[COLUMN] In Ripley, A Con Artist Can Escape Anything But Himself | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Ripley, which is streaming on Netflix and is great.

There is a deep and unsettling loneliness to Ripley, Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

This has always been a challenge when adapting Highsmith’s prose to the screen. Kerry Manders observed that Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation of the same novel, starring Matt Damon and Jude Law, “aggressively [tried] to socialize Tom” by affording him a relatively sincere relationship with Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett) and a truly loving partner in Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport). Zaillian’s Ripley affords its protagonist no such companionship. Ripley is alone – and will always be.

This is obvious in the visual language of the show. Cinematographer Robert Elswit shoots the series in stark black-and-white. Zaillian employs wide shots to give a sense of scale, but characters are often isolated within the frame. Ripley returns repeatedly to Ripley (Andrew Scott) sitting alone in a large room, staring at an empty chair across from him. A natural imitator, Ripley will conduct entire conversations for his own amusement – sometimes to thin air and sometimes to imaginary figures.

Tom Ripley is a con artist. He is introduced running a series of hustles in New York City. However, the ground is shrinking under him. As such, when private detective Alvin McCarron (Bokeem Woodbine) approaches him with an offer from shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan) to travel to Europe and recover the industrialist’s wayward son Dickie (Johnny Flynn), Tom jumps on the opportunity. It is a paid vacation to Atrani in Italy, and a ticket to a higher standard of living.

Much has been written about the con artist as an archetypal American figure. After all, the con artist is just a literalization of the archetype that writer R.W.B. Lewis codified in The American Adam, published in 1955, the same year as The Talented Mr. Ripley. Lewis wrote about the mythology of the American frontiersman, “the hero of a new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry.” This is a person looking for a blank slate.

As Emily Harnett noted, “the contradictions of the swindler – on TV and elsewhere – are the contradictions of the myth of American self-making itself.” Of course, there have always been con artists and hustlers, but the figure seems very much associated with the postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s, reflected in the nostalgia of figures like Don Draper (Jon Hamm) from Mad Men or Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Catch Me If You Can. Zaillian sets Ripley in 1960.

Part of this is undoubtedly plot convenience. It was a lot easier to be a con artist in an era before digital records and complex international databases. In America, for example, individual states didn’t start requiring photos for drivers’ licenses until the late 1950s and into the 1970s. By the mid 1940s, only half of American households had phones. Even by 1957, a quarter of American homes were still without phone connections. The world truly was more elastic and less defined.

Throughout Ripley, there is a sense that modernity is catching up to the protagonist. An early disagreement between Tom and Dickie involves Rickie’s decision to buy a refrigerator. For the first half of the show, there’s an emphasis on classical architecture and stares, but in the fifth episode Ripley moves to an apartment with a freshly installed elevator. That elevator naturally becomes a mechanism for suspense, occasionally seeming less like a convenience and more an intrusion.

This encroachment is a reminder that Ripley can only stay so far ahead of the consequences of his actions. In Rome, his new landlady (Margherita Buy) notes the apartment comes with a phone. “It’s not easy to get a telephone,” she boasts. “It takes weeks to have one installed.” The implications are troublesome. When Dickie’s fiancée Marge (Dakota Fanning) drops by unannounced, Ripley wonders how she found him. “I called the phone company,” she explains, “they had the address.”

However, Ripley suggests that modernity is not the only threat facing the show’s protagonist. There is a juxtaposition of the American idea of perpetual self-reinvention with Europe’s sense of history. “It is good to be shifty in a new country,” observed Simon Suggs, one of Ripley’s literary forebears. Zaillian’s Ripley asks whether such a virtue is to be commended in the Old World. Europe operates according to different rules and logic than the United States.

In Italy, Ripley seeks to erase himself and start anew, to knock down the man that he once was and to be reborn. However, the show emphasizes that Europe offers no escape from the past. If anything, it is built atop it. One of the show’s big recurring visual motifs is stairs. Characters are frequently shown climbing and descending staircases, frequently literally retracing their steps. Zaillian and Elswit even frame the shots in similar ways to reinforce this idea, no matter how distant the steps. In the finale, Inspector Pietro Ravini (Maurizio Lombardi) wryly notes that Atrani is “a beautiful place, but too many stairs.”

Everywhere he goes, Ripley is reminded that Europe is a continent with a long history and rich memory. He visits old cathedrals and studies beautiful paintings. Those paintings often depict heinous acts, returning to haunt Ripley as he goes about his own bloody business. After murdering Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner), Ripley lifts his head in his hand and imagines the scene as Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath. Religious ornaments and statues seem to watch Ripley, judging him.

