6 Attempts To Deconstruct The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

2. Annie Hall

Sample Dialogue: "You know, you're so ego-centric that if I miss my therapy, you can only think of it in terms of how it affects you!" Probably the best known and most widely acclaimed example of both the MPDG archetype and an attempt at its deconstruction came decades before Rabin coined the term. The role of Annie Hall was written specifically for Diane Keaton ("Keaton" is a stage name for the actress, commonly nicknamed Annie, whose real surname is Hall) and she has admitted that the la-dee-da free spirit's character is a version of her own. Bearing that in mind, it's tempting to see the film dramatising Annie's relationship with Woody Allen's neurotic Jewish New York comedian Alvy as a way of Allen attempting to come to terms with their failed relationship in the real world as much as it is a wider attempt to talk about love, relationships, gender and psychology as a whole. Allen won Best Picture, Director and Screenplay Oscars, with Keaton picking up the Best Actress award, for a film that remains hugely acclaimed, endlessly quoted and analysed by film students, but it remains a story about Alvy, about how he perceives his connection with Annie, his attempts to figure her out and his ultimate disconnect from her worldview. For all that she is the title character, we never really get a sense of who Annie is in the way that we do with Alvy's endless self analysis. However autobiographical or not Annie Hall itself is, it does seem a little odd to place a great deal of value on the romantic insights of an actor-writer-director whose own romantic life is so troubled and demonstrates continued struggles properly to understand women.