Ruby Sparks, the debut film from
writer-actress Zoe Kazan, is a modern adaptation of the Pygmalion myth, in
which a sculptor falls in love with his creation. Kazan’s adaptation is about a
young author whose dream girl comes to life,
and is celebrated for deconstructing the Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl (MPDG)
trope. While it is very nearly effective in doing so, it ultimately plays out
Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze instead: “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” (Mulvey,
624). I want to analyze where and how it goes wrong in order to better
understand where we can go right in the future.
Ruby Sparks hinges on a fantastic
concept: Calvin Weir-Fields, a celebrated author who has suffered writer’s
block for the past ten years, writes his dream girl into existence on an old
typewriter. He starts writing about her as an assignment from his therapist,
and one day, she appears in his sterile LA duplex, cooking him breakfast. She believes
herself to be his girlfriend, and is wholly unaware that she is a fictional
character.
Enter Mulvey. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,” she wrote, “pleasure
in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The
determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is
styled accordingly” (Mulvey, 624). Even at the beginning of Ruby Sparks, there are two scenes that
serve as clear examples of the male phantasy “project(ed) on to the female
figure” (Mulvey, 624).
The first scene is strangely juvenile in content. Over ethereal shots of
Ruby and Calvin swimming in their clothes, the fabric floating delicately in
the water, the pair confess their love. “What did you think the first time you
saw me?” Ruby asks, hoping to possess “to-be-looked-at-ness”
(Mulvey, 624). Calvin confirms that she does. “I thought you were the most
beautiful girl I ever saw,” he says.
Ruby then answers the question Calvin hasn’t bothered to ask. “The first time
I saw you, I thought, “Look at that boy. I’m going to love him forever and ever
and ever.”” “What if you get sick of me?” Calvin asks. “I won’t,” she says.
(She will.) “I promise.”
This is total fantasy: Calvin burdening Ruby with impossible expectations,
Ruby willingly accepting them. There are elements of Mulvey’s idea of the
“ideal ego. The character in the story”–in this case, Calvin, in his own
written tale– “can make things happen and control events better than the
subject/spectator” (Mulvey, 626). Ruby will never get sick of this Calvin.
In the second scene, Calvin describes Ruby to his therapist. “Ruby is from
Dayton, Ohio,” he begins. “Why Dayton?” His therapist asks. “Sounds romantic,”
Calvin answers, then continues. “She got kicked out of high school for sleeping
with her art teacher…or maybe her Spanish teacher,” Calvin says. “I haven’t
decided yet. Ruby can’t drive. She doesn’t own a computer. She always, always
roots for the underdog. Ruby’s not so good at life sometimes. She forgets to
open bills or cash checks. Her last boyfriend was 49. The one before that was
an alcoholic.”
Not only Ruby’s appearance, which is “coded for strong visual…impact” (Mulvey
624) after the manner of the typical MPDG–attractive figure, unconventional
good looks, brightly-colored, almost childish style–but her life, too, “hold
the look, play to and signify male desire” (Mulvey, 624). Calvin casually makes
massive, callous decisions about her life–she was kicked out of high school for sleeping
with her teacher. Does Calvin understand the potential consequences of the
decision he’s just made for Ruby?
No matter. In fact, it doesn’t even matter which teacher it was. Any will
do; Calvin can decide that later. Later, it comes out that Ruby’s parents died
when she was a baby, and she got moved around a lot. We are left to assume that
Ruby is an orphan for the same reason she is from Dayton– “sounds romantic.” Calvin,
as the man, “controls the film phantasy” (Mulvey, 625).
The film knows
that Calvin is a man-child dealing in tropes. This ideal he seeks does receive
scathing criticism, and often. That, presumably, was Kazan’s intent, as there
are many such moments. Some include the often-self-aware script making sly digs
at its protagonist’s ideals. For example, when Calvin speaks of Ruby to his
therapist, Dr. Rosenthal, he scolds himself, “I can’t fall in love with a girl
I write. She’s not real. She’s some motherf***ing product of my imagination!”
