Ripley's Talent

Which version of Patricia Highsmith's enduring villain says the most about today?

Meet the Ripley’s (l-r) Andrew Scott’s (2024), Matt Damon’s (1999), Alain Delon’s (1960).

So what exactly is this talent of Mr. Ripley’s? 

When all is said and done — after all the lies are bought, the forgeries pass muster, the murders go unpunished — just what natural gifts do we attribute to Patricia Highsmith's famous anti-hero?

For various reasons, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a perennial in the Norris household, but I must admit I really fell into the Ripleyverse this summer. And spending time with every young Tom Ripley extant — in the novel, two films, and Netflix’s prestige series — prompted some reflections on this character, as well as his real-life corollaries.

Some I’ve known personally. Others have been consuming so much media oxygen for so long that their most notable traits have gotten a bit fuzzy. So I’m hoping this inquiry offers a somewhat informed opinion on a kind of person that the famously troubled Highsmith didn’t invent so much as discover within herself. A villain whose criminal deceptions go unpunished, whose motivations are disarmingly simple, and who feels that since every game is rigged, every act is justified. 

In the most common entry point to the character, Anthony Minghella's 1999 film, Tom Ripley's talent is desire.

This is something the film's sumptuous cast, scenery, and cinematography makes almost palpable, intoxicating us with the dazzling carnal plenty that Matt Damon's gimlet-eyed nobody can only ogle, or secretly try on like extravagantly pricey lingerie. Since we behold this post-war European feast through Ripley's eyes, everything he does seems to flow from this outsized want, an all-consuming lust that leaves him alternately thrilled, desperate, or enraged to the point of murder as he feels its object slipping away. 

This young man is no mastermind or obvious deviant. A nebbishy opportunist in his larval form, Tom gatecrashes a Manhattan party where he plays piano in a borrowed Princeton blazer, attracting the attention of a wealthy older couple who ask him if he knows their errant son, Dickie, from that college. 

For all we know, the first deception in Tom's life is answering yes to this question, then agreeing to go on Mr. Greenleaf's funded mission to exfiltrate their son from his decadent life in Southern Italy. Since the first of Highsmith's Ripley novels concerns the character's coming of age, the film is a journey of self-discovery and vocation. A blackly ironic version of Jay Gatsby, this tender young American reinvents himself through imitating not a social class but a specific person, who he must then eliminate in one of post-war American literature's first identity thefts. 

From the moment Damon's wan, circumspect Tom meets Jude Law's golden-god Dickie, Tom's desire is practically the main character. We do witness his education in deceit, as he makes his way from minor misrepresentation to serious deception to extended subterfuge, but the pressure driving his improvisational jiggery-pokery is so visible in Damon's strained, nervous features that he seems like a fellow victim, subject to his own taboo, illegal yearnings. 

In his chief alteration of the story, Minghella gives Ripley a deeply humanizing ending: having found a chance at redemption with a minor character the script elevated to love interest, Tom is forced to kill him to escape discovery; wracked in agonized, suppressed tears, Damon lies atop his lover's inert body, sobbing quietly but harder than he did in the clinch with his shrink in Good Will Hunting.

This unwelcome rite of passage is like the one Fast Eddie undergoes at the end of The Hustler, when, after destroying everything he loves, he returns to the fray as a cool, disciplined pool player — having gotten "character" by discovering his girlfriend dead of a suicide in their hotel room. A Pyrrhic victory that gives the Greece-bound Ripley a classical tragic hero's arc.

Minghella's film borrowed adroitly from 1960's Purple Noon — mostly in the saturated colors of Henri Decae's cinematography, and some of director René Clément's dash and rhythm. But while it's technically the first film treatment of Highsmith's Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon’s Ripley is so unlike both the novel’s and subsequent adaptations’ — and so famously the star-making debut of the dazzling screen presence that is Alain Delon — that he seems to exist somewhere outside our little canon. 

Not having seen the film in decades, I expected to find the 1960 version to be among the queerest of the Ripley's, given the Saltburn aura around its imagery, and twinky, feline beauty of its 25-year-old star. But while Delon does exude an eely slipperiness that could translate to omnisexuality, it doesn’t really drive his actions, which reflect a more mercenary view of Dickie and Marge, and sexual chemistry only with the latter.

