The criticism about roles Zooey sometimes plays is that they’re ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girls’ AKA male fantasies who exist only to help the men around them grow. Brilliantly, the men around Jess Day do grow: they grow to like her. They grow to realise that that, ultimately, Jess is not that annoying.
Jess Day never loses her love of crafting, poofy dresses, show tunes, talking about her feelings, or loving her friends. The men – and women – around her realise that she’s smart, and that she has value, which isn’t diminished because she cares about children, art, and things that are coded as feminine. It works because of the writing, and because of the great ensemble cast, and most of all, because Zooey is so, so funny.
Remember: hating on Zooey Deschanel was a personality in the late 2000s. I myself was more invested in the politics of her fandom than I was in the 2012 presidential election. I thought of myself a feminist, but my reasoning was the same as any sexist: she was feminine in a way that didn’t appeal to me. There was something about her I found irritating. The epicentre of this rage was the 2009 indie 500 Days of Summer, a movie about a man who projects a fantasy onto a woman and then has a breakdown when she isn’t interested. “She is always scrupulously honest with him,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review. “She is her own person, and Tom can’t have her.”
It was as if millions of people made a secret pact to misunderstand this. “Summer turns out to be the bewitching villain in this story, breaking Tom’s heart without a second thought,” the Daily Beast mourned. “I hated her blank-eyed, dress-twirling turn as the object of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s obsession in 500 Days of Summer – the role that launched 1,000 indie wet dreams,” a critic groused in Slate. “Still haven’t forgiven Zooey Deschanel for what she did to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days of Summer,” a fan wrote on Twitter as late as 2018, to great discussion.
A lot of us felt a kind of misogynistic fury toward ultra-feminine-presenting women around the time of the New Girl premiere: Taylor Swift is the prime example. Their cuteness – Zooey starting a blog called Hello Giggles, Taylor living on a Christmas-tree farm – felt like a threat. It’s not that it’s anti-feminist to dislike women. It’s that the hatred of women like Zooey is often coded as a feminist critique, but actually seems to come from a place of dislike of women in general.