Read Online This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange - Free Book Online

more gravely Biggs is bound to her. This despite Allen’s own warnings (he plays Biggs’s misanthropic mentor), which fairly gong with rue for a time when it was the seventeen-year-old bird who wound up blowing your mind with her philosophical backhand. “She’s a hormonal jitterbug,” Allen cries, “who’ll have you holding up filling stations to keep her on mood elevators!”

    The Hud Principle
    If explaining this crash-helmeted Kewpie doll’s sudden ubiquity or even throwing fences around the matter seems like too massive an undertaking, there is something simpler to consider, and that is whether calling her any kind of dream girl is bogus chiefly because she wasn’t properly dreamed up in the first place.
    In referring to the early era of cinema as “the golden age,” in part we refer to a time when movies were experienced in a state of aesthetic innocence. Our first impulse was to build palaces around them: opulent wombs lit up with new life, they encouraged us to dream together. Theaters of war, literature, religion, myth, nationalism, and technology have all served the same purpose: they open a forum for the telling of stories about who we are and might be. Inevitably those stories shape our sense of what is best and worst in us. The movies were a new way to extend the gestation of human ideals into our dreaming lives.
    As a culture and its conduits fragment, the dreams we dream together become fewer and farther in between. The ideals we produce reflect this fragmentation: they work harder for less return; their influence is broad but transitory and superficial, or concentrated but esoteric. Thinking of the MPDG’s persistence, I am reminded of Melvyn Douglas in Hud , warning the teenager making pie eyes at Paul Newman’s tumbleweed hustler, “Little by little, the look of a country changes because of the men we admire.”
    That the new millennium’s first beacon of femininity is a gnomic grown woman in ankle socks and neon jelly shoes feels less like an organic outcome than a perversion of the process. I think of this much-admired her the way I think of natal wards and nurseries filling up with children whose fathers and mothers were selected from three-ring-binder profiles, without the assistance of those known and unknown bits of magic that ever drew us to our mates.
    I can’t imagine that I was alone, as the aughts wore on, in feeling a gorge of dread and mortification rise every time one of these painfully constricted specimens motormouthed across the screen. Her rate of replication seemed to suggest something dire about us. The idea that enough versions of the same type should add up to archetype seemed to bode poorly for the movies as well. As any woman who ever flirted with the trappings of frailty, flaunted her spectacular oddity, or advertised the depth of her knowledge of early Small Faces LPs knows, frailty, flaunting, and advertising are the dispiriting sum total of this ideal. For those still wrestling with the Monroe Doctrine—wonderful to whom?—she offers too sparse and specific an answer and adds too particular a melancholy to the perennial dream girl demurral— But you don’t even know me! —and its breathless protest: But I do .

    It’s Jess. That Girl Is Jess
    We live in a have-not era of feminine identity. I don’t know what else but an acute case of Stockholm syndrome could explain the fact that instead of formulating a meaningful response, or even just drafting a letter of apology to the next generation of girls, young female artists have internalized the MPDG and begun breeding her independently.
    The most conspicuous example of this is Zooey Deschanel and her wide, periwinkle eyes. A favorite on the independent circuit, Deschanel found mainstream success by specializing in mildly varied flavors of the MPDG, most notably Summer in 2009’s (500) Days of Summer . At thirty-one, she launched a