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ACROSS
1 __ for the course
4 Proverb
9 Wire fence
stickers
14 Winner of the
most 2016
Olympic medals
15 Prize founder
16 Accustom (to)
17 __ Tin Tin
18 “We’re done
here. Please
leave”
20 For mature
viewers
22 Foot prettifier,
briefly
23 Miss. neighbor
24 Grape-Nuts
cereal brand
26 Big Board 
letters
30 Lone source of
local
entertainment
33 Pop in a glass
34 Wonder
35 Longtime name
in Syrian
leadership
36 Prereq for a
lifeguard
37 Fred Flintstone’s
boss
40 CBS logo
41 Yoga position
43 Conservationist’s
prefix
44 Part of 14-
Across: Abbr.
45 Eschew 
modern
conveniences
49 Worrisome
grades
50 Misplace
51 Tennis do-over
52 Open house
offering
54 Great suffering
57 Like the child of
your first cousin,
to you
62 Great Lakes’ __
Canals
63 Baseball legend
Satchel
64 Dior skirt style
65 “__ the
President’s 
Men”
66 Does’ mates
67 Cares for
68 Sound on Old
MacDonald’s
farm

DOWN
1 Sound of a
contented kitty
2 Great Wall setting
3 Deliver a tirade
4 Sometime soon
5 “Let’s Make a
Deal” selection
6 __ Dhabi
7 Emerald, e.g.
8 Slip by
9 Texas city of 1.3
million, familiarly
10 Consecrates with
oil
11 It may be unearned
12 Compadre
13 Clinch, with “up”
19 Mythical
Himalayan
21 Singer Fitzgerald
24 Feline feet
25 Brunch servings
27 Ill-tempered
Looney Tunes
character
28 Persuaded
29 Week or rear
add-on
30 “My bad!”
31 Needlefish
32 Scottish denial
33 Nearly boil
37 Long March leader
in 1930s China
38 Tylenol target

39 One may be
stubbed
42 Retirement fund
44 Belligerent god
46 Chimney part
47 Word processing
category
involving page
dimensions
48 Moves smoothly
53 Lodes and lodes
54 Patch up
55 Hershey’s
caramel candy

56 Modern-day
carpe diem
spelled out at the
starts of 18-, 30-,
45- and 57-Across
57 Black __: covert
missions
58 D.C. ballplayer
59 Spy novel org.
60 “¡Viva el
matador!”
61 __ Scully, Dodger
announcer for 67
seasons

By John Lieb
©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/25/16

10/25/16

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

xwordeditor@aol.com

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6A — Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

T

he Manic Pixie Dream 
Girl has been part of 
pop culture for as long 

as men have looked to women 
to occupy a two-dimensional 
role in their lives. The feminine 
trope acquired that quirky 
name when Nathan Rabin, a 
film critic for The A.V. Club, 
used that phrase to describe 
Kirsten Dunst’s character in 
“Elizabethtown” (2005). He 
called her “that bubbly, shallow 
cinematic creature that exists 
solely in the fevered imagina-
tions of sensitive writer-direc-
tors to teach broodingly soulful 
young men to embrace life 
and its infinite mysteries and 
adventures.”

Having never actually seen 

“Elizabethtown,” I cannot 
attest to the truth of this state-
ment. However, I do know a 
MPDG when I see one: they’re 
everywhere. In fact, they seem 
to be multiplying, waltzing 
with their ukuleles from film to 
TV show to music video, from 
Hollywood to Sundance to 
Cannes to SAC 310.

It’s great that people are 

more aware of how female 
characters are often written as 
solely two-dimensional vehi-
cles for male enlightenment. 
But recently, as more and more 
female characters are slapped 
with the disparaging label of 
MPDG, there has been some 
backlash — and deservedly so. 
People, including Nathan Rabin 
himself, who has said that he 
regrets coining the phrase, 
are starting to think it’s unfair 
that every female character 
who possesses some weird trait 
or unusual hobby or obscure 
taste in music is labeled as 
MPDG. If girls are MPDGs 
when they’re different, but 
basic when they’re “normal,” 
how do you write a non-MPDG 
female character who doesn’t 
too closely resemble a piece of 
Wonder Bread?

While there’s no shortage of 

Manic Pixie Dream Girls pop-
ping up, the quickness of the 
gavel to label a female charac-
ter a MPDG — thus shrinking 
opportunities to believe in 
creative, complex female char-
acters — isn’t the real crux of 
the issue.

