A Different Kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl
My one beef (ha ha, get it) with a perfect season two of The Bear
*Warning: This essay contains very light spoilers for season two of The Bear
“I say the following with all the love in my heart: uh oh.”
This is what Mallika said to me when I told her we probably need to start a TikTok, and it’s what the God-type figure Uncle Jimmy (played by America’s sweetheart Oliver Platt) says to Carm in the final episode of season two of The Bear.
Uncle J isn’t talking about Carm (Jeremy Allen White)'s restaurant, which has been on fire, and largely without walls for half the season, and is surely about to send every character in the show into financial turmoil (despite how good those savory parmesan crusted cannolis look). He’s talking about Carm’s new girlfriend, Claire.
Everyone agrees that Claire, or Claire Bear, is great. This a Good Thing for Carmen echoes through season two less like an encouraging mantra and more like a death march. Because good things don’t happen to Carmen, who left his Michelin star restaurant gig to move home to Chicago and take over his dead brother’s sandwich joint, stealing all of our hearts in season one with that blue apron and those muscular tattooed arms.
This season, Claire is Carmen’s shot at happiness — one that he is almost certainly going to miss. She’s a glass chandelier hanging at the center of The Bear’s ballroom of chaos. Eventually, the racket will cause it to fall from the ceiling and this beautiful shiny thing will shatter, leaving everyone else scattered in the fragments.
That’s what Claire is: a shiny, beautiful thing. And if I have one critique of this absolutely perfect season of television, it’s this.
Claire (played by Molly Gordon of Booksmart fame) runs into Carm at the beginning of season two in a convenience store. In a different kind of show, you might be suspicious of her sudden happen-stance arrival into our main character’s life. But in this world, lit up blue by the refrigerator light, she’s immediately the girl of Carm’s dreams. Soft spoken, soulful, really interested in Carmen and what he’s been up to all these years — the two were, of course, childhood friends and neighbors.
Claire is, unsettlingly, the kind of girl every boy I had a crush on in high school would be in love with, but I guess that’s not her fault. She is very beautiful but not in a pretentious way. She’s a compassionate listener, not just to Carmy, but also to her heartbroken bestie (played with an extra dose of tragic by Mitra Jouhari). She works as a resident in a trauma center, so she gets the fast-paced chaos of Carmen’s life as a chef, but we don’t actually see her weighed down by the strain of her job. In fact, she might be the only ER resident in America with free time. Apparently Greys Anatomy lied to us, and overworked baby surgeons DON’T have meltdowns while emergency shaving half of their legs before a date. They just go home and eskimo kiss their lovers’ eyeballs while whispering, “but how are you doing?”.
Or maybe Claire just doesn’t have any of her own problems because she’s, say it with me, a manic pixie dream girl.
The term was coined back in 2007 by film critic Nathan Rabin, who was critiquing the Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst movie Elizabethtown. In it, Dunst plays a flight attendant who pops up in Bloom's life during a time of loss and turmoil and is also very immediately the girl of his dreams, despite him knowing her for all of 30 seconds. She has a quirky, carefree perspective on life, but nothing about her even hints at internal growth or exploration. She is a pixie, a plot device designed to propel our male protagonist into happiness and self acceptance. See also: Natalie Portman in Zach Braff’s Garden State or that girl with purple hair in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World or Zoey Deschanel in… everything.
Rabin says a manic pixie dream girl is a female character who “exists... to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” In episode one, a very brooding Carmy goes into a grief support group and like a nerd-freak-ass, pulls out the dictionary definition of “fun,” which apparently as a verb is “to provide entertainment and enjoyment”.... Ok, weirdo. But anyway, a few scenes later, fun enters the chat in the form of a beautiful brunette named Claire Bear. Sorry, I don’t make the rules! Babe is a MPDG.
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Although Claire does tell one childhood story in which she saw a kid’s broken arm and thought ~wow, I love broken things~ (hitting the nail a little too on the head with that one, Christopher Storer), she doesn’t quite reach the quirk level of a Deschanel or a Dunst. She’s not defined by a few silly character traits. She doesn’t playfully goad Carmy into doing something wacky like yelling into the abyss.