Over the course of Ripley, various characters come to distrust and despise Ripley. However, it often seems like the person who hates Ripley most of all is Ripley himself. He seems to want to escape himself. His relationship with Dickie fractures when Dickie catches him playing dress-up in the scion’s clothes. After Ripley murders Dickie, he assumes Dickie’s identity. Even in private, he mimics vocal tics and accents, as if trying them on for size. Part of this is aspiration, but it’s also something more.

Much has been written about Tom Ripley as a gay character, something that Highsmith herself explicitly denied. Of course, it’s worth noting that Highsmith had a complicated relationship to her own sexuality. “Highsmith was a Barnard graduate, and, like many sophisticates at the time, she viewed homosexuality as a psychological defect that could be fixed,” wrote Margaret Talbot, “yet she had enough self-respect and sexual appetite to reject any attempt to fix her own.”

Ripley is haunted by insinuations about his own homosexuality. Marge suspects that Ripley has a homoerotic crush on Dickie. Zaillian generally frames Dickie much more sympathetically than Minghella did in his film adaptation, but the series repeatedly stresses Dickie’s homophobia. It seems that this homophobia, coupled with his rejection of Ripley, is what motivates the visitor to murder the shipping heir in a boat and bury his body at sea.

Ripley cannot seem to stand himself, even as he writes and speaks glowingly about Tom Ripley while posing as Dickie. The show returns repeatedly to water imagery. In particular, even before throwing Dickie’s body overboard, Ripley is haunted by nightmares of slipping below the surface. “He’s terrified of water,” Ripley narrates of himself while impersonating Dickie. At the end of the season, Ripley hides out in Venice, where the black-and-white cinematography turns the murky canal water into a dark mirror. Ripley is terrified of what lurks beneath the surface.

Photography is a recurring motif in Ripley. Marge is working on a photo guide of Atrani. Photographs present a real threat to Ripley’s impersonation of Dickie. Ravini only realizes that he’s been talking to Ripley the whole time when he sees a clear picture of the real Dickie in Marge’s book. However, it takes eight episodes for that to happen. This is that theme of encroaching modernity, but many photographs capture characters obscured or in silhouette, as if hidden from one another. Dickie fancies himself a painter, but his art reveals nothing of himself or his subjects.

As such, it’s oddly fitting that Ripley spends most of the show alone. Large stretches of the series pass with only Andrew Scott on screen. This is perhaps some form of divine justice, Ripley consigned to spend eternity trapped with himself. The closest that Ripley comes to experiencing intimacy is with Freddie’s dead body. He makes out with the corpse to distract a passer-by and Freddie’s limp head rests on his shoulder as he drives the body out of the city. It’s a sort of purgatory.

Zaillian and Elswit underscore this idea using the European locations. Throughout the series, the pair return to familiar shot compositions. They don’t just film the same locations, they employ the same angles. At times, Ripley seems almost meditative, as the character takes trains between Rome and Atrani, using the same sequences of shots, interacting with the same people, sitting in the same carriage, passing the same police. Even paradise can become a cage, and Ripley has only himself as a cellmate.

It feels appropriate that Zaillian pushed the setting of Ripley forward by five years from 1955 to 1960. This is a series very firmly rooted in 1960. The black-and-white cinematography is part of that. “When Patricia wrote it, if she imagined a movie being made from it back then, it would be in black and white,” Zaillian explained. “The cover of that book that I had was in black-and-white, so as I was reading it, it was in my mind to be that way.”

In some ways, this was the end of black-and-white. This was the year that The Apartment won the Best Picture Oscar, becoming the last predominantly black-and-white movie to win that award until Schindler’s List more than three decades later, coincidentally also written by Zaillian. It was also the year of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, another black-and-white presentation that asks the audience to engage with a young man working through his complicated psychosexuality through violence.

Perhaps encroaching modernity is not the worst thing for Thomas Ripley, despite the increased threat of discovery. Throughout the show, Ripley is drawn to one of Dickie’s paintings, an abstract work by Picasso. It’s a very modern work, particularly in contrast to the Renaissance art and sculptures that haunt Ripley. Picasso’s work was representative of a seismic shift in the larger culture. It was literally revolutionary, challenging longstanding notions of how the world worked.

As John Berger wrote in his famous 1967 essay on the movement, The Moment of Cubism, “For the first time the world, as a totality, ceased to be an abstraction and became realizable.” Just last year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer included a montage tying J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) radical shift in scientific understanding to broader cultural and political movements. “Lawrence, you embraced the revolution in physics,” he asks of his colleague Ernst Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). “Can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx?”

“I took a long time choosing what Picasso we were going to use,”Zaillian remarked of the ending. “I knew that I wanted a cubist painting and that cubism is all about deconstructing usually a human figure into parts so that we can somehow see them more clearly.” The show’s final moments find Ripley contemplating that painting, a sharp departure from the Christian morality of Renaissance art. As the 1960s dawn, perhaps the times have finally caught up to Tom Ripley.