I can’t recall whether I have ever heard this expression before, but I doubt I’ll forget it now. ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’, a term coined by Nathan Rabin a few years ago after seeing Natalie Portman in Garden State (2004) and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (2005), popped up twice in my news feed this morning. First, Christopher Campbell looked at how Zooey Deschanel, who I adore, has come to embody this character type; he then listed ten MPDGs who were not played by Deschanel but, in his opinion, should have been (including, yes, the Portman character in Garden State and the Dunst character in Elizabethtown). And then, Glenn Kenny praised the Kristen Stewart character in Adventureland for not being the MPDG that she could oh-so-easily have been. If a third person had used the term this morning, we’d officially have a trend on our hands, but for now, these two citations will have to do.