But she might be a new (and worse) kind of trope: the reward. Let’s say we have a male protagonist, who’s really a good guy (and a good-looking guy at that). He’s got some demons. Relationships have been hard. The people around him really think he deserves love and happiness and finally he’s found it in the form of a girl. She is sweet, understanding and not annoying. And then the next plot questions aren’t, who is she? What does she want? Instead, the tension lies in, can he keep her, or will his demons drive her away?
Take Annabelle Wallis’ Grace Burgess in Netflix’s Peaky Blinders. While Burgess starts out interesting (a spy! with a grudge!) she immediately melts into what the show’s hero, Tommy Shelby — played by one half of Barbenheimer Cillian Murphy — needs her to be. And that’s fine by everyone because Shelby, while flawed, is a good guy who craves love. Grace drops everything to give him that (and you would do it too for a check those bored cheekbones and that Irish accent). By her exit, she embodies “something great” to eventually be lost at the hand of Shelby’s own dark instincts. It’s all about what a man deserves weighed with what he can sustain.
At least with your garden variety manic pixie dream girl, there’s a hint of charisma in the form of being the most fucking annoying girl a man has ever met in his life. As an admittedly insufferable person — THAT I relate to. Meanwhile, a reward girlie like Claire never directly causes any problems. The only thing she can do wrong is be so damn agreeable and loving that our male protagonist questions whether he is deserving of love at all.
As much as I disagree (and am in fervent support of a platonic but deeply intimate work relationship), in the shadow of all of this, I get why some are looking to Carmy’s sous chef and business partner Sydney as a potential love interest. Sydney came into The Bear fully formed, with flaws, desires and fears. She’s a real person in a way that Claire is not, which makes her easier to identify with. And who doesn’t want to see themselves reflected in the love interest of Ridgewood, Queens resident hottie Jeremy Allen White?
Though unfortunately, in some ways, the writing of Claire, like all of the writing on The Bear, is a pretty spot on reflection of real life. Carmy would absolutely be in love with a girl like Claire. In watching her on the show, we’re essentially stepping into one man’s crush—which we all know is just a lack of information, a human sponge that can be anything you want it to be. If it’s my crush we’re talking about, that maybe looks something like.... I don’t know, Paul Mescal drunk and crying on a voicemail saying “I really foookin love you, Marianne.” But if you’re a guy like Carmy, with a hectic job and enough drama to last a lifetime just inside your mother’s house alone, your crush might look something like a hot girl who only asks you questions about yourself and has no personality whatsoever.
But when thinking about what The Bear could have done better, or could still do better, I keep coming back to Fleabag’s season two, which I see as kind of a spiritual sister to The Bear’s sophomore: two perfect seasons of shows about grief which lightly feature Olivia Coleman.
Phoebe Waller Bridge and Andrew Scott, who in the show are just referred to as “fleabag” and “priest” (or “hot priest”), don’t fit perfectly into this mold of the reward. Fleabag, who is addicted to making terrible choices, isn’t really a good guy, so the hot priest isn’t a reward, so much as a miracle. She meets him when she’s desperate for a flicker of happiness and love. And, voila! In walks someone great. Because what woman’s crush isn’t slightly alcoholic and troubled yet soulfully intelligent?
Hot priest mostly exists for the same reasons that Claire does: so the audience can watch our protagonist learn to love and grapple with how to hold onto something so purely good. The priest is designed to be something that our main character passes through, to be profoundly changed when she comes out the other side. Just like Claire, the things we know about the priest are largely to fuel Fleabag’s infatuation with him. Even his brother’s pedophilic history is used as fodder for dinner table humor.
We don’t get an episode from Scott’s perspective, or see him do things on his own outside of Fleabag’s periphery. But yet the audience can see that he is wrestling with something, that his existence doesn’t revolve around wanting and loving Fleabag.
We hold our breaths watching Fleabag navigate this relationship, wondering how she’ll fuck it up. But it’s not her own demons that drive the hot priest away at all. It’s his choice. Even though it’s Fleabag’s story, in the end, the outcome hinges on the priest’s inner struggle, deciding if his love for her is worth tossing away the inner peace he’s found with God.
