we need more asian manic pixie dream girls
post watching movie thoughts ....
Some movies - for a lack of a better term - do not feel real. I’ve often heard them be likened to “fever dreams,” some hazy cinematic experience from your childhood or better yet, a movie with a cast and premise so promising you can’t believe you hadn’t heard of it before.
(It’s usually because it tanked at the box office)
Movies belonging to the latter category, often lost to history, end up making great conversation fodder if nothing else. Like, “what! Rowan Atkinson, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Whoopi Goldberg compete in a cross-country race for a cash prize; hilarity ensues? How have I never heard of this movie before!”
So anyways imagine my surprise when I find out about this rom-com from 2007 where Cillian Murphy plays “the film geek owner of an independent video rental store whose life is turned upside down when femme fatale Lucy Liu comes into his life.” Naturally, I had to watch it ASAP.
First of all - and let’s just get this out of the way - Cillian Murphy as an insufferable filmbro is super-duper hot. He’s like Negroni away from turning full-on “here’s what jazz is…” so anyways if you want to talk about this more just go on Letterboxd.
Next and more crucially, Lucy Liu as a mysterious and beautiful hurricane of chaos saving Cillian Murphy from the banalities of life? Now that’s something to talk about.
Was Violet (Lucy Liu) - dare I say - a manic pixie dream girl?
Well she certainly seems to meet all the MPDG standards.
Meet-cute? Check. Dresses kind of ugly? Check. Eggs on the guy to commit a cute lil’ felony on a first date? Check. Abruptly exits said date, leaving our average joe a little dizzied but also… yearning for more? Check check check.
Classic, right? We’ve seen this before.
Okay, but then her behavior gets a little more erratic. She steals food from strangers at a park, she pretends to get kidnapped, she hires her friends to reprimand Neil for the crime that she pressured him to commit! You start to really feel bad for the guy but then you also remember he broke up with his ex-girlfriend by telling her she’s not similar enough to “Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and you’re like you know what Neil? You oughta just be punched in the fucking balls. How’s that for real cinema.
With time, Violet’s behavior starts to get more violent (violet?) and less endearing. Is she meant to mock the realities of having an MPDG in your life? How inconvenient and their schemes would play out IRL? How it might be less dream girl and more just…manic?
Anyways, I’m not sure what the director’s intention with Lucy Liu’s character was and to be honest? I don’t really care. She reads like a manic pixie dream girl and that’s enough. I idolized MPDGs growing up. Specifically white MPDG’s: Quibbler reading, curly-haired, fairies on acid. They weren’t just white, they were the whitest of the white. And their whiteness - the pale skin, the implied middle-class upbringing- didn’t feel incidental to the manic-pixie-dream-girl of it all; it felt like an integral part to their character, their magnetic charm and effortless beauty. Or as everyone’s favorite cock guzzler once said:
“she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
Pretty much everything I wanted to embody as a chubby and awkward 15-year-old living in the mid-west. I’m not saying I would have been happier if I watched Watching the Detectives earlier. But damn, I don’t think it would have not helped. I didn’t realize Asian girls didn’t have to be human sweater-vests with tiger moms or whatever. I didn’t have a Violet to vindicate my ability to be something more. A secret third thing: A very special, quirky little girl.
And yeah, Violet’s Asian identity is not important to the film. They could have cast anyone for the role and the movie would have worked all the same. But they didn’t and that’s the the fucking point. I don’t need Violet to hint at immigrant parents or eat kimchi to feel represented. I just need Lucy Liu to be playing her.
And what’s so interesting about the Asian Manic Pixie Dream Girl is that it simultaneously fulfills and subverts tropes commonly associated with Asian women. It carries the mystery of Cool Asian Girl with Hair Streak but with a whimsy that’s restrained enough it doesn’t verge on dangerous Lotus Flower or Giggling School Girl (Joshi Kosei) territory. As a group bogged down by so many labels and tropes, AMPDGs imagines alternative ways to be.
We need more Asian Manic Pixie Dream Girls.
Oh but shout out to Jeon Ji Yeon of My Sassy Girl, the OG Korean MPDG.