I’m writing this bog post at 7:09 on a Thursday morning because I frankly think it’s the only way I’ll get to sleep, and I’m not even sure if I will afterwards, which kind of sucks. I didn’t sleep much last night, I didn’t cry, as much of the day lead me to believe, I just stared at a wall and tried to be placid.
But the moment I woke up, the first thought in my head, was “I am not Natalie Portman.”
To understand this comment, I must take you back a few months, to sometime between February and March. My friend’s kitchen, with a beer, a half bottle of wine, and another half beer, all in my system. I also had about half a pizza in me, but that does not matter. 2 beers and I’m already well on my way to some sort of alcoholic destruction.
I was drinking because I was upset, and I was with friends, one of which was a mean drunk, one who wasn’t drunk, and one who was kind of sadly writing in a notebook. I was texting a guy I like, when suddenly, I stopped, looked around, and in a lance of pain and sorrow, screamed in that small kitchen. “I AM NOT NATALIE PORTMAN!”
When drunk, I have the uncanny ability of being very coherent, but just making no sense. I then proceeded to tell my confused drunk cohorts over and over, as I drove myself to near insanity with sadness, that I was in fact, not Natalie Portman. I was Meg Leach. And this was a problem, because I didn’t want to be Natalie Portman.
As my friends started to console me, I went further into my nonsensical, upset panic, by saying that I WAS Natalie Portman, just not as cute or amusing, not as endearing, or especially cute. I have about 9 inches on Natalie Portman. I was telling my friends how I didn’t want to take some guy to a junkyard to scream, or that I’d never meet Zach Braff at a party and sit by a fire and ask him if he wanted to see me tap dance, because I don’t know HOW to tap dance.
For those playing at home. In my maddened, alcoholic, miserable state, I recounted the major parts of Garden State, where Natalie Portman is a specimen of rom-com fixture called a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Something that is described to be fictitious in today’s world as a real kind of person.
False. I am a manic pixie dream girl, and for those who don’t know, I’ll put some links about the discussion at the end of this post.
But for the sake of being able to write this post, and so that you can follow, a manic pixie dream girl, is an unfalteringly happy, bouncy, fixing girl. She bounds into the life of a sad boy and makes the romantic comedy happen. She fixes things because she is spontaneous, really not bound by the emotional constraints of others. She’s a chipper, pleasant, and her happiness…fixes the main character, the sad boy.
And from the moment that I heard about it, I knew, that was me. With or without the sad boy, there is something about “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” That is just…me.
And in that drunken moment, I realized that I was a fixer, and I was Natalie Portman. But fixers didn’t get a happy ending, Manic pixie dream girls didn’t get fixed, they didn’t have a happy ending, they simply moved about and fix. Natalie Portman never had her wedding at the end of these rom-coms she did. In real life, yes, but in the movies, she didn’t. It may have been implied, but as someone who lives in a shallow life, I didn’t want to believe it unless they showed it.
I woke up this morning and looked at the bunk bed above my head and muttered “I am not Natalie Portman.” But it feels that I say it because I don’t’ want to admit it, I cling to the idea that if I am not Natalie Portman, I will have a happy ending, and avoid the endless cycle of falling for fixes, who get fixed, and in their fixedness, move on, and have happy lives, leaving an irreparably broken girl behind to bound through life in wanderlust.
I want my happy ending, because what the critics call a shallow, cinematic creature in the movies, is actually an irreparably sad girl, who uses her own quirkiness to cheer herself up. An irreparably broken character, which the critics don’t understand or acknowledge because it’s not shown. But, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl becomes a fixer, who pushes away those who try to fix her.
Being Irreparably broken as a person, albeit deceptively so, is a key to being a manic pixie dream girl…it’s not shallow, it’s not something that doesn’t exist outside the movies…it’s real people, who are weird, who love forever, who are as they are because they’re partially afraid to be themselves, broken. They’re lovers, hiders, and weirdos.
And that love is a real big part of it. They fall in love, and when they are passed over, they hurt, and they break, they crack a little bit more than they are already cracked…but they still love. They bury their dead and move on, but never really do. It’s all part of that strangely permanent facade…where a life becomes a collage of pain, turned into a beautiful painting of happiness. Pain is a motivator to love more, to live more, and be more. I think we are seen as fictitious not because we are, but because we seem to react to pain fleetingly. Intense for a moment, but then, it is just a motivator to live, to love, to smile and to be what makes a manic pixie dream girl, what she is.
And although I don’t want to be, although I don’t want to be Natalie Portman, it’s something that I realized on the floor of my friend’s kitchen, and something I realized this morning. I don’t think its’ something to be fixed, or something wrong. It just is. I am afraid to live, so I hyper-live, and I take people with me. And sometimes, they feel better, and less broken.
I’ll never tap dance in front of a fireplace for Zach Braff, because I don’t know how to tap dance. But I teach people how to hyper-live. And maybe it’s not so bad, being a 5’9” Natalie Portman…It’s not something to be sad about. It just is.
Wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manic_Pixie_Dream_Girl
TV Tropes- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManicPixieDreamGirl
February 7, 2012 at 12:35 am |
I hear you.
Just when I thought I was finally self-realized and unique, my guitarist called me Kate Winslet from Eternal Sunshine. And then my ex-boyfriend solidified it all by calling me a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I looked it up and was crushed.
I will probably save lots of passive, brooding boys who are aching for intensity, but I will disappear before they have a chance to see through me and figure out I have nothing put together.
In the meantime, I will play my ukulele at stoplights and whisper conspiratorially to new acquaintances and wear flowers in my hair and never match my socks or remember to pay my utility bill on time. I will kiss you like I know the password to stop time, I will orgasm like your touch has unlocked my spirit, I will smile like I’ve learned your soul and get distracted by some novelty without letting go of my new knowledge.
I’ll get my fix of intensity over and over again, find a reason to be joyful countless times throughout the day, and probably end up alone because as soon as I am no longer a concept, they’ll get bored of me, and I just can’t let that happen, y’know?
I just can’t let that happen.
Must disappear before I go and spoil the illusion.
You know?
February 8, 2012 at 6:04 am |
Loyal til the day you die, to the boys who have cast you aside for safer options, for options that aren’t damaged, that aren’t broken. Knowing you hurt for them, and only them, and you’d bleed and fight and sacrifice every moment…because you’re a fixer, and they hurt…
I realized I was a manic pixie during a class on comic book culture. A friend said “Hey Meg! I think that’s you!” At the time, I took pride in it, because I didn’t realize what it meant for a romantic life. I didn’t realize that I would be a fixer, I thought that it meant I was amusing and charismatic (something that social anxiety dictated I could NOT be, when I was a kid.) I later learned that this status was a side effect from social anxiety.
One thing that I always noticed was how important sad boy was for me…how I could memorize every inch of his body and still want to explore more. You can touch with gentle touches that feel like butterfly wings…you remember every bit of them, every breath, every collapse of their chest. Touch was always extremely important to me.
He never thought I was boring, he thought that I was too confusing, I wasn’t simple enough. I was always up to something, I was always trying to scheme,trying to build, or tear something down. I’d get drunk and climb trees and he always had to ensure my bones weren’t broken. He wanted something safer…But everyone wants that.
So you live your faerie life and you climb the tallest trees and look out on the world and say something oddly poetic, to get attention, then you slip away. They can never see you break.
Even though they’ve done it a million times with every time you’re cast aside after their fixed.