Last year a friend sent me an article that gave a label to an irritating female archetype that has been surfacing in mainstream films. We'd been discussing another cheesy male characterisation of a specific 'type' of girl. That's the creative, 'kooky' yet pretty love interest of characters played by Zach Braff or Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
She is always dressed in something vintage, something considered 'alternative' in Hollywood, perhaps channels a little bit of emo, and reminds us of Claire Danes in My So-Called Life. Think every character that Zooey Deschanel has ever played.
Most female archetypes are annoying to women who might consider themselves remotely feminist. In terms of films, how far have we moved on from the Madonna/whore paradigm?
Now, besides the sexy bombshell who tends to dress like a stripper at all hours of the day, or the blonde girlfriend who wears more pastel twin sets and floral prints than is healthy, we are confronted with the 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl'.
The term was coined by film critic Nathin Rabin, describing Kirsten Dunst, who plays the ditsy love interest to Orlando Bloom's sensitive soul in Elizabethtown. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is the potential girlfriend to a brooding, awkward, sensitive man-child. She appears in implausible stories in which the geek really gets the pretty girl (and her dodgy cardigans).
Deschanel is the reigning princess of Manic Pixie Dreaming. But such actresses as Winona Ryder, Dunst, Amy Adams and even Natalie Portman (remember Garden State?) have been cast in that way.