‘Ruby Sparks’ retrospective: How the 10-year old quirky writer fantasy still feels topical in the way we talk about power, art, muses and love

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The titular character of Ruby Sparks first appears in a dream. In the midst of a crippling, neurotic, self-serving writer’s block, the acclaimed novelist Calvin Weir Field (Paul Dano) dreams of a beautiful redhead, a shadowy silhouette on a sunny day. When Calvin begins compulsively writing about her, she becomes fully-fledged — Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), from Dayton, Ohio. His dream girl, down to the last life detail. She’s quirky, messy in a palatable way, artistic and sweet and sexy. After some time writing her, through an inexplicable manifested miracle, Ruby appears in Calvin’s kitchen — physically materialized, cooking him breakfast, reaching out to hold him with a breezy casualness. She is totally unaware that she has been written by him, that she is anything but his partner, that her memories, her life, her very soul, all come from him.

Ruby does whatever Calvin wants. Her lore is built in, crafted by him (she loves roller skating, giving blowjobs, and cooking, she has a checklist of past red flag relationships but also isn’t a slut, loves to cook and to snuggle her twiggy neurotic boyfriend), and anything about her can be altered by whatever Calvin types. His private promise to never type anything again once she becomes real, to let her be her own person, is founded in an extremely weak resolve. It only takes Ruby slight pulling away from him for Calvin to write that Ruby needs him like air, forcing her to cling to him like a child or a lost puppy. When this irritates, he writes instead that she’s always happy, until her mania pisses him off. When he writes some agency into her spirit, he grows irritated by the way she’s a normal woman.

There is no winning, because Calvin doesn’t really want a partner, he wants some intangible, impossible fantasy. He wants a story to control. When reading Calvin’s first draft of Ruby, Calvin’s older brother, Harry (Chris Messina) scoffs at the manuscript: “You haven’t written a person, okay? You’ve written a girl.” Part of what makes Ruby Sparks work, allows it to hold a weight beyond its bordering on cutesy premise, is the films’ awareness of what can drive artistry, especially writing — a desire to control, to understand, to anticipate, to force things to go your own way.

Ruby Sparks came to fruition in the midst of early “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” discourse, in fact, screenwriter Zoe Kazan was regularly asked about the term (rejecting it repeatedly, insisting that women should just be allowed to be women), and it feels a bit like a harbinger of our current era of extreme personal labeling, especially in an increasingly digital world. Manic pixie dream girl now sits among a variety of mantels — femcels, dissociative feminist, e-girls, film bros, bimbos and so on and so on, a cultural insistence that you can and should be readable. When Calvin tenderly says that he “loves [Ruby’s] mess,” you know that he is a man in the midst of romanticization, disinterested in seeing her as whole, seeing her instead as something adequately labeled. 

Ruby Sparks has a certain simplicity to its execution — in terms of structure, tone, feeling, much of it feels as if it belongs in the realm of a simple 1980s or 1990s caper, along the lines of Big or Groundhog Day. The beauty of a simple, slightly romantic, premise being well-executed. What if the perfect girl you forced out on your typewriter during a creative block became real and in love with you, changeable on a whim? 

But simultaneously Ruby Sparks feels almost ahead of its time in its exploration of the specific self-flagellation and narcissism of many writers. Now ten years old, Ruby Sparks still feels topical in the way we talk about power, art, muses, love, and manipulation in a modern context.

These are complicated, but commonly explored, experiences. What’s magical about Ruby Sparks is the way it touches these explosive, impossible concepts with a light, pleasing, sunny, touch, letting them marinate gently in the midst of Los Angeles and the California coast. It holds itself as a pretty romance film replete with montages, gentle kisses, and coupled bickering, first and foremost, lacking the grit of much of our more recent cinematic takes on obsession, creation, and the pressures of modern womanhood. But that’s what frequently draws me to it. It feels pleasant to watch instead of draining. 

Calvin appears painfully humble, seems to deeply enjoy the process of being in pain — likes when things are hard, when he can say he’s never going to have another good idea again, likes blaming his beautiful mother and his ex-girlfriend for his problems. He waves away praise with intensity.

