Manic Pixie Dream Girl…Interrupted

Gabi Hoffman and Jenny Slate in ‘Obvious Child’

Obvious Child and the death of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Hey Zooey Deschanel: your time is up.*

Or rather, it is my fervent hope that the era of the manic pixie dream girl is coming to a close.

Which is not to say that the MPDG wasn’t a stepping stone in the humanizing of the female archetype in Hollywood. Basically, in old Hollywood, some women were crazy and damaged; other women were caretakers. Then came the MPDGs: crazy, and damaged, but also charming, and there to take care of you in ways you didn’t know you needed, a little like a rolfer.

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What Happened, Sarah Waters?

Has everyone’s favorite gothic lesbian author lost her mojo?

Once upon a time, I wrote a writer’s love letter to Sarah Waters. It was terribly overwrought. “You have rewritten the past with me in it,” I gushed. Perhaps that wasn’t quite true; after all, I wouldn’t last an hour as a rent boy in London in 1890. But Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were queer answers to the books I

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