The other
characters make more overt criticisms of Calvin as the “bearer of the look”
(Mulvey, 624). His brother, Harry, scoffs, “You haven’t written a person. Quirky,
messy women whose problems only make them endearing are not real.” Calvin’s ex,
Lila, cries, “You just had this image of who I was, and anything I did that
contradicted it, you just ignored.”
Ruby herself gets in
some punches. Some are mild: she jokes with Harry, “He can be such a control
freak, right?” They intensify after a botched weekend at Big Sur with his
family. “You don’t have any friends,” Ruby notes. Calvin replies, “I have you.
I don’t need anyone else.” Ruby retorts, “That’s a lot of pressure.”
Things turn ugliest near the end of the film. “I’m
sorry I wasn’t acting like the platonic idea of your girlfriend,” she snaps
during one argument. “You don’t want me doing anything! You have all these
rules, and you don’t tell me what they are until–whoops–I’ve broken one, and
then you get to be disappointed with me? F*** you,” she snarls furiously. “I’m
not your child! You don’t get to decide what I do.”
But
of course, he does, doesn’t he? That’s the whole conceit of the film. It
manifests itself in various ways throughout the film’s hour and a half, and
those scenes are hefty evidence against the argument that Ruby Sparks effectively deconstructs the MPDG trope. They play out
very much in favor of Calvin as the traditional “bearer of the look.”
In an early scene,
Calvin embarrasses Ruby in public when he tries to prove that she’s a
hallucination. Angry and confused, Ruby throws a drink in Calvin’s face and
runs away. Calvin, thrilled to realize she’s real, chases her down, throws her
over his shoulder, and carries her away as she screams; the scene even features on the movie poster.
He doesn’t like
her singing in the kitchen; he doesn’t want her to get a job. The list goes on.
The most stunning manifestation of his aggressive “male desire” (Mulvey, 624) comes
about three-quarters of the way through the film. As mentioned above, Ruby and
Calvin fight, and Ruby yells, “I’m not your child! You don’t get to decide what
I do.”
Calvin can’t bring
himself to look at her, but can bring
himself to respond, “Want to bet? I’m pretty sure I can make you do whatever I
want.” “What are you going to do, Calvin, tie me up?” Ruby asks wearily. Calvin
replies, “No. I don’t have to.” He walks to his typewriter and loads it with
the pages of her story.
Calvin begins to
type, and Ruby involuntarily performs his words, perfectly controlled by the
keystrokes and ding of the typewriter. She realizes for the first time what she
is–woman, created in man’s image. The scene is stunning, “frightening,
emotionally sadistic” (Justin Chang). As Vadim Rizov wrote in Sight & Sound, “As he pounds the
typewriter, the cutting between the phallic platen slamming back and Ruby's
involuntary rising shouting mimics the rhythm of intercourse—it’s a cinematic
violation.” As discussed, Ruby’s entire past and personality are “coded for
strong visual and erotic impact” on her creator; in this scene, her every
action is, too.
“I wrote you,” her
creator says. “I made you up. I had a dream about a girl. I wrote it down. I
gave her a name. I can make you do anything because you’re not real.” “You’re
sick,” she says. “Listen to me. If this is how you think about people, then you
are in for a long, lonely, f***ed-up life.” He just looks at her and
types.
“Do you hear me?”
She snaps. The typewriter dings as he finishes the line he’s typing. She
continues speaking, then pauses in shock when it comes out in French. “I speak
French?” she asks in French, horrified. “But I don’t know how to speak French.”
She claps her hands to her mouth in fear. “See?” Calvin says calmly, pointing
to the typewriter. “Ruby speaks French.”
“What’s happening?” she asks, still in French.
He whispers, “I
told you I could make you do anything.”
He types again. “I write it”–the typewriter dings– “you do it.” The page
reads, “Ruby snaps,” and she begins snapping. “Stop, Calvin, stop!” she weeps
in French.
