It is me, Claire Colburn, from the oft-maligned 2005 film “Elizabethtown,” and may I just say? YOU SUCK!
It’s possible the only thing you remember about me is that one negative review of the movie I star in coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” while describing, well, ME. Thanks for that! (Or maybe you recall I was played by Kristen Dunst, a fabulous actor who is having A MOMENT right now. You give the Dunst the respect she deserves or I’ll summon Claudia from “Interview with the Vampire” to hunt you!)
Whether I’ve ever been manic or a pixie is none of your business. If I have been your dream, I don’t want to know. But you know what I wasn’t on-screen and am not now? A girl. I was more than 18 years old then. I had a full-time job. An adult, not a child.
Normally I’m happy to be placed in the company of Holly Golightly and Ramona Flowers, but apparently, we are all flaky and hot and nothing else. (We are, in fact, literate and we have access to the internet to see what you’ve been saying about us.)
I can admit that “Elizabethtown” is an imperfect movie. The premise is preposterous–footwear engineer (played by Orlando Bloom) designs a pair of shoes that flopped because they were killing soccer players somehow, his dad dies, then he gets dumped by his mean girlfriend and wants to kill himself, it is very sad! He’s on an airplane being very depressed and I am his flight attendant. I start chatting to him and snap him out of it a bit.
We talk on the phone! There is a road trip! We fall in love! Sorry you watched the preview and thought you were in for some gritty realism. Guess you never learned how to suspend disbelief in order to watch a moving picture. So you think every movie has to be “Trainspotting” and that’s MY fault?
I’m in my 40s now and looking back at that little slice of my life, filmed in the year 2004, it occurs to me that you may assign quirks to me as an individual that were just part of the culture before the smartphone. We weren’t even in Crackberry days yet, babies. You flipped open to a cell phone for MOBILE TELEPHONE CALLS, ONLY. So sometimes you talked to strangers. You struck up conversations in public places or invited yourself to harp on something in line at the bank. Is that SoOoOoOo much more eccentric than leaving comments on news articles or ReTweeting strangers? I’ve heard this called “para-social relationships” today, but what do I know, I’m too *~*idiosyncratic*~* to criticize anything!
Implausible though it may sound to your cynical ears, this movie does explain that I am from a small Southern town with a certain colloquialism: we’re obsessed with giving directions, pointing the way with our fingers, jawing on about how easy it is to get lost on the causeways, hand-drawing maps on napkins for travelers. If I were in a middle-grade story, you’d find me charming. I’d be a HERO. (Is Amelia Bedelia a MPDG now? How about Judy Moody?) If I were in a grownup novel I’d charm your grandmother’s book club. Really, I’m Eleanor Oliphant. Here I Am, Bernadette. I’m Tuesdays with Morrie, you jerks.
And MAYBE I am proud of where I’m from, and the locality that shaped me, is that some crime? For all you know I tried to make a cultural anthropology career out of it. An academic’s hours are grueling, I spent all my time chasing funding and none of it gathering research, and do you even know what they pay adjuncts? So I dropped out of my grad program to make actual money working as a flight attendant. One dude’s “mania” is this not-girl’s “burnout.” Thanks for the added mental health stigma!
My past is interesting, and it is painful, so I don’t spout it off right away when I chat up sorry-looking strangers in public. What do you want me to do, assume every sad sack is a protagonist in a dark comedy, and start spewing my life story? That won’t work as dialogue, BECAUSE THIS IS THE CINEMA, YOU CLOWN.
The anxiety and sadness of my backstory are hinted at, you know, in the manner of constructing a narrative or writing a script. Don’t you remember Annie Hall, unable to have sex without dissociating? Using weed as a crutch to fend off intimacy? WOODY KEPT THAT DETAIL IN, and he is a Sylvia Plath disparaging sex criminal! He understood that flightiness is a mask, and he is the literal scum of the earth! You cannot clear a bar set low enough for Woody Allen? Take yourself to jail, donkey brains.
Perhaps I have developed a generous sense of empathy because I have known loneliness and despair. And here is another point the movie was trying to make, but you geniuses were too busy sniffing your own farts to discern: Being from a big overbearing family and/or a small town CAN make you a busybody and a weirdo–and what’s more loveable than a weird nosy sweetheart? Maybe chatty oddballs are a STAPLE OF HUMAN SOCIETY since they extend the olive branches of inclusion and conversation to … everyone??!!
Sure, there may be some truly indefensible moments in the film “Elizabethtown.” Pitting me against Jessica Biel, casting her as the cold ex, and positioning me as “refreshing” by comparison, is gross and misogynistic. We never share a scene. I don’t talk about her. Do I even know she exists? Do you realize I’m dating someone else for most of this movie??
Is it inconceivable that these errors point to the joint phenomena of the pains of the artistic process and pitfalls of the film industry? Does it have to boil down to me?
In conclusion, “Garden State” had a MUCH more problematic premise and relationship, go bully them, why don’t you?!
