Somersault Magazine Vol. 1/Issue 1

fictional or no, are treated and considered in Western culture.

One of the embedded rejections held within the backlash to characters lumped into the Manic Pixie category is a rejection of the female audience to which these movies, these Cameron Crowe romances and these hipster love playlist flicks, are directed. How many Manic Pixies have existed outside of what might be unkindly or carelessly termed, the "chick flick" genre? If a narrative has been crafted for a female audience, it is automatically inferior in its literary and aesthetic qualities. It is not the same to criticize the small scope of film types that are marketed to women as women's narratives, as it is to reject female or feminine stories as second-class in nature. Critics do not do women a service by treating such creative product as unworthy of attention.

This gets worse the closer one gets to pop culture narrative marketed to teenage girls, who have become the cultural red flag for shallowness and poor taste, and unnecessarily and cruelly so.

To so broadly categorize this type of female character is itself an erasure, a reduction, of all the possibility that character holds, to all that we should defend about these women who are silenced under the gaze of the critics, the audience, the creators, their fellow characters. What we should reject with broad stroke is not these women, but the traditionality, the male-centrism of contemporary, mainstream Western film that stifles creative female characters or treats them as secondary. Generalizations like these allow us to dismiss the place of supporting role female characters and the actresses who take those roles, and to ignore the places where they have potential, where they have interest value, creativity and strength and where they differ from one another. Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's is certainly a quirky ne'er-do-well girl who's had a cinematically sanitized onscreen life and whose presence in the storyline of Paul changes his writerly life for the better. She's also a fairly independent-minded person whose storyline is an interesting narrative of class-meets-gender, with an interesting examination of the phony, unsatisfactory version of exploited success she has crafted for herself. And she is certainly not the secondary or supporting role character in the film. Her inclusion in the MPDG critical lens, however, treats her character as one of a group seen as small, mindless, and relatively interchangeable.

This is not to say there aren't plenty of things wrong with this film (most notably the horribly racist depiction of the Asian neighbor by Mickey Rooney), but that the character made so famous by Audrey Hepburn is deserving of individualized consideration, not as part of a host of poorly-thought-of female characters.

Another careless aspect of the creation of the MPDG critical construct is the use of the term manic, a word choice that immediately casts judgment upon mental health.

One of the places where patriarchal constructs have served to do contemporary women the greatest harm is through the inclusion of sexism and misogyny and heteronormativity in the medical field. By titling these characters manic, critics venture into pop psychology, diagnosing certain expressions of femininity as mentally undone, December 2012 ♌ 36