“Ruby strips and sings,”
he types quickly, staring at her with a gaze half horrified, half hungry. With
sorrow and fear in her eyes, Ruby begins stripping sexily and singing.
Type—ding. She
drops to the floor and begins barking, backing into a corner, growling. Type–ding.
“I love you. I’ll never leave you.” Type–ding. “I love your mouth,” she yells,
gesturing towards him, spinning around, gesturing, spinning, gesturing,
spinning, a tornado of not her own desire but his. “I love your nose. I love
your butt. I love your eyes. I love your belly. I love your ears. I love your
c***. I love your ears. I love your mouth. I love you so much. I’ll love you
forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever.” Type—ding. She begins
jumping up and down, cheering, “You’re a genius! You’re a genius! You’re a
genius! You’re a genius!”
With each
declaration, Calvin pounds his fists on the desk gleefully, his face elated. On
the last one, he pounds the keyboard and Ruby crumples to the ground. When he releases
the keyboard, Ruby stays on the floor, panting heavily. He comes close to her,
slowly, and then quickly grabs for her. She jumps to her feet and flees.
Calvin stands there,
staring at the closed door. After a long moment, he returns to the typewriter.
“As soon as Ruby left the house,” he types, “The past released her. She was no
longer Calvin’s creation. She was”–he closes his eyes in pain before he types
the last word. “Free.”
Despite that freedom–despite the well-intentioned and momentarily effective
undermining of the MPDG trope and the male ego, Ruby ends up exemplifying the
first and catering to the second. Her narrative purpose is, ultimately, as
critic Nathan Rabin put it, “to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace
life and its infinite mysteries and adventures” (Sierra Allison). This is
confirmed by the denouement and cemented by the final scene.
Ruby, neither the film nor the
character, is not freed by its denouement, in which Calvin frees Ruby from her
past; it is trapped by it. First, she did not break free, in Modleski-like
fashion; Calvin let her go. It was his consent, not hers–crucial for his character
arc, useless for hers.
Second, we don’t
follow Ruby after that. We stay with Calvin as his brother comforts him. We
watch him give up the old typewriter and buy a laptop. We stick close as he
achieves personal success–defeating his crippling writer’s block–and public
success–his new novel (about, yes, his and Ruby’s relationship) is a hit. “What
counts,” as Budd Boetticher said, “Is what the heroine provoke(d). She is the
one…who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the
slightest importance” (Mulvey, 625). The film makes that clear: as we visit
Calvin’s successes, his family’s faces glow proudly, the music is joyful, and the
scenes are edited into almost a brief, happy montage.
Third,
Calvin has the final word. He writes the story how he wants to; he has the
ultimate say. This is not the story of a weak man controlling a woman,
according to Calvin. It is, instead, as he begins his new novel, “The true and
impossible story of my very great love.” He offers a brief apology to Ruby in a
book reading. The crowd listens carefully as he says, “I can’t help but write
this for her. To tell her, “I’m sorry for every word I wrote to change you. I
couldn’t see you when you were here.””
The
apology passes as he continues to rewrite the narrative as he pleases, turning
it into a story of love and magic and miracles. “One may read this and think
it’s magic,” he says, “But falling in love is
an act of magic.” He then speaks of Ruby with an almost mystical reverence, as
if she were a fabled stag or fairy queen in a folk tale. “She came to me wholly
herself. I was just lucky enough to be there to catch her.”
Perhaps
it is damning enough that despite all Ruby’s attempts to be more than a MPDG, she
ultimately has no narrative importance beyond “what she represents” for Calvin (Mulvey,
625). But if it were not, the last scene seals the deal.
Happy now,
successful, Calvin is out walking his dog, Scotty, in the park. Scotty takes
off through the trees. When Calvin chases him down, he finds him nudging a
woman reading on a picnic blanket. Calvin hurries over. “Sorry, he’s mine.” She
turns: Ruby.
