Seen and Loved

Paul Dano and Elliott Gould in Ruby Sparks
Image © Twentieth Century Fox. All righs reserved. Used by permission.

Calvin (Paul Dano) is worried about his dog. Scotty the terrier, he tells his therapist Dr Rosenthal (Elliott Gould), is frightened of everything and everyone. He doesn’t behave like a normal dog should, and feels somehow constantly inadequate. What Scotty really needs, Calvin explains, is ‘someone who sees him, all slobbery and scared, and likes him just the way he is.’

Of course, Calvin isn’t really talking about his pet. A young author whose precocious first novel won him huge acclaim as a teenager, he is now an insecure mess living off past glories. Unable to write, he spends his days taking care of Scotty, and dreaming about meeting someone who really understands him. These dreams are so potent that when Dr Rosenthal sets him a writing exercise, he invents Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), a quirky girl who’s his idea of a perfect partner.

As he obsesses over her, Ruby becomes increasingly real to him. But it’s still a shock when she appears in his house one day, eating breakfast cereal and completely oblivious to the fact that she’s a fictional construct. To his astonishment, Calvin discovers that, not only can other people see and interact with Ruby too, but that he can change her personality and behaviour simply by writing about it. It’s an impossibly perfect scenario. He has conjured his dream girl out of thin air.

You’ve written a girl

Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks
Image © Twentieth Century Fox. All righs reserved. Used by permission.

To some extent, Ruby Sparks is a satire on the way that Hollywood often treats its female characters. In an industry where only 7–10% of directors, producers, writers and cinematographers are women, characters like Ruby are all too common. They exist to salve the insecurities of the male protagonist, rather than as people in their own right, and in some cases come across as little more than wish-fulfilment for their creators and audience. ‘You could tweak things!’ suggests Calvin’s brother Harry (Chris Messina) enthusiastically, when he learns about the power Calvin holds over Ruby. ‘You know, big tits, long legs. You could make her do anything. For men everywhere, please don’t let that go to waste.’

In a quieter moment, Harry acknowledges that there’s something not quite right about Calvin’s portrayal of Ruby. ‘Quirky, messy women whose problems only make them endearing aren’t real. You haven’t written a person. You’ve written a girl.’ He knows full well, from his experiences with his wife Susie (Toni Trucks), that real women aren’t like women in films. They are as fully human as the other partner in the relationship, as fully flawed, and as much in need of rescuing from their own problems and inadequacies. Idealised portrayals of women are, in their way, just as unhelpful as more obviously demeaning ones.

Having created her to be ‘the Platonic ideal of his girlfriend’, Calvin doesn’t know how to react when Ruby begins to have desires and opinions of her own. Though he initially swears to Harry that he won’t use his authorial power to alter her, he soon breaks his resolve to ensure that Ruby needs him just as much as he needs her. It’s far easier, in the end, to be in a relationship with an ideal than with a person.

Five Shades Off

Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano in Ruby Sparks
Image © Twentieth Century Fox. All righs reserved. Used by permission.

Ironically, Calvin himself knows how it feels to be treated in this way. Since his early success, he’s struggled to find a girl who wants to know the real him, rather than just their own concept of the famous writer. ‘They’re not interested in me,’ he complains to Dr Rosenthal. ‘They’re interested in some idea of me.’ Speaking about her inspiration for the film, screenwriter and star Zoe Kazan has discussed her own difficulty with finding authenticity in relationships: ‘I’ve had a feeling that there’s this person called Zoe Kazan, and the person I’m with loves her, but that person is not me. It’s sort of five shades off from me.’[1]

The story of Ruby Sparks is underpinned by the deep human need to be seen and loved for who we really are. But it also serves as a reminder of the problems with actually finding this kind of relationship. First of all, there’s the fear: we feel that we can either be seen or loved, but never both. If somebody ever truly knew us, warts and all, they couldn’t possibly love us. And if someone does love us, it must mean that they haven’t actually seen us, and so it isn’t really us being loved at all – rather, somebody ‘five shades off’ from us, as Kazan describes.

Secondly, there is the issue of loving in return. It’s all very well craving true and unconditional love, but who’s really able to offer it? The fact is that if I am a messy, inadequate person deep down, and want to be loved in spite of it, I must accept that everybody else is in the same position – or otherwise my ‘love’ will be nothing but selfishness. Calvin can’t bear the flawed reality of Ruby, preferring the false version who is perfectly tailored to meet his own needs. We also learn that he broke up with a previous girlfriend, Lila (Deborah Ann Woll), because he felt threatened by her success and by her failure to conform to the image that he had of her. ‘The only person that you wanted to be in a relationship with,Ù Lila tells him, ‘was you.’

At the heart

Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano in Ruby Sparks
Image © Twentieth Century Fox. All righs reserved. Used by permission.

As Calvin is drawn deeper and deeper into using Ruby for his own ends, the film goes to some surprisingly dark places. In the disturbing climactic scene, he uses his writing powers to forcefully prevent her from leaving him, and then to humiliate her. We realise both how twisted and how desperate he really is when he puts the words into her mouth that he’s been wanting to hear all along: ‘I love you! I’ll love you forever! You’re a genius!’

We can see from the look on his face that hearing her say this has given him a momentary fix of satisfaction. But it quickly fades. Because however good this kind of affirmation might feel in the short term, he senses that love without choice, and love without truth, isn’t really love. It can’t do anything to heal his loneliness, his shame, or his inadequacy.

Love must involve voluntarily crossing the divide between me and another person, relating to them as they actually exist in reality, making room for their beliefs, reactions, experiences and desires where they differ from my own. Love doesn’t erase or trample these differences between individuals, but unites across them. Instead of making the other person in the relationship smaller, reducing them to whatever I need them to be, it makes them bigger, prioritising them above myself. If both people in the relationship are trying to love like this, selfishness begins to disappear.

The God of the Bible differs from other monotheistic concepts of God in that he is ‘trinity’: one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This might sound abstract, but in truth it is central to the Christian concept of love. Relationships are at the heart of the meaning of everything because God loved, God was in relationship, even when he was the only thing which existed. Made ‘in the image’ of this kind of God, we will be incomplete until we are relating authentically to something other than ourselves: to him, and to those around us. And our relationship with God is possible because he is both powerful enough to see us and good enough to love us – truthfully, and out of his own choice.

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