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(500) Days of Summer: Indulging and Subverting the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Madison Correia

Arizona State University

COM 323: Communication Approaches to Popular Culture

Professor Hawn

December 3, 2021
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(500) Days of Summer: Indulging and Subverting the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

For this paper, I decided to examine the movie (500) Days of Summer, not only because

it’s one of my favorite movies but because it is a perfect artifact to ground the analysis of the

“Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope. (500) Days of Summer falls in the indie film genre, which is a

breeding ground for these Manic Pixie Dream Girls. It was in 2007 that this unique term was

coined by film critic Nathan Rabin to describe “a nascent filmic female trope as “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”” (Rodriguez, 2018). Essentially, these Manic Pixie Dream Girls are to indie films as

“fridged” women are to comic books, shallow plot devices to the benefit of their male

counterparts. Yet, (500) Days of Summer’s use of the trope isn’t so black and white, which is

what makes the film all the more interesting.

Description of Artifact

(500 Days of Summer) is a 2009 American indie film directed by Marc Webb. It doesn’t

have a clear genre, but can fall under Drama, Romance, and Comedy. The film is full of irony

and satire, and it doesn’t make any efforts to hide it. Prior to the opening credits, the narrator

warns the audience, saying “This is a story of boy meets girl. You should know up front this is

not a love story” (Webb, 2009). The boy, and main character, is Tom Hansen. The story is shown

from Tom’s point of view yet is being narrated by an anonymous disembodied voice. Tom is a

greeting card writer living in San Francisco. He’s introduced as “[growing] up believing that

he’d never truly be happy until the day he met his... “soulmate.” This belief stemmed from early

exposure to sad British pop music and a total misreading of the movie, The Graduate” (Webb,

2009). Thus, he’s introduced as a hopeless romantic to a fault. Next introduced is the girl,
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Summer Finn. Summer doesn’t share Tom’s belief in soulmates, and “since the disintegration of

her parents’ marriage, she’d only loved two things. The first was her long black hair. The second

was how easily she could cut it off... And feel nothing.” (Webb, 2009). Thus, Summer is

introduced in juxtaposition to Tom. She doesn’t believe in love and often hides her emotions. In

fact, she seems bitter and angry about love. Summer will be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of the

film. Summer and Tom meet when Summer gets a job in Tom’s office. For Tom, it’s love at first

sight: “In an instant, he will know she’s the one he’s been looking for” (Webb, 2009).

Tom and Summer’s relationship is represented in days, and a counter on the screen

corresponds with how long they’ve known each other. The numbers also correspond with a

season, which is a metaphorical representation of how well their relationship is doing. Their

relationship essentially begins in Tom’s head before he’s even talked to her. Their interactions

begin with awkward elevator banter and chatting at office parties, but the romantic tension grows

and one day Summer unexpectedly kisses Tom in the copy room of the office. They begin to, in

Tom’s eyes, date, but Summer makes it clear that she isn’t looking for anything serious. Tom still

views them as a couple, though.

As their relationship continues, their metaphorical season changes from spring to summer

and finally to winter. As their winter draws closer, their relationship begins to fall apart. Summer

becomes less and less interested in Tom and they begin to bicker. As Tom desperately clings onto

his romanticized idea of their relationship, Summer ends things. Tom is surprised due to his

biased memories, but Summer can’t believe he’s still happy: “This can’t be a total surprise. I

mean, we’ve been like Sid [Vicious] and Nancy [Spungen] for months” (Webb, 2009). Tom’s

biased storytelling is what frames Summer as his Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
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Critical Analysis

Popular culture has long been lacking in the telling of female stories. With women

representing only 15.1% of directors, 17.4% of writers, and 18% of studio heads of the top 200

grossing films 2018-2019 (Hawn 2021b), more often than not a woman’s perspective isn’t being

heard at all. Thus, when there are female characters on screen, they are shown through the lens of

the male gaze. This can lead to sexualization, objectification, and overall misrepresentation of

female characters; what “real” women are like to the men who tell their story for them. The

Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a result of this imbalance of representation.