She doesn’t
recognize him–it seems the past did release her. “He’s so friendly,” she says
of the dog. “What’s his name?” Stunned, Calvin responds, “Scotty.” “That’s
funny,” Ruby laughs, “That’s the name of the dog in this book.” She shows him his
own new novel. “Have you read it?” He nods awkwardly. “Did you like it?” she
asks. “Uhh,” he falters. “What did you think?”
“My friend who
lent it to me thought it was kind of pretentious,” she says, looking up at him,
smiling slightly, “but I really like it so far.” He smiles. They study each
other for a moment. “Have we met before?” she asks. “I…I don’t know,” he lies.
“You seem really
familiar,” she wonders. “Maybe we knew each other in another life,” she jokes,
“Or maybe we just go to the same coffee shop.” Then she carries on the
conversation. “What do you do, besides go for walks with your dog?”
“Uh, I’m a
writer,” he says, sheepishly opening the book jacket to a picture of him. “Oh,”
she covers her face, embarrassed. “So that’s why you look so familiar.”
“Maybe,” he agrees.
“I was just
kidding about my friend calling it pretentious,” Ruby blushes. She looks at him
earnestly. “Can we start over?” Happy and disbelieving, Calvin accedes. He asks
if he can sit down, and she invites him onto her picnic blanket. They look
happily at each other, then she grabs his novel. “Just don’t tell me how it
ends, okay?” He smiles. “Promise.” The film ends.
That final scene
is beautifully shot, warm and sunny, light filtering softly through the trees. It
would be a charming meet cute in any romantic comedy. But this is no meet cute.
After a few close calls throughout the film, Calvin is again in charge of the
narrative–just as he’s been from his first chilling “I can make you do whatever
I want.”
But (sexual
im)balance (Mulvey 624) has been restored to Calvin’s world. Now that Ruby is
back, he can be in charge of not just his own narrative, but of hers. We don’t
know for sure, of course, how this is going to play out–the cheeky, self-aware
line, “Just don’t tell me how it ends” ensures that. But based on those smiles
and that sunlight and sweeping music, we can surmise that Ruby will continue to
be Calvin’s dream girl and fulfill his desires.
Of course, he doesn’t have the means to control her
anymore. She's her own woman with her own agency. But it doesn't matter enough. It doesn’t matter enough that he’s learned his lesson, that Ruby is technically free. She's back with Calvin. She may not be his creation any longer, but if
Mulvey’s theories prove right, he will continue to “project (his) phantasy on
to (her)” (Mulvey 624), only this time without her knowledge or consent. For all his new goodwill, Calvin is still acting from a position of power and "male phantasy."
We don’t need
Calvin to tell us how it ends; we can guess. “The creator,” one writer reminds
us, “will only ever look upon his creation as an object” (Britt Hayes). It
doesn’t always need to be that way, though. We can add to the work Kazan does
accomplish in deconstructing the MPDG with our understanding of Mulvey’s
theory: empowering our female characters and separating them from their “to-be-looked-at-ness.”
Works Cited
Allison, Sierra. “The
Manic Pixie Dream Girl Complex And What It Means For Modern Women.” Odyssey. 14 June 2016. https://www.theodysseyonline.com/the-manic-pixie-dream-girl-concept
Accessed 21 April 2018.
Chang, Justin.
"Ruby Sparks." Variety,
vol. 427, no. 7, 25 June 2012, p. 20. EBSCOhost, www.lib.byu.edu/cgi-bin/remoteauth.pl?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=77390896&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Accessed 21 April, 2018.
Hayes, Britt. “Reel
Women: ‘Ruby Sparks’ and the Deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” ScreenCrush. 27 July 2012. http://screencrush.com/reel-women-ruby-sparks/
Accessed 21 April, 2018.
Mulvey, Laura.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film
Theory and Criticism :
Introductory
Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP,
2016. Pp. 624-626.
Rizov, Vadim.
"Ruby Sparks." Sight & Sound, vol. 22, no. 11, Nov. 2012, p. 103.
EBSCOhost, www.lib.byu.edu/cgi-bin/remoteauth.pl?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f3h&AN=82569697&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Accessed 21 April, 2018.