This kind of depth and power handed to the priest doesn’t diminish Fleabag’s own agency. Her journey remains the most important thread of the show and the hot priest serves his purpose to her, he opens her up to believing she might deserve a chance at happiness, even if it’s not through him. He can pass this on because he’s not tied eternally to being her “something great,” it’s just one bucket among many others that he fits in.
I wish this kind of power and independence for Claire in The Bear’s season three, if only because I think Molly Gordon could pull it off. Free her from manic pixie dream-dom! It’s not too late to give her an “It’ll pass,” dammit.
B Plot
Question: Who’s your favorite pet on a TV show?
Mallika: This feels like a cop out because he could talk but as we’ve said before we make the rules around here so I’m going with Salem Saberhagen, the black cat from Sabrina The Teenage Witch (NOT to be confused Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina). He was technically a warlock who got turned into a cat because he tried to take over the world — and can we blame him? If I could put all my nutty ideas into action, I’d hope one of you would turn me into a cat, too. His sass was one of my favorite parts of that show. Side note: During research, I discovered London’s dog Ivana on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody was voiced by Emma Stone. No Emmy nom? Snubbed for this, snubbed for Easy A…
Rachel: I don’t know why my sick, sick brain immediately went to Duck’s stunning Irish setter on Mad Men….. that dog deserved better. But then I remembered the most practically named dog on television, Backup the pitbull on Veronica Mars. Call me Mrs. Paw Patrol (jk jk ACAB!!) but I love a dog with a job. Veronica, a high schooler who moonlights as a private eye because that’s a normal after-school job, brings Backup as her go-to security detail to spy on bad guys and set traps for creepy scammers. Backup is working over-time and making minimum wage. He should get a steak for every stake out. Unionize the pit bulls!
C Plot
We know this is against the rules because it’s not a TV show, but this newsletter is publishing on Barbenheimer day (!) It’s relevant actually because we’ve already name-dropped Cillian Murphy, and Barbie features some of TV’s heaviest hitters, Insecure’s Issa Rae, Arrested Development’s Michael Cera, Sex Education’s Emma Mackey, The Crown’s Emerald Fennell in yet another raggedy ass wig. The reviews are in and… everyone should see Barbie and Oppenheimer in theaters. We weren’t connected enough to get invited to any early screenings, but once we use our investigative journalism skills to unearth what kind of dirt Josh Peck has on Hollywood’s top execs to land that Nickelodeon unsalted tortilla chip who won’t leave Jennette McCurdy alone a spot not just in a Christopher Nolan movie but in THE FIRST SHOT of the Oppenheimer trailer, it’s over for all of you hoes.
Speaking of Sex Education, Emma Watson is randomly friends with Ncuti Gatwa (Eric) and British wrapper Stormzy? They were pictured together at Wimbledon (where the recently-single-though-maybe-dating-Spongebob-Squarepants Ariana Grande cosplayed Challengers by sitting in between two of Britain’s hottest twinks… crazy to see someone else living your dream) and yet again Watson appears to be dating her brother. They wore matching pink linen and it wasn’t even to the Barbie premiere! We’re worried about her!
On the subject of women we’re worried about, there’s one we didn’t even know we should have been worrying about but perhaps don’t need to worry about anymore: Bethany Joy Lenz. Combining two of Mallika’s prime interests (One Tree Hill and cults), Lenz (who played Haley on OTH) revealed on the Drama Queens podcast recently that she was in a cult for a decade. But don’t worry, she’s been out of it, divorced from the man who put her in there (because of course it was a man) and in recovery for almost 10 years as well. Lenz said she’s thinking about writing a tell-all about her experience, which we will of course be reading, especially because according to a Deux Moi blind item, the guy from the 2002 film Tuck Everlasting, also starring Alexis Bledel, is involved?? And we thought Chad Michael Murray was the only Gilmore Girls and One Tree Hill crossover….
PS: Keep an eye out for us in today’s special edition of Is This Available?