a perfectly fine woman with no problems in her life, and the second we know that she’s single we decide that she must need love. She never says that love is missing in her life, she doesn’t actually stand to gain anything from a relationship in the abstract, and she has no reason to believe that she and Andrew are good for each other. They work out because the author wants them to work out; there isn’t any good reason for it. It’s sweet, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t give her any agency. It limits her purpose to their relationship because from the get go she’s given no problems to resolve in the film and therefore no room to grow. As a character, she sees no development, and that’s cemented from the second scene she’s in. 

The next relevant sequence is the sequence in which Andrew goes with Mark to get his mom’s ring. It’s significant mainly because Sam has absolutely no reason to be there and serves zero purpose until Andrew “defends” her and then again when Andrew kisses her. She has no relevant or purposeful lines, she doesn’t do anything, there’s zero motivation for her presence. She’s there all day because Andrew wants her there and that’s that. She has no dramatic purpose until she’s “defended” by him, which supports Andrew’s growth, not hers, and she doesn’t even initiate the kiss, she is kissed by Andrew when he, once again, develops as a character and experiences growth. She has no agency here, and she has no clear intentions or goals, she exists only to support Andrew.

The final scene of the film similarly shows how she is incapable of acting without Andrew. They begin with a parting scene, which is very sweet and emotional and also really drives home the fact that she has experienced zero growth in the course of this film by saying she’s still lying, because of course she is, it wouldn’t make sense for her not to be. Andrew leaves, and she is sad, which is again understandable and fine. I’m not criticizing the course of or intensity of their romance here, it’s acceptable and within Hollywood romance standards, and criticism of that is another thing entirely. The issue is in the fact that Andrew leaves, boards the plane, sits on the plane for at least several minutes, and runs back to Sam, and Sam has apparently been there crying in a phone booth since he left. Call that a movie conceit, let’s ignore the time that she would have to spend there to be crying from when he left to when he came back. It is literally insane that she spent the entire time crying alone instead of maybe going home, or even using the phone to call her family, or take a breath and reflect, or just stop crying honestly. The film is saying, with this sequence, that this character’s life is so empty and devoid of meaning without Andrew that she had literally nothing to do except sit there and cry until he returned. She had zero other goals to pursue, she didn’t have any lessons she learned, she didn’t think to talk to anyone she cared about, she just sat there inert until he came back to give her a reason for existing in this movie. She doesn’t even initiate the final kiss. You’d think that if you spent anywhere from minutes to half an hour sobbing over someone you love leaving, you’d be eager to kiss them if they came back for you. But she is so without agency, so incapable of taking action for herself, that Andrew has to move to kiss her before she can allow herself to be kissed. Sam is without doubt a manic pixie dream girl, not because she’s quirky and in love, but because she’s nothing else. 

I want to be clear in saying that I don’t necessarily think that Zach Braff is a sexist. I also want to say that there’s nothing wrong with a character being a trope. Without context, there’s nothing wrong with the MPDG trope. But within the context of a society that devalues women as a part of our culture, in every aspect of life, depicting women as tropes, specifically tropes that exist only to serve men, is a problem. Not every character in a film needs to have agency, because that’d be insane. We only need to focus on one or two (maybe up to five in extreme cases) characters at a time. But when the characters we focus on fall onto oppressive gender or racial lines, and when the tropes we use reinforce oppressive ideas, then even though you may mean well, or even mean nothing at all with you presentation, you may be causing problems with your work, which negatively affect the culture that you put them out into.