Kirsten and Natalie #8: Garden State and Elizabethtown

(Kirsten and Natalie is a series tracing American womanhood as portrayed through the films of Kirsten Dunst and Natalie Portman. Read the introductory post here.)

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl 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. — Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club

After seeing and enjoying 2005’s Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe’s sixth feature film, Roger Ebert theorized that Claire (Kirsten Dunst), the flight attendant who serves as the film’s romantic lead, was an angel. Drew (Orlando Bloom), the film’s temporarily depressed hero, goes on something of a metaphorical journey through the afterlife in the film after his attempt to take his own life is interrupted by the untimely death of his father. It is only fitting, then, that Drew’s Dante meets a Virgil and Beatrice all rolled up into one, someone who can get him through the pits of Hell and out the other side.

So far as I can tell, no such theorizing exists for Sam (Natalie Portman) in 2004’s Garden State, the film that served as Zach Braff’s directorial debut. When Andrew (Braff), the film’s chronically depressed hero, makes a pilgrimage to New Jersey for his mother's funeral, he runs into Sam at a clinic, where she proceeds to change his life by playing The Shins for him. As the two grow closer, Sam is revealed to have a personality that seems to have been developed as an equal and opposite reaction to Andrew’s dissociation, even though she’s only just met him. She, too, is an angel of sorts, and at one point in the film, she and Andrew descend into an abyss (a rock quarry) to meet the people who live there.

In case the synopsis didn’t make this clear, Garden State and Elizabethtown are very similar films, even beyond the presence of Dunst and Portman as, effectively, the same character. When my A.V. Club colleague Nathan Rabin coined the term “manic pixie dream girl,” he had Elizabethtown’s Claire in mind, but he also cited Garden State’s Sam as an example of the trope. As such, the two have forever been linked in my mind and perhaps formed a subconscious impetus for this project.

‎As Rabin’s definition (which I’ve quoted above) makes clear, the MPDG almost needs to exist as a direct foil to a man who needs to come out of his shell and rejoin humanity. It is all but impossible for the audience to imagine her having a life of her own, even though both films take great pains to suggest who she is outside of her interactions with the lead. When we find out things about either character, those things don’t make more sense of who they are as people. Instead, they further suggest each character as just the coolest, quirkiest gal around. These aren’t people; they’re junk drawers with no rhyme or reason as to what personality traits ended up in them.

Contrast Claire and Sam with Clementine, the Kate Winslet character from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Clementine seems to have much in common with Sam and Claire. She also exists as a bright fireball of light streaks across the gloomy skies of terminally depressed man Joel (Jim Carrey). What sets her apart, however, is how careful the film is to let you know things about who she is outside of her interactions with Joel. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry very specifically choose moments to let Clementine insist on her personhood, and all her seemingly random quirks reveal themselves to be rooted in a desperate, thwarted creative energy.

Moreover, despite the film’s memory-erasing conceit, the character doesn't solely exist within Joel’s point-of-view. The film gives her a subplot of her own, albeit one where we see her through the eyes of a different man, played by Elijah Wood. It’s a subtle nod to the idea that for a certain type of guy, Clementine will always exist only to resolve his emotional distress.

Claire and Sam don’t have the inner life Clementine does. Indeed, it can seem as if they don’t have inner lives at all. Crowe seems at least fitfully aware of this in Elizabethtown. He’s a more experienced screenwriter and director than Braff is at this point, and he winks at the audience about how formless Claire can feel as a character, most notably when he has Claire and Drew watching Audrey Hepburn on TV. Crowe’s longtime affection for Hepburn carries through. Though Claire is not a patch on, say, Hepburn’s Roman Holiday character, Crowe understands that he’s created a character who exists within a cinematic lineage that can be murderously hard to get right. I don’t think he manages to make Claire feel distinct, but he at least gestures to what he knows he should be doing.

What’s more, the stakes of Elizabethtown welcome a character who exists as a seemingly supernatural being spontaneously generated from the empty spaces in a man’s soul. When the film begins, Drew has lost a shoe company almost $1 billion, and his failure has him constructing a ridiculous contraption with which he will end his life. (It’s an exercise bike with knives on it, and it seems like a terrible idea in multiple ways.) Elizabethtown is an overreaction to people’s discomfort with Crowe trying something new in 2001’s Vanilla Sky, retreating to the seeming safety of what is basically a late 20s Jerry Maguire. The film’s message, such as it is, boils down to “Life is worth living, even the hard parts.” It’s trite and cliché, but Crowe wants it to be. Within that specific milieu, a character as threadbare as Claire almost makes sense.

