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It’s a warped omnipotence, a negative psychic power, as if what happens in your head really drives the world outside. Living so intensely in your head that boundaries disappear. It’s a state that Chris Kraus, in her novel I Love Dick, affectionately calls the “psychosis of adolescence”: Quentin staunchly refuses to detach his thoughts about Margo from his thoughts about his friends, his school, or his family. She disappears from the plot, but remains ever present in the narrative. When Margo runs away from home the next day, she seemingly leaves hints of her whereabouts in places only Quentin would find them (think of it as Gone Girl without the horrific mental and physical torture). Paper Towns is devoted IN ITS ENTIRETY to destroying the lie of the manic pixie dream girl… I do not know how I could have been less ambiguous about this without calling the novel The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed. The first third of Paper Towns constructs this stereotype, Green argues, in order to deconstruct it later:
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In the book, he thinks to himself, “I kept taking glances at her… quick snapshots: a photographic series entitled Perfection Stands Still While Mortals Walk Past.” The film lingers on glamorous slow-motion shots of Delevingne’s windswept face as she leans out of the passenger window. Quentin falls quickly into the role of observer. They rattle around Orlando in Quentin’s mum’s car, committing acts of revenge on their awful, shallow peers. Until, of course, one evening, when Margo bursts through Quentin’s bedroom window promising a wild night of elaborate pranks and romantic gestures.
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Once childhood friends, they now barely speak, because Margo has become (gasp) popular.
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Margo Roth Speigelman, always referred to by her full name, lives oppostite the protagonist of Paper Towns, high school student Quentin Jacobsen (played by Nat Wolff in the film). Margo, played wonderfully by Cara Delevingne, is mysterious, beautiful, troubled, and spontaneous. Like other flat stock characters, such as Elizabethtown’s Claire and Garden State’s Sam, Margo has all the required characteristics to qualify as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, “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”. This is the struggle at the heart of Paper Towns, John Green’s bestselling YA novel and, now, summer blockbuster. It’s a criticism Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” video endured, and Amy Schumer faced with her GQ cover: when does subversion end and submission begin? How do you kill a trope in a mainstream story? How do you solve a problem like Margo Roth Speigelman? When parody wrestles with the generic tropes it seeks to destabilise, it can be easy to perpetuate, rather than supplant, stereotypes.