6 Attempts To Deconstruct The Manic Pixie Dream Girl
4. (500) Days Of Summer
Sample Dialogue: "This is a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Tom Hansen of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he'd never truly be happy until the day he met the one. This belief stemmed from early exposure to sad British pop music and a total mis-reading of the movie 'The Graduate'. The girl, Summer Finn of Shinnecock, Michigan, did not share this belief." Created to be an antidote to typical romcoms, (500) Days Of Summer explicitly sets out from the start to tell a story of what happens when its hero, Tom, has a view of romance entirely developed from watching movies and tries to project those ideas onto a real woman. It shows how Tom expects the eponymous Summer to be the MPDG that will bring him to life and how hard she tries to resist it. Unfortunately, perhaps more than any other movie on this list (all of which suffer from this problem), the film's fanbase is primarily made up of people who not only root for Tom and Summer to end up together, but really support Tom's misguided worldview. But I guess this is hardly surprising, since obviously the people watching are themselves movie fans whose opinions have been formed as much by the movies Tom loves as his have. In fact, even though it sets out its stall pretty directly from the opening narration, Marc Webb's film is constantly undermining its cynical message by proving far more adept when it's being a straight up example of the charming, quirky indie romance than it is when being much more ambitious and trying to subvert it. (In a similar way to how Webb's two Amazing Spider-Man films were full of charming romantic chemistry and utterly devoid of interesting superhero action). At the end of the day, the director might be better off reeling in his ambitions and just making a good old fashioned romcom. Of course, it doesn't help that casting Zooey Deschanel, practically the patron saint of Manic Pixie Dream Girls, as Summer may have seemed like a decision that would help the film's subversion of the archetype, but actually only serves to bring out those qualities in the audience's mind rather than her more cynical ones.
