Mary Pickford and the Deevolution of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

In his 2005 review of Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin coined a new term for an increasingly popular movie trope: the manic pixie dream girl.  The term is defined 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."


Rabin first applied the moniker to Kirsten Dunst in that movie, but since then it has been applied to everyone from Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby to Tom Hanks as a male variant in Big.  In fact, one website has over 60 examples of this type of character.

But who was the first MPDG?


Mary Pickford flirted with elements of the trope in some of her previous work like Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but in Tess of Storm Country she's in full on MPDG mode.  Lloyd Hughes plays Frederick Graves, a disillusioned son whose idea of a good life is starkly different than his wealthy father.  He's rudderless however and will likely become exactly what his father wants.

Enter Mary Pickford's Tess.  She's everything he's not.  She's poor.  She's fiery.  She stands up to authority.  She randomly breaks into dancing. There's no reason for Frederick to fall for her.

Yet fall he does.  Hard.

By the end of the movie, he's stood up to his father and been able to become his own man.  He literally tells Tess that she is the source of his belief system.  She transforms him into the man he could become.

So, Mary Pickford's Tess is full of quirk and enters a relationship with a man that fundamentally changes his life for the better.  She also is the type of creature that only exists in the minds of Hollywood writers.  She is perfect in her imperfection.  She has delicate features yet doesn't bathe and throws a mean right hook.

The only part of the MPDG standard she does not quite satisfy is shallowness.  She is deeply committed to caring for her father and her village.  And she drops everything to care for a baby in danger of being abandoned.  Unlike the traditional MPDG, she is very self-aware and is truly in love with Frederick while never compromising her values.  She's more like Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Like Clem, you can easily see Tess admonishing Frederick at the start of the film that she's not a concept and isn't there to save him; she's her own person, complete with flaws.

Still, in the world of the MPDG, Pickford is definitely one of the chains in the path's evolutionary path.  Or rather de-evolutionary path.  Pickford's oeuvre is clearly the forerunner of characters right up to Ramona Flowers.  Let's give credit where credit is due.