The endearing nature of romantic comedies is what makes so many of us gravitate so much towards it. It’s lighthearted, it’s tender and pliable in our fingers. We can twist the story in any way in the middle, its flesh ripping away to reveal only the fresh and pink, the grotesque idea of a rebirth at the end of a film. A new beginning is there, the light at the end of the tunnel that they’d been stuck in throughout the course of the movie.

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There was always going to be a happy ending no matter the pain it takes to get there. It matters not how much the characters have clawed and shoved each other away because we both know that in the end they will have persevered despite everything. The love they have for each other is more than the accumulated resentment that they both have felt. 

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And if the idea of someone seeing you through hell doesn’t scream that they love you differently, I don’t know what will. 

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There’s almost a twisted sense of “Well, we saw each other at our worst and there’s still love there. That must mean that what we feel for each other is stronger than other people.” But why can they do better than the other? Why does the narrative make us cheer for them to be together and work it out despite witnessing just how much hurt there is underlying there? I myself am guilty of enjoying “toxic” relationships in the media, it feels like a safe way to engage with very flawed characters and explore how they get along romantically even if we know that it’s not a good thing. 

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It almost feels more human to see them have arguments and end up miserable together than the constant giddiness that we see in those movies we would see as kids. Love perseveres is what we almost want to say is happening. But sometimes it doesn’t really feel like love anymore. There is an attachment there, yes, but I don’t think that some of the couples we see can be described as being “in love”. We’ve fought so much for this, it must mean that we want this, right? It starts to feel like some obsession with the other, an idealization of having a partner that is specifically “made” for you. It’s romantic to think that someone was put on this earth for you. But also incredibly selfish? Almost like an entitled sense of deserving a perfect partner when there really is no such thing. The only way you would be able to find an ideal partner almost feels like an otherworldly act, something higher up there must have sent them to you, you must have done something right to have met them, this is some sort of reward for everything good that you have done. Do you do good things because you think you’ll be rewarded for them, though? Is the act of being kind expecting kindness back inherently a little selfish? (Not that there’s anything wrong with a little selfishness. You should be able to do that once in a while for yourself. You are just a human after all!) 

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Ruby Sparks, written by Zoe Kazan, allows us to delve into the concept of playing God in the way that people tend to do by creating through Calvin Weir-Fields. Calvin is a writer who has been living off the success of one of his books he had published whenever he was younger. He cringes at the word genius, tensing at even the mention of it even whenever it is in praise. The word is too much, it feels disingenuous, it feels like people are just saying it to him for the sake of saying it - he doesn’t exactly feel like he deserves the title it seems.

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 Though one must consider that Calvin’s profession as a writer comes inherent with wanting control. One creates the world that one writes, chooses their words carefully in order to evoke certain emotions in the reader you’d like them to, and even goes as far as to become an unreliable author in order to prove a point. It’s the way that your voice is able to get out there but polished, rough draft after rough draft, edit after edit - one must paint themselves in their best version to make up for all the time spent hunched over writing with your back aching. 

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You must make something good out of your sacrifices or else they just become a pain you have experienced. 

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And there isn’t anything wrong with that! Calvin wants to be good and come across a certain way, follow the social norms as one does. One must “fix” themselves, make their own edits to their being. People tell you that you talk too much and you are now conscious of how many words leave your mouth, you try to say “Okay. I’ll talk after at least three others do.”, you set rules for yourself. People just want to be their best version and get help (We hear that so often. Be the best version of yourself! And it’s almost always to please others?) I think it’s one of the reasons why Calvin goes to therapy. He feels depressed, in a slump. There is something “wrong” with him as some people might say and he would like to fix it. Crawl out of a hole to be able to walk amongst others. His therapists asks him to do the one thing that he knows Calvin knows to do -write. 

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The action in itself seems so obvious, you’d ask a writer to write because well, he was born to do that! He has that sort of romance in his heart to be able to express himself in the lines of his books, a part of him within them. Well, the part that he likes to show people, anyways. This is his chance to write something more raw. It’s not being published so there’s that feeling of not being constrained by social etiquette. 

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Perhaps that is why Calvin begins to write about a woman. You tend to hear about women writing about romance so this in itself is an act of rebellion against masculinity that I cannot help but point out. He writes about a girl who is just a dream to him. An ideal girlfriend. Someone that he can fantasize about and swoon over so much that she begins to appear in his dreams, he can feel himself slowly begin to fall in love with this woman. Well, his idea of a woman. Ruby isn’t exactly a real person. And I’m not just saying that because she quite literally lives in his head but because she is written as though she is more a concept than an actual person. 