The plot of (500) Days of Summer is unique in that it indulges in the Manic Pixie Dream

Girl trope while subverting it at the same time. Yes, it uses the trope, but it does so in a self-

aware way that calls to attention all the flaws in the use of Manic Pixie Dream Girls in the first

place. Summer is a perfect Manic Pixie Dream Girl on paper. She’s pale with dark hair, bright

blue eyes, and red lipstick. She likes casual sex. She runs in the rain. She wears vintage polka dot

dresses and has a 1960’s style haircut. She’s free-spirited, spontaneous, and full of life. And most

importantly, she serves as Tom’s muse with her sole purpose being “to inspire the creativity and

passion of the fragile, insecure male [protagonist]” (Rodriguez, 2018).

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is best examined through the lens of Feminist Theory, which

“at its core looks at power differences between women and men and how these differences create

both private and public social norm expectations” (Hawn, 2021a). The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

is a male fantasy, just as Summer is Tom’s fantasy, and a fantasy has no real depth to it. Summer

and Tom’s first direct interaction is when Summer recognizes a song by one of Tom’s favorite

bands, The Smiths. When Tom discovers their share in music taste, he becomes determined to

make Summer his. This is a good example of how shallow a Manic Pixie Dream Girl can be;
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“she is composed of a collection of quirks, of clichés, and of fantasies; as such, the [Manic Pixie

Dream Girl] is rendered a kind of blank canvas for our hero’s masculine desires” (Gouck, 2017).

Summer and Tom’s meet-cute cliché of liking the same obscure music gives Tom fuel with

which to idealize Summer over something that, all in all, is a superficial thing. Summer is never

“a point-of-view character, and she isn’t understood from the inside. She’s one of those female

tropes who is permitted precisely no interiority. Instead of a personality, she has eccentricities, a

vaguely off-beat favourite band, a funky fringe,” of which Summer has both. (Gouck, 2017).

Summer is not only defined by Tom through her quirky fashion sense and music taste,

she becomes these things, and even more than that, she becomes more of a dream than a real

woman with her own thoughts and desires. Tom, in his own head, turns Summer into a symbol,

thus employing symbolic interactionism. Human beings are both products and producers of

symbols, and “these symbols are constructed and reconstructed, whereby meanings (and

meanings of those meanings) form social processes that guide human behavior and experiences”

(Madison, 2019). Tom, throughout the entirety of their relationship, views Summer through his

own manipulated lens. What mattered to Tom was what Summer provoked, what she

represented. Summer is the feelings she inspires in Tom. She’s the love, the fear, and the concern

he feels for her. In herself, Summer has not the slightest importance (Mulvey, 2006).

When discussing the superficiality of what marks a character as a Manic Pixie Dream

Girl, one could also employ Marxist Theory to explore how the woman is being commodified.

The unique way Summer expresses herself may have the guise of personal choice, but deep

down there will always be a social pressure placed on the feminine body. “Femininity, as Judith

Butler (1985) has claimed, becomes nothing but an artifice, a “mode of enacting and reenacting

received gender norms that surface as so many styles of the flesh” (p. 11)” (Rodriguez, 2018).
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Summer, being a female love-interest, must meet the expectations that every female love-interest

in film must meet. She must be a beautiful and alluring object for the male protagonist. This can

be accomplished through consumerism, and “in spite of this social commandment to be pretty for

men, all the processes involved in the construction of a beautiful feminine body – waxing, dying

your hair, applying makeup, choosing the right type of clothing – are presented as aesthetic

activities through which women can express their individuality” (Rodriguez, 2018). The concept

of individuality is a must-have for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and for Summer it is her vintage

style of hair, makeup, and dress. Thus, consumerism, and commodity fetishism more

superficially, is perceived as a means for constructing Summer’s identity.

The character of Summer is obviously indulgent in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope,

and the film, being shown from Tom’s perspective, paints her as such. Yet, (500) Days of

Summer approaches the trope with an ironic and satirical twist. The film allows Tom’s recounting

of all of his biased memories, but as the film goes on, viewers can see that Tom might not be the

hero he painted himself out to be. The cracks in Tom’s recounting of what happened in him and

Summer’s relationship becomes more clear as the film continues, clueing any perceptive viewer

in on his unreliable storytelling. When Summer breaks his heart and suggests they stop seeing

each other, Tom paints it as a great injustice, as though Summer had just backstabbed him.