His problems as an artist are non-problems in so many senses. His biggest concern is that he wrote a book so good — deemed by some as the next great American novel — at nineteen years old and now fears he can’t top it. His family and friends and therapist all let him moan and mope about writer’s block. He is self-indulgent, neurotic, constantly in his own head, a little irritating. A writer, through and through.

Writing is strange. It is interior and self-serving, often an inadvertent leeching off of others — their experiences, ideas, feelings. Existing as a woman is strange. Everything is marked, every decision is read. To be a woman is to accept that to many, you are perceived in a way similar to Calvin’s brother’s description — a girl, not a person. 

In this sense, there’s a certain beautiful folding in of itself in the way Ruby Sparks was created. The film was written by Zoe Kazan, the woman who plays Ruby — the quirky, beautiful, messy girl that came from the depths of the mind of Calvin actually came from her own brain. Calvin is played by Paul Dano, Kazan’s real life husband. Kazan admits that Calvin was, subconsciously, from the very start, written as Dano, and Ruby as herself, at least in terms of energies, despite insisting their relationship is vastly different. The film is directed by the duo Valerie Faris and Johnathan Dayton, also a married couple, and the follow-up to their Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine. It’s striking that the film is so entrenched in the loving and interpersonal — a multi-layered collaborative project centered upon creating and controlling a partner.

I write from between the worlds of Calvin and Ruby, between writer and modern woman — often creating personal work that picks apart my own response to art, culture, the world around me, where I try and make sense of me through the characters, stories, and ideas I am offered. Sometimes an exercise in learning, growing, creating, but sometimes, admittedly, a practice of performing palatability and appeal for an imagined audience. 

Slowly, but surely, Calvin’s red flags leak out. In therapy he describes his ex as a heartless slut, but when we finally meet her at a party she tearfully remembers a different relationship, one where he projected, manipulated, made her feel small and stupid. He hates his mom (played by the lovely Annette Bening) for falling in love with a handsome man who carves furniture from wood (played by the immensely sexy Antonio Banderas), and one wonders if this hatred comes from seeing them feel happy and spiritually aligned, opting out of his world of conventional suffering.

His biggest issue, though, is the way his writerly instincts seem to ooze into all that he does — he wants control, he wants people to read his mind and perform properly for him. And bubbling beneath his faux humbleness and his introverted, self-deprecating attitude is the truth, one that sits in so many artists — he actually thinks that he’s special, he thinks he’s worthy of being obsessed about, fawned over.

In the end, all of Calvin’s superficial self-flagellation is revealed to be completely and utterly for show. After a fight with Ruby (one in which she begs for Calvin to please just tell her the rules, unaware he’s written them all and is still unhappy with her, unaware that it is completely his fault, not her own), he shows her the truth by torturing her at the hands of his all-powerful typewriter, makes her sing, dance, strip, crawl around like a dog, and, in a final reveal of his true desires, jump up and down while screaming a repeated adoration: “You’re a genius! You’re a genius! You’re a genius!”

After torturing Ruby, he sets her free — allows for her to forget everything, have complete control, sends her out into the world like he’s a parent, like he’s God, like he’s an artist letting their work pass into the hands of the public instead of being clutched in his individual, controlling grasp. And like many writers before, he turns the pain — both his own and hers — into art, writes a novel about the experience that brings him back to the cultural forefront. He actually benefits from the whole mess. It borders on irritating, though I can’t say I don’t understand the urge, which is a testament to what Ruby Sparks does so well. A simple premise, sure, but underneath bubbles a distinct understanding of the potential toxicity of creation, of the way that to make art, but especially to write, is to be entrenched in desires of control and projection. 

But Ruby Sparks’ most important message is that even for geniuses, this is not an excuse — to hurt and to suffer for the art is your journey and yours alone, and it is your responsibility to not let it leak out into the interpersonal, to poison relationships with your artistic quirks. Even ten years later, it feels like a lesson many acclaimed artists are still in dire need of learning. 

Ruby Sparks was released by Fox Searchlight on July 25, 2012. It is currently available to buy or rent on Amazon and Prime Video.

Photo: Merrick Morton / Fox Searchlight