Nathan Rabin, film critic and cultural agnostic, coined the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in 2007. It’s grown in popularity enough that the Nabokovian satirist and aspiring Russian Train Baron Patrick Rothfuss has this to say about himself:

So folks — at least certain folks residing in Wisconsin who read The A.V. Club — are aware of the phrase. It came originally from a piece entitled The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown from Rabin’s Year of Flops. It’s a year he spent cynically deconstructing films he viewed as beneath his stature. I won’t go into all of the details of the piece — I get physically angry reading it, to be frank; I can taste cortisol and adrenaline — but I’ll quote the main part in question:

Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example). The Manic Pixie Dream Girl 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. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family. As for me, well, let’s just say I’m not going to propose to Dunst’s psychotically chipper waitress in the sky any time soon.

Elizabethtown shows what happens when a gifted writer-director lets his big ol’ heart do his brain’s work for him.

— Nathan Rabin, The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown

The assumption, of course, is that this person — the Manic Pixie Dream Girl — does not actually exist.

But if we deconstruct Rabin’s life in the way Rabin deconstructed Cameron Crowe’s, we find his cynicisms rather tinny and thin. (In fact, potentially the very subject of a future post on the naiveté of cynicism). Nathan Rabin, according to the internet archive, grew up on the Northside of Chicago. He then got lucky with a job in Madison.

Look.

I don’t blame him for his experience. And I’m not mad at everyone in Chicago, though as the author of Bell Hammers, you might suspect otherwise about me. I love Chicago. My step-dad’s from Chicago. I’m honestly, secretly, more partial to the Cubs than the Cards and have been enchanted by their (once) almost infinite losing streak. My buddy Corey lives there, other friends. I visited as often as I could.

But a blindness does exist from a kind of person who grew up in cities and only lives in cities, especially large global cities boasting something like… oh Chicago population on up towards something bigger and taller like, you know, Brooklyn. Some of those guys end up thinking they know everything about country life. Some of them assume they know nothing, find a spare copy of the Ohio traveler’s guide in some giveaway box on 45th street, and stand up quarter to lunch at their office near Grand Central to declare, “TODAY’S READING FROM THE BOOK OF THE OHIO TRAVELER’S GUIDE—”

It’s a posture thing. That same posture of humility wouldn’t say a phrase like “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family,” because few — almost no — propositions are all-or-nothing in practice. Consider the ultimate proposition: that of the existence of God. It should be simple: He either exists (theism) or does not (atheism). And yet we have agnostics and secular humanists. Do those lifestyles make rational sense? Seldom, but they do make a sort of emotional sense. And it’s the same with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: some people could take or leave her, they really don’t feel as passionate as Rabin and I. That humble allows them to read from a spare copy of the Ohio traveler’s guide. Again, it’s a posture thing.

And Rabin don’t have it. And it’s why he misunderstands the manic pixie dream girl as a person.

Because when I read this to my bride before bed, she laughed.

I asked, “What’s funny?”

She looked at me and smirked.

I said, “Yeah, I know that girl too.”

And here’s the thing. In thirty seconds, she and I listed twelve of them from Southeast Missouri, Southwest Missouri, Northwest Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Southern Illinois, Western Tennessee, Southern Indiana. Yes, some were manic and needed serious mental care. Most weren’t. Most were quite fine. They just seemed manic to people like Rabin when they were little more than passionately sincere.

Of those most, hardly any of them needed a man. Several were single. Several were single permanently. A couple were lesbians.

Many were quite innocent, many got married as virgins (though some were borderline nymphomaniac), many dabbled in art or protest or the sort of super crunchy vegan lifestyle that camps on rock banks under the stars. All of them had a cuteness about them (so I suppose the “pixie” part fits?), none of them I would categorize as “ditzy.” And dream-girl only really fits if you consider her someone you meet in your actual dreams. Someone you meet in Somnolory of the Vale Megacosm.

Not unlike a certain girl from a certain Chesterton play who gets her faerie heart broken by a summoner of demons.

What seems to be happening is Rabin knows no one like this from the country side of the equation. He didn’t grow up in the country and so doesn’t know country folk who raise up a smart kid that goes to an urban center as the first generation college attender and, upon returning home, realizes that there are still sweet girls out there who, though not naïve, have a softness to them that allows them to flit from disaster to disaster. A girl that might — sans cynicism — actually have the ferry boat for the Styx. When I shared this post originally with a Jewish friend here in the city (chevra Torah study leader and son of a Rabbi, no less), this Columbia mythology and comp religions grad said, “Oooooh MPDG as psychopomp: I love it.”