The problem is that the term 

Manic Pixie Dream Girl is 
starting to become an insult in 
itself wielded against women, 
not the men who use them. The 
whole point of the label is to 
hold writers accountable for 
using women as plot drivers, 
bringers of male epiphanies or 
adventuresses who brighten 
the lives of the men they laugh-
ingly lead by the hand into the 
horizon (or don’t: see “500 
Days of Summer” for an exam-
ple). Instead, it has become 
a quick, culturally relevant, 
in-the-know way to criticize 
women. This is especially 
relevant to how it relates to 
aesthetics. The point of Manic 
Pixie Dream Girl is not to 
criticize a woman’s wardrobe 
or hair or makeup choices; it 
never has been, but that is what 
it has devolved into.

By focusing too much on aes-

thetics and allowing the term 
to be used to criticize female 
characters in a vacuum without 
analyzing how they’re used 
by the men in the story, we’re 
forgetting the point. What used 
to be a term used to criticize 
writers and directors for using 
women solely as props has now 
become a term to demean or 
dismiss the women themselves.

I have even heard people 

call real women — women they 
know, are friends with, are dat-
ing — Manic Pixie Dream Girls. 
The most obvious example of 
this would be Zooey Deschanel, 
who has become the poster girl 
for MPDGs. The actor herself 
has been referred to by this 
label, starting from when she 
was the undeniable MPDG 
in “500 Days of Summer” to 
the recurring Saturday Night 
Live sketch “Bein’ Quirky with 
Zooey Deschanel” to even her 
character in “New Girl.” While 
her character in the 2009 
movie was absolutely a MPDG 
— her only role to lead Joseph 
Gordon-Levitt to emotional 
awakenings — her character 
in “New Girl” is not. And the 
SNL sketch doesn’t make fun of 
the idea of MPDGs, but rather 
takes Deschanel’s character 
traits and holds them up to 
mockery.

Real women can’t be Manic 

Pixie Dream Girls, because that 
term refers to a construct built 
by men. Calling a real woman 

a MPDG for any reason — her 
wardrobe, her taste in music, 
her favorite books, whatever 
— is essentially turning her 
into two-dimensional arche-
type. Please, for the love of 
the nine muses — all of whom 
were women, who would’ve 
thought? — don’t refer to a real 
woman as a Manic Pixie Dream 
anything.

Ross Putnam, a producer 

with a Twitter account that 
went viral — @femscriptin-
tros — helped shine a spotlight 
on the origins of this problem 
when he started tweeting 
“intros for female leads in 
actual scripts” that he has read, 
changing all of the names to 
Jane.

Some of my personal favor-

ites include: “JANE stares into 
camera through intense eyes 
— she’s beautiful but hard, like 
a layer of humanity has been 
scraped away,” “Jane (late 20s) 
sits hunched over a microscope. 
She’s attractive, but too much 
of a professional to care about 
her appearance,” “All heads 
turn to fine JANE (28) in the 
doorway: stunning and trying 
her best to hide it” and finally, 
“A gorgeous woman, JANE, 23, 
is a little tipsy, dancing naked 
on her big bed, as adorable as 
she is sexy. *BONUS PTS FOR 
BEING THE 1ST LINE.”

The worst part is that not all 

of these characters would be 
described as MPDGs, because 
some of them may just be side-
kicks or non-romantic leads or 
just happy neurotypicals. Not 
every single one of these char-
acter intros have to do with 
the woman’s attractiveness or 
her relationship to her physical 
appearance, but the vast major-
ity do. And these are real films. 
If even the intros to a character 
hold nothing of substance, how 
is the character supposed to?

The MPDG trope isn’t the 

only archetype or misogynis-
tic weak writing tool that still 
plagues our media, but the 
creation and consumption of 
trope itself coupled with the 
flawed criticism of it is one of 
the most insidious problems in 
the industry. 

Kaufman is moving to New York 

on a whim. To start a new life with 

her, email sophkauf@umich.edu.

Manic Pixie Dream 

Girls gone wild

The popular phrase should be about bad writing, not real women

DO YOU PRONOUNCE ‘THEATRE’ 

WITH A BRITISH ACCENT? 

DO YOU READ THE NEW YORKER MORE 

THAN YOU TEXT YOUR PARENTS?

DO YOU LIKE CHICKENS?

Then Join Daily Arts Community Culture!