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Calvin inadvertently writes her to be what I’d imagine falls under the category of a manic pixie dream girl. Ruby is pretty, Ruby is wild, Ruby is cool and free. It’s almost as though she is everything Calvin would like to be and likes it in a partner. She’s more so a woman rather than a person. Calvin writes her to be sexually liberated in a sense that she started having sex with older men because women’s sex lives always seem to end up being something men will look at to see if they’re their type. Ruby is so free-spirited that she was kicked out of high school for having sex with a teacher of hers thus she never was able to hold a job properly. She was in foster care throughout her life leaving her without any ties to anyone. She is free to do what she wants because of this! She can travel and do as she pleases with nothing holding her back. She is an artist, she doesn’t drive because she has a love for rollerblading and biking, she has fiery red hair and is everything you would want in order to have fun. 

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The reality of it all is that Calvin has written his ideal woman to be completely dependent on him. Ruby’s failure to complete high school is not the image of a woman who was sexually experienced at an early age and paid the consequences for being just such a temptress - she really was just a girl who was suspended in order to avoid anyone finding out about the grooming her teacher had put her through. Her inability to have any sense of community because of a lack of constantly moving and not having any family makes her completely alone in the world. With no means of transportation or financial literacy (because Calvin wrote her inability to make good budgeting decisions as a silly thing), she cannot move from her socioeconomic status either. 

That would be much different if Calvin was in the picture though. He would be able to completely support her and her dreams. He would be Ruby’s savior. 

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It seems more often than not that men seem to see incompetent women as being cute because they like the feeling of being able to teach them, they love feeling to be the more educated one and remaining as the one in power because “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll handle that”. The idealization of women suffering, whether that be from their own lack of education that has made them experience disadvantage, at the hands of other men through acts of cruelty against them or simply experiencing girlhood alone, gives men a chance to behave as the one good thing. 

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Calvin is a meek, soft-spoken and slightly awkward young man. He isn’t interested in male dominated things and is only dragged out there by his brother, who does seem to behave in a much more douchey way. When you compare the two, when you see Calvin’s brother enact the whole “Are you getting laid?” conversation men seem to ask to measure how they’re doing, and Calvin’s discomfort, you cannot help but feel Calvin be the kinder of the two. Even if men don’t directly participate in the violent treatment or sexualization of women, just existing as men in a patriarchal society makes them benefit from it all the same. Good men are seen as good men because they, by comparison, are kind. 

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Ruby, despite being a fantasy turned reality by Calvin however, is a real person now. Not aware of how she came to be, she is real, raw and with her own thinking process. She feels caged in Calvin's home, suffocated by the fact that he only wants to spend time with her and no one else because "[he] doesn't need anyone but [her]". Upset at this, he begins to edit her, begins to pick her apart, make her need to depend on him whether she would like to or not. Though the movie plays this off as him simply being on control of her behavior in a more otherworldly manner, the implications of this being a controlling relationship are made even clearer whenever he chooses to mold her into being this quiet, obedient, young woman who used to have such strong opinions and passion. (Those "I can fix him" posts do not work on Calvin. No you can't fix him, the dream girl that HE created couldn't fix him!) She, pursuing her passions, starts to take art classes, starts to make friends in those classes and Calvin, rather than be happy for this, experiences jealousy in the way Ruby has other people in her life. He likes to play the hurt role whenever he takes out the typewriter again and types in:

"Ruby was miserable without Calvin."

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Before the ink can even dry, Ruby is calling and telling him that he wants to return home, right back into his arms and continuing this co-dependent relationship that Calvin craves so much to have. And miserable she is. Even being in another room from Calvin sends her into a crying fit, fully dependent on his attention to make her happy. He has written her to only need him the same way that he only needs her, unable to regulate or understand her own emotions in the matter because really, it's just him manipulating her with the typewriter. One of the saddest progressions of the film is seeing how much Ruby starts to seem less like herself and into something Calvin seems to have wanted.

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We only know how Calvin is within a relationship because we are following his with Ruby, but we do hear about an ex-girlfriend of his, Lila.. He had bad mouthed her before, referring to her as a "heartless slut" in his therapy session whenever the topic of relationships comes up. The  comment being made so casually brings forth the misogynistic side of Calvin that seems to come out whenever he is angry towards women, specifically those who he has been in a relationship with as if holding onto that anger for them leaving him. There exists this idea in my head that this is because of the environment that he grew up in.

