When Ruby comes to life, she is initially Calvin’s manic pixie dream girl. He has imagined Ruby as a character with no job and no other friends; her life revolves around him. Calvin has stopped writing Ruby’s story, but she continues to evolve. She chafes under his restrictions and quickly begins to tire of their insulated life. When Ruby insists on meeting Calvin’s family, their relationship begins to deteriorate. Ruby is fascinated by Calvin’s mother (Annette Bening), a late-in-life hippie, and her partner Mort (Antonio Banderas). Her desire to get to know them highlights Calvin’s immaturity and social awkwardness; he spends the weekend by himself in a treehouse, rejecting his family’s pleas to join in their fun. He tells Ruby that he resents his mother because in her marriage to his father, she was a “completely different person.” He cannot reconcile his mother’s multi-faceted personality and range of interests with his need for her to inhabit a clearly defined identity. When the weekend is over, Ruby tells him that she needs to have friends; she wants to take classes, meet people, and have a little space to be her own person. Calvin, afraid that she is leaving him, begins to write her again. He makes her anxious and clingy, exuberantly happy, and then depressed as a result of these lows and highs.

In early scenes, Calvin blames his writer’s block and general ennui on the loss of his long-time girlfriend Lila, who cruelly broke his heart. When Lila finally appears, late in the film, she contradicts this narrative, claiming that Calvin only wanted to be in a relationship with himself. She suggests that he was threatened by the fact that she was also a writer, and this carries the weight of possibility. The audience is aware that Calvin is Ruby’s author, but when Lila accuses him of re-writing their relationship, it forces the realization that he has also turned her into a character.

In reading the film as an allegory about how men represent women, the climactic scene is especially trenchant. Calvin tells Ruby that he can control her behavior, and then takes to his typewriter to prove it. He types commands: she cannot leave the house, she strips her clothes off while singing a song, and she falls to her knees and barks like a dog. He scripts her lines: “I love you! I’ll never leave you! You’re a genius!” He proves the power of his authorship by causing her physical pain, forcing her to humiliate herself, and compelling her to stroke his ego. She is his victim, his sex object, and his mindless cheerleader. As he observes the pain he is inflicting, Calvin realizes that he does not want to have this kind of control over another person.

Zoe Kazan has said that she was inspired to address the way that men write female characters in romantic comedies. Ruby Sparks is not a perfect film–the ending wreaks havoc with the willing suspension of disbelief that’s key to the premise. It makes clear, however, that in order for the central relationship to have a shot at success, Calvin must mature enough to understand that other people exist outside of his wants and needs and Ruby must exist, in all of her complexity, outside of his imagination.

Larsson, who died in 2004, was a progressive feminist journalist who created a detailed storyworld in which crimes of sex trafficking, rape, and domestic abuse are acknowledged and exposed, and men who perpetrate violence against women are made to suffer.  Reviewers consistently interpret Lisbeth Salander, a chain-smoking, kick-boxing, bisexual hacker who is one of the trilogy’s two main characters, as feminist, while ignoring the other lead, journalist Mikael Blomqvist, presumably because he is male (part of a long tradition of equating feminism with women).  The trilogy’s first book was published in Sweden under the title Men Who Hate Women, which Larsson insisted upon, apparently because it was significant to his vision.  The marketable Girl Who … titles originated with the publication of the trilogy in the UK, introducing a meaningful shift from “women” to “girl.”  (“Feminism” is apparently not such a loaded word in Sweden, a country where feminists still routinely protest pay inequities and feminist-influenced state policies have reshaped cultural attitudes about work and family.)

The major questions raised about feminism in the franchise are basically summarized by Missy Schwartz in an article for Entertainment Weekly that owes an unacknowledged debt to multiple bloggers.  She claims that Larsson both repudiates and exploits violence against women, and uses as an example a “female character” who is “choked to death with a sanitary napkin down her throat.”  Even though I had just read the books and seen the first film when this article was published in June, Google had to help me figure out what Schwartz was referring to: a female victim of a male serial killer who used Old Testament biblical passages as fuel for his misogyny.  The victim is not a “character” as such; the details of her murder are discovered by the protagonists in the course of their investigation and the circumstances of her death add to their understanding of the criminal they seek.  The serial killer’s crimes, supposedly based in religious zeal (referenced more extensively, but in a way that similarly overemphasizes the role these events play in the overall narrative, here), add one more layer to Larsson’s social critique, which extends to psychiatry, law enforcement, and the justice system.

The complaint that the trilogy cannot be feminist because of the way it depicts violence against women is a common one; it perhaps implies that in order to be “feminist” the storyworld would not acknowledge the realities of gendered brutality, and seems to miss the point that violence against women is presented as a direct result of institutionalized patriarchy.  In Dragon Tattoo, Larsson offers statistics related to male violence against women in Sweden at regular intervals; many bloggers who critique the violence in the films openly confess that they have not read the books, which raises the issue of how the story and its characters shift from one medium to the other.

Schwartz also contends that Salander’s breast augmentation, which the character has undergone in the second book, but not in the second film, is anti-feminist.  Although she rarely exhibits any understanding of how she might be viewed by other people (readers and viewers frequently interpret Salander as a high-functioning autistic), this criticism suggests that she purchased “solid, round breasts of medium size” (Girl Who Played with Fire 17) in order to become a sex object, an idea that runs counter to every other aspect of her behavior and personality.  The claim that feminism is at odds with plastic surgery is also dated, ignoring the feminist school of thought advocating individual empowerment through the construction of identity.

Issues of translation (from books to films, from Swedish to English and more than thirty other languages) complicate the questions raised about Larsson’s gender politics, but the discussion should draw our attention to the general lack of consensus on “feminism” as a theoretical concept, a practice, and a political ideology.  In the United States, the phrase “post-gender” is gaining traction, and “feminism” is often referenced as a dirty word.  Lisbeth Salander is not an “every woman” character (she does, after all, use a cell phone to dig her way out after being shot several times and buried alive) and the feminist appeal of Larsson’s storyworld is not solely due to his invincible heroine.  His crime fictions resonate because he views social problems through the lens of gender and offers tough, intelligent protagonists (female and male) who fight to change the status quo.