Ripley Believe it or Not!

Behold my deep dive into the criminal adventures of Patricia Highsmith's protagonist antagonist!

In the first book, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley muses about the ease with which he can assume the form of Dickie Greenleaf. It is so easy for Tom to move and speak as Dickie, it hardly feels like a dissociation from himself. There was a passing physical resemblance between them anyway; they wore the same sizes; they had nearly identical height and physique. All Tom needed was some minor tweaking—to lighten his hair, for instance—to become and feel exactly as Dickie Greenleaf. He wrote letters in Dickie’s name, he wore Dickie’s rings, he used Dickie’s typewriter, he signed Dickie’s name, he answered phone calls with Dickie’s intonation, and he did all of this easily, and perfectly, for as long as he could. The problem was that, while Tom felt and believed himself to be Dickie, or as good as, there were limits as to how much he could successfully act as Dickie in front of people who knew the real Dickie. He was able to convince them that he was Dickie over the phone; however, when confronted face to face, the game was up. The question remains throughout the novel: what was wrong with being Tom Ripley? Being Tom Ripley was just...boring…and sometimes shameful. The reasons for his self-hatred were no doubt rooted deep within his soul. The author dangles that carrot deliciously before the reader without spelling it out exactly. It is tempting to project the author’s own turmoil about sexuality onto her beloved anti-heroic protagonist. There is, no doubt, something to the idea that a writer battling such demons must find catharsis in a thought experiment such as Tom Ripley. What if he can become whatever he wants? What if he has a peculiar talent for eliminating inconvenient realities—not just by denial but by active and shameless manipulation of forms—in order to achieve the absolute freedom to live out his fantasies? Such a character can evade laws, trick police forces, and even pass over borders in defiance of international customs. Homosexuality is a prevalent theme in the novel even if it is seldom explicitly named. If discussed at all, it is treated as a problem, an issue, or even a sickness. It comes up when Tom perceives Madge’s accusation against him to Dickie. Madge is certainly jealous of their increasing closeness, but it must be an open question whether she truly thinks Tom is homosexual or Tom is just projecting his own paranoia about people in general. He was taunted about it by New York friends, sometimes by homosexual men who were attracted to him. We are in Tom’s head throughout the novel and so we learn about him having at times pretended to be gay for others’ amusement, as if the pretense made it a safe unreality for him. At one point, Tom tells Dickie, unconvincingly, “I like girls,” and that was before he met Freddie Miles. Freddie took an instantaneous dislike toward Tom and Tom seems to feel that it’s because of homophobia. Was Freddie, like Madge, jealous of Tom’s closeness to Dickie, or just suspicious of an interloper who seemed to drop from the sky? In the novel, Freddie is an English bon vivant, but sort of Irish-like, with red hair; he is fat and laddish in the novel, not unlike Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal in the 1999 motion picture. In the Netflix series, however, Freddie is portrayed by the antithesis of the novel’s description—dark-featured, slim, petite, and gender neutral—by actor Eliot Sumner, who is non-binary in real life and uses the pronouns they/them. I think both types work toward the same end—self-consciousness in Tom, triggering his worst insecurities and resentments. I rather like the gender neutral, refined version because it presents Tom with a vision of his own vagueness, a vagueness he clings to in his quest to define himself.

What does he want? He wants to move in the world easily and luxuriously. He wants to feel easy in himself. He wants to be looked at with respect. He wants to live as Dickie lived—but better. At one point, he thinks to himself that he became better at being Dickie than even Dickie ever did. Dickie didn’t know how to do it (that is, be Dickie) right, he thought! He also found a sense of gravity in the world through possessions—not many, but a few quality items, like Dickie’s watch, billfold, his rings, his suitcase, his Picasso.

These themes persist in the second novel, Ripley Under Ground. Here again, we face the idea of forgery throughout, with Tom having a stake in an art gallery that sells new paintings by a dead man called Derwatt. An elaborate scheme involving countless peons who know nothing about the scam that originated in Tom’s brain, it comes to crisis point because of one skeptical buyer, Mr. Murchison, who engages in a fascinating ethical debate with Tom: Is it really wrong to “forge” a painting if one is doing it in the name of and giving credit to the artist being copied? Murchison contends that it is still wrong because it’s a lie. But Tom! He likes his “fake Derwatts” (by Derwatt’s morally-conflicted friend Bernard) better than the real ones. He takes the view that Bernard’s “fake Derwatts” are really just real Bernard’s paintings which are credited as Derwatts. It is a view we expect Tom to take, given his own fluid identities and attachments. Yet it’s problematic, a bit like doing a painting and calling it a Van Gogh because, as a Van Gogh, it will fetch a lot more money. Of course Tom liked the manufactured Derwatts better than the real ones that were painted when Derwatt actually lived! This is the same character who believed himself to be a better Dickie Greenleaf than Dickie Greenleaf! From the book, we have Tom’s thoughts: “An artist does things naturally, without effort. Some power guides his hand. A forger struggles, and if he succeeds, it is a genuine achievement.” There is an interesting compatibility between Bernard and Tom. Bernard confesses that it is easier for him to paint as Derwatt than to paint as himself. It is easier to pretend than to be, and the more we pretend (practice) at something, the more it feels just like being.

The first novel takes us to Italy. Up and down Italy, from San Remo to Sicily, and from Rome, to Florence, to Venice. Patricia Highsmith, the author, wrote as a person who had engrossed herself in Italy and Italian ways. The text alternates between English and Italian as seamlessly as her main character flows in and out of identities. In the second novel, she almost domesticates Tom by putting him in the more quietly affluent environs of Seine et Marne, France. Here we see Tom pleasantly at work in a garden, a married man indistinguishable from any other suburban dweller. What does he “do”? He gardens, he collects art, he collects wine, he studies German and French, and…takes a ten-percent annual cut from the profits of a fraudulent art gallery in London! It’s just another day, Monsieur Ripley!

I finished Book 2 and am now reading Book 3: Ripley’s Game. I’m excited about future episodes of Ripley on Netflix. I love the portrayal of Tom Ripley by Andrew Scott, an actor who first grabbed my admiration as Moriarty—also a sociopathic and criminal genius) in Sherlock (BBC, 2010-2017). (Did you know he also played William Stevens Smith in the HBO miniseries about U.S. President John Adams?) I love the black and white aesthetic in the Ripley (Netflix, 2024); the cinematography by Robert Elswit is masterful. I’m looking forward to savoring other adaptations. Of course, there is the major motion picture directed by Anthony Minghella, with a long list of the biggest stars—Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and the aforementioned Philip Seymour Hoffman. There are others, though, like Ripley Under Ground (2005) and Ripley’s Game (2002). The latter has John Malkovich as Tom Ripley, and we see Malkovich taking on the role of Tom’s fellow criminal, Reeves Minot, in the Netflix series.