Yes indeed. Psychopomp indeed.

Some of the real ones in our world — and, contra Rabin, I maintain they are quite real — do triage at major hospitals, some wait tables, some tried and failed at acting careers, some surf, some camp, some ride ATVs and hunt coons, some farm, some ride horses, some bring home bigger bucks than their engineering farmer husbands, some machine parts out of their garage, some crop dust, some break horses. All of them, for one reason or another, do not need city boys like Nathan Rabin or folks like me that went to college and moved to NYC. And they won’t necessarily complete us either, even though their looks and personality profile fit his type, the type that… well in his own words, “I’m not going to propose to Dunst’s psychotically chipper waitress in the sky any time soon.” It’s because he thinks she doesn’t exist outside of b-cluster personality disorders. Here’s the thing: having lived in NYC for awhile, that actually might be true in the city. The city makes you hard and if it’s hard enough to make you break, perhaps the only truly joyful people are nuts. Maybe? I can see his pseudo-logic turning, anyways, the one that put the manic in Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The kind of cynicism that founded the A.V. Club.

And yet.

It’s okay for Nathan Rabin to be naive. City guys are naive too. What’s in poor taste is to then look down your nose from your domain expertise at the domain expertise of another and dismiss it as a “trope.” Or rather to name it a “trope” and so dismiss it: subversion is not the only way to be true. You know what’s the most boring trope of our days? Sunlight (moonlight is sunlight, remember). Try one day on Earth without a sun, however trope-ridden: any story featuring a world without a sun (including my own 00:08:23) simply makes this point by contrast.

Sunlight is. Sometimes unicorns, simply, are. It’s for cynics like Rabin who have never considered certain black swan events in history that meticulously researched and yet to be disproven tomes by certain Oxford dons exist. In my experience, that kind of city guy hasn’t come across country words that come from crafts — words like anticor, stillicide, ductility, pomace, noils, worsted, crib biting, chatoyance, spalting, zanfirico, incalmo, battledore, ard, coppicing. The list goes on and on, hundreds of words per craft, hundreds of crafts per hyper-local countryside. Maybe Rabin knew all of those words, but in my experience there’s an ignorance in the city of rural vocabulary. Vice versa, sure.

Best not be proud. Why?

Because what’s really happening here is that Rabin cannot conceive of a world in which Crowe calls forth the manic pixie dream girl sincerely, not to complete him, the moody writer, nor his analogue in the character, but rather to show him the way of the recovery of innocence on the far end of experience. Psychopomp, little more: the host leading one into the land of the dead, not Death himself. And Rabin seems primed for the recovery of innocence on the far end of experience. She’s not Aphrodite or some nymph. She’s Ariadne helping Theseus through the labyrinth. She doesn’t complete him at all. She shows him the way towards what will.

That’s a key difference.

Because Elizabethtown isn’t a romantic comedy.

It’s a eucatostrophic fairy tale. And without that key piece of insight connected to at least one major cultural hook to help you understand Crowe is subverting Paula Dean with Paula Dean, you will not get it.

Unless you’ve been at your own father’s funeral and the jack that lowers the casket breaks, you won’t get it.

Unless your cousin has three nipples.

Unless everyone in your tiny po-dunk town thinks you’re a hero and you still think you’re a fiasco.

I live in NYC now. It’s hard to feel anything but anonymous and unknown. It’s great for the death of the ego in a lot of ways. Except, of course, for the folks who make it to the top of their industry here. For folks like Colbert, where then do they move to grow?

I remember watching the film with two guys from Southern Illinois and one guy from Southwest Missouri. Smart guys. Critical or at least aware. One lives in Tokyo now, one in Phoenix, one here in NYC. All four of us, for various reasons, were far away from home going to college. In my case, the first person in living memory to go to college in his family. And we all cried so hard we wept in that film. It moved us to tears at both ends of the emotional spectrum.

And none of us — one a freshman in college, two sophomores — left that film thinking, “I want a girl like Kirsten Dunst.” At least of the two that hinted at that, they didn’t say that primarily. That wasn’t the focus at all.

We left thinking, “When the time comes for my father to die, I want to have lived well.”

Rather than go asking girls out, we all reconnected with our parents. I called my dad almost immediately after.

I tried showing this film to my brother, who still lives in Southern Illinois. He hates it. I’ve showed it to city boys, they tend to hate it.

