Visibility Analogy

Originally I was set on using filmmaking as my analogy for Visibility. It seemed perfect. An initial story or idea goes through multiple phases—some verbal and others visual—from storyboarding and scriptwriting, to casting, shooting, editing, and finally screening.  However, Calvino really had already used cinema as an analogy for visibility. Thus, I’m turning to a product of the art of filmmaking—one of my favorite movies, Ruby Sparks. The film centers on a writer and perpetual loner named Calvin (Paul Dano) who is suffering from writer’s block. Finally, as a project given to him by his therapist, he sits down at his manual (and perhaps magical) typewriter and begins to write his dream girl, Ruby Sparks (Zoe Kazan), into fictional existence:

“Ruby Sparks, twenty-six-years-old, raised in Dayton Ohio.  Ruby’s first crushes were Humphrey Bogart and John Lennon. She cried the day she found out they were already dead. Ruby got kicked out of high school for sleeping with her art teacher… or maybe her Spanish teacher. I haven’t decided yet. Ruby can’t drive. She doesn’t own a computer. She hates her middle name, which is Tiffany. She always, always roots for the underdog. She’s complicated. That’s what I like best about her. Ruby’s not so good at life sometimes. She forgets to open bills or cash checks and… Her last boyfriend was 49. The one before that was an alcoholic. She can feel a change coming. She’s looking for it.”

However, her existence turns out to not be quite so fictional. The next day, he comes home only to learn that Ruby has become a real person and that everything he had written about her is fact. After getting over the initial shock, Calvin comes to terms with the reality of his situation and he and Ruby begin to truly enjoy their relationship and fall deeply in love. However, Calvin soon discovers that his ability to write things into reality wasn’t a one-time thing. He can continue to write and change Ruby if she isn’t acting the way he wants her to behave. He can change how she looks, thinks, feels, acts, and even speaks (even writing her the ability to speak French at one point in the film), which comes in handy for him when he sees that their relationship is going downhill. (I would tell you more, but I don’t want to spoil the ending!)

Overall, this movie exemplifies the concept of words being visualized and actualized. It’s hard to say what came first—the image or the words, for Calvin could have already imagined exactly what Ruby would look like before he began typing descriptions. However, with the way the film presents the idea, I believe that Calvin wrote the words first and then they became a reified image. Furthermore, Calvin could control the “image” simply by writing new things. In that way, the words dominated the image, as they begin to do in the course of Calvino’s writing.

One line from the movie spoken by Calvin also seems to exemplify the entire process of imagination that Calvino hoped his readers would understand (Jeez this is confusing…Calvin and Calvino!)

“One may read this and think it’s magic, but falling in love is an act of magic, so is writing. It was once said of Catcher In The Rye, ‘That rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper and the imagination.’ I am no J.D. Salinger, but I have witnessed a rare miracle. Any writer can attest: in the luckiest, happiest state, the words are not coming from you, but through you.”