This post contains spoilers through the end of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Ah, the peril of Kindle indexes without page numbers. I didn’t realize how close we were to the end of the novel when I picked our section break last time. But Molly’s “Ruby Tuesday”-like departure does get me thinking about the character. Are the residents of Babylon correct? Is Molly something more than human, Steppin’ Razor, who brings “a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart”? And if so, can a deity be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl?

Molly is deliberately opaque about her past, and while the story about how she got her enhancements is undeniably traumatic, it reveals much more about the society she lives in than about Molly herself. As she tells Case:

“Surgeons went way in, that trip. Tricky. They must have disturbed the cut-out chip. I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. . . .” She dug her fingers deep in the foam. “Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren’t alone. She was all . . .” She tugged at the temperfoam. “Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ ’Cause we weren’t finished yet. . . .” She began to shake. “So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. “The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while.”

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I was talking to the awesome Chloe Angyal from Feministing a couple of weeks ago about how we need a more specific set of terms so people don’t use Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe all annoying female character tropes. One friendly person (if it’s you, holler and I’ll provide proper credit, I swear) on Twitter had suggested Paper Dolls for replaceable action starlets. Chloe came up with Insert Girl Here for the girlfriend the male lead dumps so he can fall for the lead woman, and Lesson on Legs for women who exist to provide the male lead with an important lesson before heading off to live the rest of their lives presumably in service of their own interests. In The New Girl, Zooey Deschanel is an archetypal Girltergeist, a character who despite her ephemerality manages to be impressively annoying. She would be a female Peeves if she seemed capable of intentionality.

The thing that’s frustrating about the character is that the show makes her seem stupid, rather than goofily endearing or unsocialized in a way that seems charming because it exposes social rituals as artificial and contrived. No grown-ass person thinks that humping a plant is a way to fulfill a stripper fantasy. It’s not actually charming to spend your first days in a new apartment crying loudly in common areas and totally hogging the TV without any consideration for your new roommates. Going up to someone in a bar and addressing them as “Hey, sailor,” is just weird. As is refusing to do as much as order a glass of wine to hold a table in a restaurant and instead asking if you can have more free things when you are an adult with a job. As is being spacey enough to burn your own hair off. None of these things expose anything about social rituals, or calcified senses of how women ought to behave. They’re just infantilizing and strange.

A long-term commenter suggested that I might like the show because of a scene where one of Jess’s new roommates, Nick, suggests that he can guide her back into the dating market, only to have her reply in a quaver, “Like Gandalf through Middle Earth?” Nick’s game, talking her through it and suggesting “First, let’s take the Lord of the Rings references, let’s put them in a deep, dark cave, where no one’s going to find them, ever.” Instead of laughing, blowing her nose, and returning to the world, Jess keeps going in that baby voice, telling Nick: “Except Smeagol. He lives in a cave.” If this is what nerd girls are supposed to be, people who dodge adult conversations by retreating further into fairyland, count me resolutely out. And it’s not like there’s any sign here that Jess is really a nerd, just that she watched the same couple of movies that all of us watched because hey, they’re awesome. This is nerd-pandering, and I have other options. I’m not so desperate for references to the nerd canon that I have to watch this to get some affirmation that Hollywood knows that I exist.
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Apparently, it’s romance day on the blog, because Adam Serwer has some interesting thoughts on Manic Pixie Dream Girls as ghostly projections of movie writers:

My theory is that the MPDG is a fantasy molded from the clay of an infinite number of adolescent rejections from the women of their youth. Precisely because the relationship never reaches the stage of genuine intimacy, the MPDG remains a two-dimensional projection of the desires of a guy who is progressive enough in gender matters to want a woman who is “interesting,” but not one that has an internal life of her own beyond the superficial qualities that made her “cool” and “not like other girls” to begin with.

Key to the MPDG is that the concept reflects the gender-based hostility of the nice guy. She frequently suffers from a form of (mental) illness, because this both proves that she needs the nice guy and shows why he has such a hard time acquiring her. Even if she’s not sick in some way, she is defined by some kind of glaring emotional vulnerability that makes her, in an abstract sense, a damsel in distress who needs rescue. Under the circumstances, the nice guy’s qualities become as heroic as he imagines them to be. She often suffers cinematically, because she refuses — like the unattainable women of the nice guy’s imagination — to recognize just how good for her he is.

He and I were talking about this a little bit a couple of days ago, and while I think it’s pretty clear why MPDGs are a fantasy for men, I also think the archetype has some utility for women. After decades of makeover scenes and unrealistic physical and behavioral expectations, there’s something kind of appealing about being told that the fantasy isn’t the Herve Leger bandage dress and the body that goes with it, it’s the quirky cardigan; that it’s not about having to fix yourself, it’s about someone else has to do the transformative work and all you have to do is help. I don’t necessarily think it’s a good trade, and I don’t actually think it makes for fully fleshed-out characters or exceptionally interesting movies, but I understand why it might feel worth it.

I liked this Racialicious piece on possible black models for Manic Pixie Dream Girls — there is something weird about the whiteness of that particular archetype, and the whiteness of the archetypal men who desire her. But I think it’s actually overly optimistic to assume that what makes a woman a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is actually her own qualities. I don’t know that a character is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl because she wears a certain kind of clothes, be they thrift-store duds and kinte cloth or tea dresses, that she’s good at idiosyncratic activities, like playing acoustic guitar or running turntables, or that she will hook you up with certain activities, be it backstage parties or playing house at Ikea. I’m not even sure that this is quite it: “If the notion is that Zooey Deschanel is an unreal amalgam of white male fantasies, female rappers like Nicki Minaj may offer that for Black males.” After all, the point isn’t really that Zooey Deschanel is a supermodel sex kitten — she’s an anime character, a pliable blank with eyes as big as movie screens, perfect for a certain kind of male character to project all sorts of ideas and emotions across. Why Manic Pixie Dream Girls like what they like, or self-present the way they present, or are the way they are, is never interesting to the movies or television shows that they’re in.

I’m all for the idea that we need more diverse images of black people, and of black couples, on our screens. The problem with Tyler Perry is not that he tells the same story over and over again — lots of stories told by white writers and directors, with white stars, are hugely derivative. But it matters a lot less if 90 percent of those movies with white casts and white writers and white directors and white producers are derivative when hundreds of those movies come out every year. It might be better if all of those movies were original and fascinating, but even if you get 20 fairly original, thought-provoking movies every year, that’s enough to keep most moviegoers fairly occupied, and a reasonable number of white actors in interesting work. But when Medicine for Melancholy, or Love Jones, is a once-every-couple-of-years event, you don’t get a chance to build and explore new archetypes across multiple works in the same way the Manic Pixie Dream Girl has come together in a relatively short amount of time. Instead, you’ve got the same manichean old struggles about class and righteousness. Which is to to say that how race is lived across class lines, or the role of the church, aren’t important to folks, but they’re not the only things that are important to all folks.

In any case, if we’re going to get more nerds of color, more quirky non-white people, on our screens, we should shoot for archetypes that actually focus on what it means to like different things than your peer group, or to conceive of beauty differently, or to mature before, or after, the people around you, rather than to turn those differences and uniquenesses as totems on someone else’s spirit quest. More Oscar Waos and fewer Zooey Deschanels.