There
are a lot of shows on TV right now that make women look bad. The ladies of Gossip
Girl have
never made a well-thought-out decision (that doesn't involve clothes) in their
lives. Snooki and Deena roll in the sand, shrieking like wasted porpoises,
while male castmates look on and laugh. The entire cast of The Bachelor have completely lost their minds.
The show that pisses me off the most may seem harmless in comparison, but the
moronically twee New Girl regresses me to a cave-womanish rage with its insistence
on its insipid star: Zooey Deschanel.
I
always vaguely disliked Zooey for some reason I couldn’t figure out, but I
didn’t start to detest her until I saw 500 Days of Summer. After the movie finished,
my boyfriend (at the time) seemed to be suffering from a swooning fit like his
corset was too tight. “That girl,” he breathed, mesmerized. “She was like, the
perfect girl!”
I
don’t condone jealousy over celebrity crushes, but his statement was so
irrationally offensive to me that I had to stop and consider what it is about
Zooey that makes her totally hateable. After all, she didn't she didn’t fit the
cookie-cutter “bombshell” it-girl image I had in my mind.
With
her immaculate bangs and wardrobe straight from Anthropologie, she seems tailor-made
for the artsy, iPhone-apping, indoor-scarf-wearing sensibilities of the world.
But how could everyone fall for someone so patently fake? I mean, it’s kind of
creepy, how contrived she is. She’s like a living doll. Can you even imagine Zooey
Deschanel taking a shit?
Luckily
I’m not the only bitter nihilist in the world. Fellow hater, film critic Nathan
Rabin of the Onion A.V. Club, captured her persona perfectly and summed it up
in what is now an internationally recognized movie trope: “The Manic Pixie
Dream Girl (MPDG),” he writes, “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.”
Although
playing the “villain” role in 500 Days of Summer, she flits in and out of
Joseph Gordon Levitt’s life, being a total bitch with no explanation for her
actions. The closest we come to receiving an explanation for her character is
when she trills, “Because I wanted to!” after callously breaking his heart for
the trillionth time. Like Natalie Portman’s saccharine forest sprite in Garden
State, her
role is always to act as a catalyst to the male character, with no exploration
of her own story arc.
Zooey’s
characters always choose non-threatening careers such as secretary, elementary
school teacher, and department store elf, in which they can fulfill their
dreams of singing and doing crafts all day while their male costars go on to
become architects and lawyers. Although it’s always depressing to see women
typecast as bitchy workaholics (paging Katherine Heigl), I would way rather see
that than watch Zooey glamorize careers that belong in the '50s.
Jezebel
contributor
and Smart Internet Lady Sadie Stein identifies Zooey as an “Amazing Girl”, and
furthermore expands on the archetype of her and the other girls like her: “All
are vaguely creative, all sort of political, all sweet and kind and sympathetic
and all lacking in any critical judgment whatsoever. Indeed, a lack of harsh
judgment might be called the central tenet of their sisterhood, and perhaps a
key to their particular magic.”
Her
characters always go along with whatever her male counterpart seems to want,
always supportive, encouraging, and sexually available, while demanding nothing
in return. She loves his taste in music unconditionally; she’s cool with his
lack of ambition; she hangs on his every word without question. Lazy male
audiences love this kind of character because it gives them an unrealistic
expectation of finding the perfect female muse willing to put up with their
shit indefinitely. No such girl exists, of course, but the expectation of her
is the ultimate entitlement fantasy.
My
boyfriend and I broke up shortly after watching 500 Days of Summer. It was probably my fault;
I couldn’t support our relationship anymore. It primarily consisted of hanging
out in his attic getting baked and listening to his prog-rock collection while
he tuned his ever-growing collection of acoustic guitars. After all, the Zooeys
of the world would have found our relationship “amazing”. Having no interior
life of their own, it would be much easier to be quietly absorbed into a man’s.
After all, he would no doubt worship her, having found his unquestioning,
undemanding female; the “perfect” girl.
My
argument is that we need to forget about the Zooeys, the MPDGs, the perfect
girls of the world, and focus on, or focus on becoming, Real Girls instead.
Real Girls who aren’t perfect, Real Girls who get angry, who take shits, who
have bad hair days. Real Girls who don’t exist only for the enjoyment and
improvement of wimpy artist-type men. Real Girls who are never complacent, who
have ambition, and above all, never stop asking questions.
//Shannon Elliot, production manager
//Author illustration
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