The term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ has been arguably overused since its initial invention in Nathan Rabin’s “My Year of Flops,” where the critic first coined the term in his review of Cameron Crowe’s “Elizabethtown” (2005) in reference to the film’s main female character, Kirsten Dunst’s Claire Colburn. The tag was created to categorize a specific type of female character, usually written by a man, who is only present to serve the purpose of the main male character’s story. This classification was, essentially, a plea for better fictional women — women with their own stories and agency — and gave a word to an archetype that had long dominated female characters in film.
Since then, the concept has become a marketing tool, something desirable in a female character despite it being, by definition, a negative trope borne of misogyny. And yet, through characters like Summer (“500 Days of Summer”), Ramona Flowers (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) and Penny Lane (“Almost Famous”) the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) has taken on a whimsical, derivative and derogatory life of her own in the two decades following her categorization. But the MPDG was not invented in 2005. She came into being about sixty years previously, in the then newly invented genre of the screwball comedy.
Screwball comedies are an absolute institution of a film genre. Arising in the 1930s, they collectively represented multiple instances of women having agency in film. The principal function of a screwball comedy presents the main female character as a source of chaos and disruption who becomes the driving force of the story, which usually incorporates a romance between her and the disgruntled male main character. Screwball girls were the first MPDGs and it’s not even close.
They bring the male main character out of his usual routine and into a magical world of danger and adventure, serving only to move his story along. While this may seem misogynistic in the modern day — and it very much is, as it presents women as creatures of pure emotion without capacity for reason and perpetuates stereotypes of hysteria and irresponsibility — at the time, it was liberating.
The fact that women were allowed to do anything to move the plot along in a movie was absolutely radical to the point where the ends justified the means, no matter what. Women were just so relieved to have any agency at all in a film, so screwball comedies can be, looking back, hailed as feminist masterpieces for the time. Especially in the post-World War Two period of American history, when the very concept of women’s autonomy was…in question, shall we say. While screwball girls may have been derivative stereotypes, they were also a huge step in the right direction in terms of female representation in Hollywood.
This brings us to “The Philadelphia Story” which, while undeniably a screwball comedy, is one that manages to subvert its own tropes before we even knew what to call them. Katharine Hepburn, who could be considered an original MPDG for her role in “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), plays Tracy Lord, an imperious woman who is getting remarried after divorcing her previous husband, Cary Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven. Her wedding comes under scrutiny and, through threat of blackmail to her father, she agrees to let reporter Macaulay Connor, played by James Stewart, write a piece on the event. Antics ensue, regarding a love triangle, a second husband who is strangely uninvolved in the proceedings, mistaken identities and the struggles of romance.
Tracy Lord has every man in this movie wrapped around her little finger in one way or another. Her strange personality and romantic inclinations are the chaotic driving forces of the movie, to be sure, but she isn’t a typical MPDG by any means. What sets her and this story apart from other screwball narratives is her maturity.
Most MPDGs are, in fact, grown women written to act childish as a way of endearing them to the audience and making them nonthreatening to men, while also perpetuating the idea that childishness is desirable in women. Tracy Lord is not any of these things. She is actively smarter than everyone around her and is known to be cold and forbidding. She may play with people’s romantic lives and flit about her house doing as she pleases, but she possesses a sort of self awareness that MPDGs are almost never entitled to because, despite critical claims to the contrary, they are not meant to be the main characters of the stories they inhabit — they are props, plot devices given physical form and bubbly voices.
Tracy Lord is nobody’s plot device. She is angry. She is imperious and cold. She is scared. She is kind but unforgiving. Her own father tells her she is heartless. While the original premise of “The Philadelphia Story” reads like a typical silly screwball, the reality of the premise sets in very quickly. In fact, “The Philadelphia Story” is one of the only screwball comedies to actually deal with the real world repercussions of its plot points.
While Tracy is introduced to Macaulay Connor and Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) as a strange, whimsical creature, the movie goes on to reveal a sad, scared woman underneath the frivolous exterior. The premise may be silly (and the movie is fun) but in dealing with the realities of its characters and giving Tracy Lord her own agency and personality outside of the men in her life, “The Philadelphia Story” marks a huge step forward in feminist film.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl was invented for men and has since devolved into even more of a derogatory archetype than it was when it began. But at the time of its invention, it was a feminist miracle, allowing women agency on the screen that they weren’t allowed in their own lives. While we can look down on the MPDG now, it is important to remember the role they played in film history, while also keeping in mind the stereotypes they inhabit.
In terms of Tracy Lord specifically, I believe she is deserving of the term Manic Pixie Dream Woman, because she has all the hallmark characteristics of a typical MPDG, but she has her own beliefs, opinions and struggles. She’s allowed to be an adult with adult problems. To put it simply, Tracy Lord is allowed to be a mess. And that’s more important for women in film than most people realize.
“The Philadelphia Story” screens in the Centennial Film Series on August 11 at 7 p.m. at the Fargo Theatre. Tickets are $7 and will be available at the door.