‎Garden State seems to have similar stakes. Andrew is lost in a medicated haze, thanks to the drugs his father has prescribed him since he was a child. Yet as dramatic conflicts go, “Will Andrew wake up from his living death?” is less heightened than “Will Drew end his life?” The worst-case scenario in the latter involves actual death; the worst-case scenario in the former involves a reversion to the status quo.

Much of what Garden State has to say about being over-medicated is… interesting from a modern lens. When Andrew breaks free of the pills that have been fogging his mind, it’s presented almost as a generationally defining moment, a la The Graduate. Still, its triumph is premised on the idea that it is better to be unmedicated and really experience life than it is to be lost in a fog. The film is always careful to nod to the idea that some people need anti-depressants, but it carries an implicit, “But not everybody does, and maybe you don’t, too!”

“Parents have overmedicated their kids, and they are missing out on life” was a popular idea in the culture around when Garden State was made. It’s telling how disconnected it was from the realities of parenting or medication that the thing making kids miss out on life so effortlessly shifted to “phones” once smartphones became ubiquitous. Sam is intended to be a person who isn’t missing out on life and embraces every day and every moment. As such, it’s hard to imagine her taking so much as a Pepto Bismol. She carries sadness with her, too, but it’s always subservient to Andrew’s sadness. Her primary plot function is to draw him out, so he can have a shattering emotional climax, and when the two fall in love, it feels about as perfunctory as possible.

I am not someone who thinks tropes are de facto “bad” unless they are tropes that deliberately play into prejudiced assumptions baked into our culture. The manic pixie dream girl arguably fits that description, since she only ever exists to prop up the story of a man. Yet stories need supporting characters. Sometimes, a story will be about a man, and an important supporting character will be a woman. There is probably room for manic pixie dream girls with some degree of nuance, as you could argue Clementine is. When pointing out tropes, it’s often more helpful to focus on if they’re used well or poorly, and in the case of both of these films, I would argue their filmmakers use the trope they supposedly originated poorly. The film’s imagination, in both cases, is only as big as the frame we are looking at at the moment, which badly limits the characters.

These films also mark a turning point for Portman and Dunst, as Portman enters several years of something like movie stardom, years in which she will be nominated for two Oscars, winning one. Meanwhile, Dunst tries her hand at romantic comedies, to limited success, and enters a wilderness period in which she offers some of her best performances (though not her performance in Elizabethtown) but in movies that are more overlooked than hers had been in the recent past. In watching these two movies, I think I may have figured out a reason for that divergence.

Women in their 20s are often considered the pinnacle of desirability in our culture. They’re adults but still young enough to be naïve in certain ways, or so the cultural assumption goes. It’s telling that the manic pixie dream girl always seems to exist simultaneously as the protagonist’s beloved grandmother and his first high school girlfriend. She lives not to challenge the protagonist but to make him feel good about being alive. Thus, neither Claire nor Sam are meant to exist, not really. They are meant to be what amount to holographic projections from Drew and Andrew’s minds, the girls who can help them find the answers instead of abandoning them to their respective quests alone.

From her first film, Natalie Portman’s career has been defined by how often she plays characters that men, both onscreen and off, project their emotions onto. Sometimes, the films she is in are aware of this tendency; sometimes, they’re not. One of the creepiest things about Sam is how if the movie told you she was 15, it would be as believable as if it told you she was 25. Some of that is on the clumsiness of Garden State, but some of it is on how oddly our popular culture regarded Portman across her teens and 20s. She wasn’t allowed to be a human, not really. She was a beautiful girl.

Kirsten Dunst’s career has almost always been defined by her flintiness. Even in the Spider-man movies, in which she ostensibly just plays Peter Parker’s love interest, her character has an arc of her own that exists independently of Peter. When Dunst was cast as a love interest in her teen years, she was usually situated as the girl next door, rather than the mysterious beauty, and the idea of the girl next door is that she’s someone you know as a person or a friend first, then realize is someone you’re in love with. As Dunst entered her 20s, she was asked to play a pure fantasy object for men more often, and she’s not very good at it, as Elizabethtown shows. She’s too good an actor to give a bad performance here, but she always seems aware that she’s not being asked to do much.

