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Ben Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel Split


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Speaking of Zooey and The New Girl...

This is from an article on Cracked.com titled Four Pieces of Relationship Advice Hollywood Needs to Stop Giving

Number 4. Not Being Able to Function Socially Makes Someone Attractive and Interesting

The Thing: “If she’s a wide-eyed, crazy, eccentric free-spirit, then she’s actually just the gal you need to straighten your entire life out, man! Bursting out in song in the middle of dinner and not knowing how things work makes a person attractive!”

Worst Offenders:The New Girl,Garden State.

This trope has been around so long that it’s actually been given a name. Film critic Nathan Rabin calls it the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character and describes it as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that 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.” It’s any chick in a movie who is more style than substance, and whose free-spiritedness and unconventional approach to life is meant to cover up for her general inability to function socially. And and it’s insulting to both genders.

Zooey Deschanel’s character in The New Girlis probably the clearest example of this right now, as that entire show is based around how quirky and eccentric and, as a result, lovable, Zooey’s character (I think her name is “Eyeface”) is. Except she’s not so much “eccentric” as much as she is “bad at being alive and functioning socially, in the present.” One of her main conflicts in the pilot is that she has a date at a fancy restaurant, but doesn’t know what to wear so she puts on overalls! Classic Eyeface! And one of the male characters on the show goes goofy-eyed and clearly starts falling in love with her instead of, say, yelling, “You’re 27 years old, how do you not know how to dress and function yet? Get your shit together.”

It needs to stop because guys shouldn’t live their lives expecting a woman like this to exist. No guy should be waiting around for a quirky, blue-haired, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing chick to show up and fix his entire life, because what woman would want to deal with that expectation and level of pressure?

It also needs to stop because I don’t want wide-eyed gals to think they need to act like vapid morons to attract guys. Because I’m an average, twenty-something male in 2011 America, I’ve developed a pop-culture induced soft spot for pale chicks with giant eyes and bangs.

And, unfortunately, Hollywood is trying to convince women who look like this that being brainless goofballs who don’t understand how life works is an appealing personality type, and I just can’t let that stand.

Hollywood is still teaching women that “dumb” is “attractive,” they’re just hipsterfying it. I don’t know when it happened (maybe after Clueless?), but sometime after the ’90s, “Quirky Eccentric Weird Chick” became the new Bimbo. She’s just as insultingly one-dimensional as the archetypal Ditsy Blonde Bombshell Valley Girl character that was all over the place a decade ago, except now she wears vintage knee-socks and listens to The Smiths, and that’s supposed to be better, for some reason.

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Number 4. Not Being Able to Function Socially Makes Someone Attractive and Interesting

The Thing: “If she’s a wide-eyed, crazy, eccentric free-spirit, then she’s actually just the gal you need to straighten your entire life out, man! Bursting out in song in the middle of dinner and not knowing how things work makes a person attractive!”

This whole article sums up why I can't stand Zooey Deschanel. Every role she is in, I can't help but feel the URGE to seek her out and punch her in the face. Every attractive quality of hers is balanced out by an equally off-putting "cute little quirk". I get the sense that this is her personality and she just plays herself, Michael Cera-style. Plus she's a well below-average singer and actress. She sure is pretty, but there are better pretty girls out there.

I am excited to see if this gets Gibbard out of his mediocre songwriting rut.

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