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Earlier in the film, when he and Ruby went to visit his mother and her boyfriend, Calvin was in a sour mood the whole time, wanting to get away from everyone and finding annoyance in the fact that everyone was getting along so well. He points out that his mother did not use to be this spiritual, artsy woman before dating her current boyfriend, who seems to be in touch with his creative side. He said she used to wear polos and do barbecue. A very traditionally American woman, implying that his father was as well. There's this idea roaming around in my head that makes me feel as though his father was more rigid, more conservative in the way that he viewed what counted as being "right", he never quite liked how much Calvin wasn't a traditionally masculine man, opting for the arts. After he passed, Calvin was never able to get that approval he so desperately wanted from his father and went into mourning both him as a person but the loss of a relationship that might have never reached it's full potential. He might've depended on his girlfriend during this the same way he only ever needs Ruby in his life and he grew resentful at the fact that she left when she needed him the most. As for his relationship with his mother, her boyfriend being such an artistic man, he's outgoing, he's easy to talk to, he's happy all the time. He is everything Calvin wants to be but is unable to be. Calvin's biggest flaw is that he feels inadequate for everything, even the things that he likes.

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(Now, I don't delve into Calvin's thought to give him sympathy for what he is doing to Ruby, but instead to point to the fact that some actions have reasoning behind them. There's no excuse for them but it does provide a more human look at Calvin. Abusive relationships are not always some sort of monster clinging onto a person, it is two people where one is very much still a person (though an awful one at that). Referring to people as monsters has always felt as though there's this distancing from them as people. "A person would never do that!" But it was a person and we must acknowledge that it might be part of a larger scale problem that society is dealing with.)

And it is Calvin's insecurity that leads us to the climax of the film where his jealousy makes him drag Ruby out of a party where she was about to go into the pool with Calvin's publisher. (I have no idea why Calvin wrote Ruby to be someone who is a victim of grooming and has had to be dependent on men her whole life then acts surprised whenever she has a complicated relationship with men and how she reacts to what she reads as kindness.) He then proceeds to berate her in the way we've seen him do to Lila, his ex-girlfriend by saying "Don't fuck other men, don't let them think about fucking you." And I suppose Calvin had forgotten he had written Ruby to be this strong-willed, speaks her mind woman because she very angrily points out how stupid that logic is, as she is unable to control what others will think of her. This only prompts Calvin to say when she "acts a certain way it makes people think [she's] a slut."

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It's frankly demeaning that Calvin speaks to her in such a way, but I do have to praise both actors for doing such an amazing scene here. The anger in Ruby is palpable, and Zoe Kazan is able to play Ruby's exasperation and disappointed in what she thought was a loving boyfriend, treat her so horribly. I admire Ruby so much for being able to always tell Calvin what she's thinking, making that attempt for boundaries to be made between them but again, Calvin would simply edit her into fitting into this "ideal girlfriend" box. He was just slowly removing her agency each time he brought out that typewriter, pressing down on the keys with power he knew he held over Ruby. As much as he claimed to love her, he never did. He just wanted to have her without any of the emotional labor that comes with being in a functioning relationship. He wanted some type of toy that answered only to him and only had the "fun" option on.

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Ruby, exhausted by his behavior proclaims,

"I'm not your child. You don't get to decide what I do."

"Wanna bet?"

"What?"

And Calvin, fully aware that with just a few words, Ruby will lose any sort of her ability to argue with him, doubles down by saying ,

"I'm pretty sure I can make you do whatever I want."

He walks to his desk which Ruby follows close behind, dressed up and with a bag on her shoulders indicating that she was already on her way out. This will always hurt me knowing that she, on her own, would make the decision to leave him but it was him that chains her down to him. Calvin is drowning in his own misery and it seems as though he's grabbing onto Ruby's foot to bring her down with him each time she gets any closer to leaving him. Once he shows her the pages upon pages that he had written to "make" her, Ruby, understandably is put off. From her perspective this sounds like an obsession, entries of how her life began, of her likes and dislikes, her history with men, her trauma, all in these pages, so when the words of

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"You can't write about me, that's private."

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leave her mouth, it only puts into perspective how much this film, from her point of view, has been a story about abuse, control and hurt.

It only stabs you more in the chest when Calvin's response only drives home the fact that Ruby was doomed from the very moment she was created by Calvin. He didn't give her a happy story when he wrote her, it was all just some sort of fantasy that he could indulge in at times and my gosh do some men seem to get off on the trauma that woman provide for them. They will hear stories about women being abused and enjoy knowing that because they have never done that to her, they are immediately put into the "good" category. This is what I imply about all men being able to benefit from men's abuse towards women - Calvin wants to be the "good guy" in her life, Ruby being written to always go for men that end up hurting her as if he, just by being, automatically makes him a better man than the previous ones that Ruby has dated. Calvin benefits from the fact that Ruby has not known kindness from men.

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"I'm not writing about you. I wrote you. I made you up."