It’s a film for a very specific cross section of society:

1. Men
2. Who left the country
3. For the city
4. And lost their fathers or mothers

These folk get it.

And when they come home to people like my sister, who is herself a manic pixie dream girl, they realize that these women don’t complete them. Rather these women point the way to ride that border between the urban and the rural: the recovery of innocence on the far end of experience.

Especially the year their father died.

Mine did in 2021. I watched the film shortly after burying him.

And I wept at completely different parts. I watched it with my mother and grandma. They were like, “It’s fine.” City folk here said, “It’s fine.” I didn’t think, “Man I wish my wife were more like Claire from Elizabethtown.” I didn’t see the manic pixie dream girl at all. Rather I used the character as a means to see:

This is how you bury your dad after you’ve given up everything to move to the city and stay there a decade through hurricane and through COVID and everything between.

You know who I called?

My buddy who watched the original release of Elizabethtown with me in theaters. He lives in NYC now, pursuing a law degree. His mother died a month after my father died. And there was a resonance we shared from the same experience. He’d recently broken up with a manic pixie dream girl, I’d married mine. Neither were present. Just he and I under the black southern Illinois sky digging for photos of my son — the one my father would never meet — I’d forgotten at the hotel.

What was present was this mutual grief of belonging both nowhere and everywhere and losing the deepest root in the country for a city that didn’t understand.

This is how you bury your father everywhere and nowhere.

That’s what she teaches us, the masters of both worlds.

It’s also interesting that Rabin wrote in that now-archived piece that as a freshman in high school he learned “it wasn’t enough to just have an argument you have to support it, you have to build it.” And yet he just throws this concept out there that he later… sort of… fills in a year later in a glorified listicle. That’s all that is, for the record, a paragraph and a list of sixteen “examples.” Hardly the work of a thesis.

Whatever, his shiny unicorn I suppose. I’m glad he invented a term: at least it’s poetry. Doesn’t mean I have to agree with the poet, agree with his vision once I’ve seen what he sees.

He seems rather blind to me.

You and I know the manic pixie dream girl exists. She’s not always — in fact, not often — that psychologically damaged.

And you and I know she’s not there to complete Nathan Rabin, assuming she’d ever accept his proposal if he saw the light. She won’t: he’d likely put the pomace on the spalting, think combing the noils would fix the anticor through some sympathetic magic, and use an ard to start the coppicing. God help us if he ever used the battledore to test the ductility or, worse, stop the crib biting.

She’s not there for Rabin. Or the writer; the audience; or necessarily even the character.

She’s there as a threshold guardian between life and death.

To return to Rothfuss, where we began, it may well be that the Manic Pixie Dream Hobo litters his work with Manic Pixie Dream Girls in order to subvert the trope. Devi’s legitimately insane. Auri may be, but may also be Fae. Denna’s almost certainly fae, clearly both innocent and not, clearly a key. Obviously, Felurian’s a fairy. Vashet is no faerie (I don’t think), but is certainly a type of rah-rah dream girl feminism fettish. In fact, in a book full of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, Fela seems to be the only one that ultimately fits the trope. Curiously, she’s the only one that isn’t trying to subvert it.

The rest, literally and figuratively, stand as threshold guardians between life and death. Manic Pixie Dream Girls as psychopomp, as my Jewish friend said.

And some are downright pixies.

All of them, more or less, seem to me to be country girls.

Except the truly manic one, Devi. She’s a city kind of crazy.

The one Nathan Rabin’s scared to marry and projects onto all of the Manic Pixie Dream Girls you’ve actually met.

Nevermind Devi. And nevermind the trauma of Devi projected onto real MPDGs. When the time comes for my father to die, I want to have lived well.

He has.

So have I.

Thanks to a psycho.

Pomp.

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PS — Cameron Crowe, if you ever by some weird twist of fate read this piece, thank you for Elizabethtown. You gave me a powerful gift that I’ve watched more than any other film in my life. More than Vertigo, Memento, Babette’s Feast, Lord of the Rings, Wizard of Oz, and the original King Kong combined. I used to blush at this, but I don’t anymore. Those from the region who moved away get it. Everyone else is just ignorant about what it takes to relocate to an urban center form Appalachia, cynical about small towns, or hasn’t yet lost their father.

I owe you a full analysis of Elizabethtown someday. I have never really thought about it intellectually, but that film makes me weep every time. I’ll do it.