He felt entitled to Summer, but what he wanted wasn’t the real Summer, and the real

Summer wasn’t his idealized fantasy. He becomes so enraged when he finds out that her wants

and needs don’t align with what he’s prescribed for her, and he demonizes her for destroying

what he views as a perfect and loving relationship. Summer was always up front about her

wanting only a casual relationship, a fact which Tom seems to ignore. He had decided that she

would want him too and that she would become the girlfriend he so desperately wanted her to be.
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Tom creates the “ideal” femininity in this film, not Summer, and when she doesn’t live up to

what he wants, he calls her a “coldhearted bitch” among other things. This is due to the fact that

what Tom sees in Summer is “something that she cannot give, for she does not possess it – she is

not the quirky life muse Tom fantasizes about, but a real woman with real problems” (Rodriguez,

2018). So, (500) Days of Summer in the very least gives Summer a way out and gives the

audience a chance to see that she isn’t the villain Tom thinks she is after all, which is more than

can be said for many other movies. Summer’s character, by disproving Tom’s idea of her, in turn

disproves the validity of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Summer didn’t conform, and Tom’s

subsequent undoing showed just how fragile the Male Gaze can be, thus turning the premise of

the movie on its head and subverting the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope can be a very damaging vehicle for

gendered messages. Sadly, even the creator of the term suspects that they will never disappear

entirely, as “they just speak too powerfully to the male ego to disappear forever” (Piafsky, 2016).

Still, films are powerful mediums for communicating culture and ideology, and the way they

construct self-image, gender, and relationships will have consequences. Women have to negotiate

their place in society and perform their femininity all the way down to how they dress and how

they do their hair, and films often act as teachers, influencing the concept of the “ideal” woman

and in turn influencing the expectations placed on real women. It’s important to remember that

films, even “off the beaten path” indie ones, are “representational systems [that] portray a “way

of seeing” the social reality that may appear to be natural, [but] are indeed the product of the

specific power structures of patriarchy” (Rodriguez, 2018). The social structure perceived

through most films are filtered through the male gaze, thus prioritizing the fantasies and
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stereotypes that excite the male directors, scriptwriters, and even viewers while any meaningful

representation of women’s independence, intelligence, or ambition fall to the wayside. Films are

incredibly powerful, as they have the capacity to control the dimension of time (editing,

narrative) and the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), all while creating a gaze, a

world, and an object (Mulvey, 2006), so any chance to examine and reconsider the way film

impacts society should be taken with importance.

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References

Gouck, J. (2017, April). “Destroying the lie?”: The manic pixie dream girl in American young

adult fiction [Paper presentation]. Irish Association for American Studies: Annual

Conference, Ulster University, Belfast Campus.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324797872_The_Manic_Pixie_Dream_Girl_in_

American_Young_Adult_Fiction

Hawn, A. (2021). Critical Theories [PowerPoint slides].

https://asu.instructure.com/courses/91110/files/34397951?module_item_id=5981359

Hawn, A. (2021). Ruining Movies [PowerPoint slides].

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Madison, D. S. (2019). Critical Ethnography (3rd ed., pp. 61-98). New York, NY: SAGE

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Mulvey, L. (2006). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Media and Cultural Studies:

Keyworks (pp. 342-352). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwill.

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Piafsky, M. (2016). A Conversation with Nathan Rabin. The Missouri Review, 39(4), 121–142.

https://doi.org/10.1353/mis.2016.0067

Rodríguez, L. (2018). Dismantling gender in American Indiewood’s quirky narratives: The

manic pixie dream girl stereotype. Comunicación y Género, 1(1), 69–82.

https://doi.org/10.5209/CGEN.60248
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Ross, S. T. (2016). (500) Days of Summer: A postmodern romantic comedy?. The Polish Journal

of Aesthetics, 41(2), 155-176.

https://pjaesthetics.uj.edu.pl/documents/138618288/138826957/eik_41_8.pdf/f6dbe6d6-

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Vincent, N. (2020). Manic pixie dream politics: A focus on postfeminist muses. CLA Journal, 8,

57-75. https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/05-Vincent-CLA-2020.pdf

Webb, M. (Director). (2009). (500) days of summer [Film]. Dune Entertainment.