Email ajtheis@umich.edu and 

katjacqu@umich edu for information 

on applying to Daily Arts.

As climate change is a hugely 

complicated 
and 
multifaceted 

issue, it’s difficult to create a com-
prehensive 
look 

into all of its causes 
and implications. 
However, “Before 
the Flood” does 
an impressive job 
of showcasing the 
multiple perspec-
tives surrounding 
climate change, as 
well as its real-time impacts and 
possible solutions. Oscar Award 
winner, United Nations Ambassa-
dor for Peace and slick man about 
town Leonardo DiCaprio (“The 
Revenant”) partners with Nation-
al Geographic to create a terrify-
ing and provocative exposition of 
climate change.

The documentary begins with 

a look at the industrial side of cli-
mate change, revealing the world’s 
dependence on fossil fuel indus-
tries for global energy systems. 
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. is revealed 
as one of the major consumers of 
energy and subsequent emitters 
of fossil fuels, providing a much-
needed slap in the face to the issue 
and consequences of American 
consumerism. The film constantly 
reinforces the massive scale and 
harmful effects of the fossil fuel 
industries. However, it sometimes 
falls short in explaining exactly 
how they operate, instead assum-
ing the viewer understands these 
processes.

One of the major achievements 

of the film is that it goes beyond 
attempting to convince the view-
er that climate change exists; 

instead, it presents the indisput-
able science and moves on from 
any discussion of its validity. The 
film does address the many biases 
in politics and the media, with 
clips of Republican politicians and 

newscasters deny-
ing the existence of 
climate change. The 
documentary 
suc-

ceeds in revealing 
a terrifying reality 
of the number and 
power of climate 
change 
deniers, 

showing gridlock in 

a Congress stuffed with ignorant 
policymakers blocking legislation. 
The public, in turn, is force-fed the 
illusion that climate change is a 
debatable issue.

The brilliance of “Before the 

Flood” lies in the way it shows 
how all these perspectives are 
intertwined. The film uncovers 
the practice of fossil fuel corpora-
tions paying people with scientific 
or political credentials to deny cli-
mate change and lobby Congress 
to block any climate change legis-
lation. In short, politics is rife with 
institutional corruption in favor of 
corporate interest. This influences 
the media and the public perspec-
tive, adding to public ignorance of 
the very real and immediate prob-
lem of climate change.

The documentary also does a 

nice job widening the lens from 
American politics to the global 
environmental and social effects 
of climate change. With gorgeous 
footage from all over the globe, 
Leonardo DiCaprio explores the 
melting of the polar ice caps, the 
flooding of agricultural lands in 
India and the devastation of the 
pacific islands. Testimony from 

real people in real places works 
to put this issue into a digestible 
context, reinforcing the fact that 
climate change is affecting land-
scapes and people in real time. 
Furthermore, the film brilliantly 
captures one bitter paradox, that 
those who contribute to climate 
change the least are the ones most 
effected. This crushing reality is 
necessary to understand but leaves 
the upper middle class American 
viewer feeling powerless.

The film rounds out with an 

exploration of solutions. Almost 
gratuitously, 
President 
Barack 

Obama slides in with his charac-
teristically presidential optimism, 
reinforcing the hope that educat-
ing the masses will elicit change. 
Economists and other officials 
discuss a carbon tax to incentivize 
clean energy use, while reinforc-
ing following the example of world 
leaders in renewable energy. Even 
the Pope endorses climate change 
and calls for global systematic 
restructuring.

Despite these possible solu-

tions, Leo remains heavily cynical; 
the film ends with the bone-chill-
ing driving point that the U.S. 
and the world has the capacity to 
reverse climate change, but lacks 
the political will. The documen-
tary’s main failing lies in its final 
confusing placing of responsibil-
ity – is it the people’s job to change 
policy through careful consumer-
ism or careful voting? Does it go 
higher, with the need for nations 
to implement clean energy sys-
tems? Is it both, or something else? 
The effect of this confusion is an 
overall documentary that is cap-
tivating, thought-provoking and 
inspiring – but ultimately over-
whelming.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

“2 Revenant 2 Furious”

A-

“Before the Flood”

National 

Geographic

DiCaprio saves the world

FILM REVIEW

SOPHIA KAUFMAN

Daily Gender & Media Columnist

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

“Hey I just met you and this is crazy, but could you hold my pet chinchilla?”

GENDER & MEDIA COLUMN

SYDNEY COHEN

Daily Arts Writer

