6 Attempts To Deconstruct The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

6. Paper Towns

Sample Dialogue: "The fundamental mistake I had always made€”and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make€”was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl." Lead actress Cara Delevingne drummed up some extra attention for the film recently when responding with appropriate sarcasm to a breakfast TV interviewer asking if she'd actually read the source novel by vlogger/Fault In Our Stars writer John Green. Judging by the movie's trailers, though, it would seem like the question would be more appropriately directed towards the studio's marketing team. Of course it's possible that the Fox marketing people want audiences to think that they're getting a conventional MPDG story in order to create a level of cognitive dissonance in the audience when it reveals itself to contradict that, but it feels more likely that they just see the simpler conceit as an easier sell. Perhaps this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise given the large numbers of both fans and critics of the novel who see the character of Margo, hero Quentin's quirky neighbour who suddenly appears back in his life climbing through his window and then disappears seemingly leaving some equally quirky clues for him to follow, as a prime example of the archetype. (And this is regardless of the fact that the whole point of the story is that people projecting such ideas onto her is precisely what Margo is running away from). Delevingne, the bisexual supermodel turned comic book movie villain, is probably used to the raft of male assumptions projected onto her based on the variety of associations that come from those various identities, making her pretty perfect casting for a character who is basically made up of other people's ideas of how she should behave. Ultimately, though, this is kind of the problem with Margo. While she rebels against being pigeonholed as an MPDG and Quentin sort of learns his lesson about viewing girls as people too, she doesn't actually get much of an alternative personality and the story really remains all about him.