I wondered if the two women switching roles would improve these two films. On the one hand, this is quite an indictment of how little regard either film has for its lead actresses. On the other, I think it might have worked. Sam needs flintiness. You need to buy that she’s interested in Andrew for reasons beyond the requirements of the plot. Meanwhile, Claire needs to have a certain unearthly luminosity to her, and Dunst’s earthier performance doesn’t quite match what Crowe’s going for. I don’t know that this quick swap would make either movie “good,” but I have to imagine what resulted would be compelling in different ways.

Or maybe it’s just not worth thinking about this, even as an academic exercise. Ultimately, we live in a culture that will look upon a young, attractive, usually white woman in her 20s and decide that she is primarily interesting as a symbol of something else. What’s most disappointing about Elizabethtown and Garden State isn’t that Sam and Claire are both effectively supernatural messengers. It’s that it’s impossible to watch the films and not realize that they are similarly flattening their lead actresses into women who are meant to help their wayward filmmakers find their way.

Next time: The revolution comes for our girls, as Natalie Portman shaves her head for V for Vendetta and Kirsten Dunst indulges her sweet tooth in Marie Antoinette. See you sometime!

Talk back to me: What's your favorite vaguely disreputable trope? Tell me by replying to the email or commenting on the blog post.

What I've been up to: I recently had a couple of pieces I'm proud of go up at Vox. The first digs into why we're still so drawn to gender-essentialist stories like Don't Worry Darling. The second considers the risks inherent to not letting trans kids transition. I hope you'll read both!

The conversation about trans kids right now is fundamentally broken. Because it is led, by and large, by cis people, it focuses on the potential regret children and adolescents might have after transitioning, and ignores the social, physical, emotional, and psychological costs of not transitioning. It ignores the reams of studies that underline the need to support trans kids. It ignores the lived experiences of many trans people, who despair that they were kept from transitioning as youths.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: Michelle Swinea's piece on My Brilliant Friend made me want to get caught up on that show, which I fell behind on long ago for reasons of gender dysphoria. Read her take!

‎Even early in this story, My Brilliant Friend is underlining the ways that chance can drastically change the course of one's life. Elena has the support of an educator, her family, and her best friend. Lila only has her best friend. While they are both brilliant, Lila's lack of a support system limits her access to options Elena seizes with full force. Though the women won't realize how fully their paths have diverged until they are older, Lila catches glimpses of it here and there. She knows Elena has gained an advantage. She knows she might never catch up.

Read me: I was fascinated by this resurrected blog post from 2008, at the tail end of the George W. Bush era, which examines the persistence of a particularly pernicious piece of political agitprop alleging that the CEO of Procter & Gamble was a Satanist. I don't know if I agree with every conclusion it reaches, but many of them are dead on in my experience.

In retrospect, this desperate, shotgun appeal to religious authority demonstrated why the dossier itself was probably futile. It was an acknowledgment that the people they were attempting to convince were beyond the reach of mere fact or reason — people who did not find reality compelling. The only hope of persuading them, then, was to call upon religious leaders from across the spectrum in the hopes that the pronouncement of one of these random bishops and evangelical pseudo-bishops might be regarded as trustworthy. If you’re forced to resort to such an attempt then you’ve got to realize that it’s not likely to work either. Any audience so far gone as to require this sort of argument is also likely to have already adopted the mechanisms of self-reinforcing stupidity. Thus if they read that Billy Graham denies the rumor, their response won’t be “Oh, OK, Billy Graham. I trust him,” but rather “OMG! Billy Graham is in on it too!” (cf. “biased media”)

Watch me: I've been watching the 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for... reasons, and let me tell you, it's a balm to the soul in these troubled times.

And another thing... It's FALL, which means it's AUTUMNAL SOUNDSCAPE SEASON, which means it's the MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR. Here's a good one, and here's another good one. Do you want to SPEND FALL IN A COFFEE SHOP? Here's one of those!

‎

Opening credit's sequence of the week: Honestly, what the fuck is going on here? The malevolence in "Not bad for 101. Don't look a day over 90!"

‎

A thing I had to look up: I went back and read all of Nathan Rabin's very first My Year of Flops column. It was a nice reminder of when I spent most of my workday reading The A.V. Club and lurking in the comments. Then, a couple of years later, I got a job there, which changed my life. Hurrah!

This week's reading music: "Let Go" by Frou Frou

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.