Maurice Ronet plays Greenleaf as a carousing, woman-slapping asshole a la française, a high-born lowlife on his way to becoming one of Blier's Les Valseuses. A visually unremarkable man, his Greenleaf visibly diminished by the chiseled, brooding, sapphire-eyed presence of the French James Dean beside him, who’d outshine even Jude Law, an object more than subject of outsized erotic longing.

This Ripley's talent is his feral beauty. 

It's also a curse, to him and those around him, fostering a wastrel's entitlement that makes his decision to murder Dickie feel like an impulse, sending him ricocheting like a pinball through the remainder of the plot. This Ripley's lack of moral checks and balances reads more like a beautiful wild animal's than a devious human's. And there's such symmetry to this film's murder and replacement plot that you root for its success. 

On its merits, Purple Noon is delicious, a supremely well-made cocktail of sun-soaked ennui that goes down smooth and cools the soul. (The film also provides the English-speaking viewer that dependable joy of watching Americans whose looks, carriage, wardrobe, mannerisms, and language are all screamingly Parisian —complete with a Dickie Greenleaf whose first name is Phillippe.) But its greatest relevance for this essay may be the more literal translations of its European titles — Plein soleil in France; Delitto in pieno sole in Italy — which cash out something like "in broad daylight." This refers to the essential condition for Ripley's talent.

Once he's ensconced in this luxurious life, Matt Damon's Tom answers this essay's opening question. What's his talent? "Forging signatures, telling lies, and impersonating almost anyone." He then performs an unspectacular impression of Mr. Greenleaf senior, which nonetheless impresses Law's Dickie — revealing his willingness to indulge a certain amount of rakish deception if it's new or entertaining.

Which brings us to Netflix's Ripley, which is certainly new, rather less entertaining, and reveals some essential qualities about the kind of talent we’re talking about here.

In truncating the novel's title to its main character's name, the Netflix series, adapted and directed by Steven Zaillian, is presumably queueing up a potential multi-season run of Highsmith's four subsequent Ripley novels — which, if this one's pacing is an indication, will run through 2035.

After the first three episodes, I found myself trying to think of a recent entertainment product of such impeccable provenance, that had such world-class talent and such masterful execution, and gave so little joy over so long a period of time. Having made it through all eight episodes, I conclude that this is a feature and not a bug.

An Oscar-nominated screenwriter for blue-chip films like Schindler's List and Gangs of New York, Zaillian also wrote 2016's riveting American version of the crime procedural The Night Of, managing its eight-part episodic structure like he invented the form. Cinematographer Robert Elswit, who seems to have DP-ed every it-film of the past two decades, sets out his ambitions in the first shot, using high-contrast film-noir monochrome and putting a novella's worth of cinematography in every other shot. 

The first ten minutes fill you with anticipation. Then you get the point pretty quickly. Yes, this Ripley is High Noir: wet streets, dark skies, looming shadows, an air of German Expressionist urban menace even on the beach. The camera is refined, austere, infinitely patient. It tracks Ripley's perambulations — up a flight of stairs, across a landing, up another flight of stairs — in a series of elegantly composed shots with the immaculate sound design of Ferragamo soles ringing on marble step, from one end of a vaulted hallway to another, as we watch Ripley drop off or pick up some mail. 

Every shot is composed to within an inch of its life, charting the moral blacks, whites, and grays of its protagonist's soul. And in case we missed its suggestive use of chiaroscuro, we're given frequent opportunities to sit in hushed reverie before paintings by Caravaggio, the technique's best-known exponent after Rembrandt. Add a few oddly vulgar smash-cut narrative sight gags and this show leaves you feeling alternately condescended to and left behind. 

But in its title role, Ripley has one of the most skilled and surprising actors of his generation, Andrew Scott, whose performance points you toward some specific conclusions about his character and what his "gifts" are. It's not pretty, or ultimately all that rewarding, but Scott’s performance is intensely reasoned, powerfully contained, and utterly unconcerned about projecting charisma or glamor. To the point of being somewhat hard to watch.

Scott’s breakthrough role was as the floridly psychotic Moriarty, genius evil twin to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes, and in this performance was explosively watchable: flitting up and down vocal registers, counterposing operatic gestures with the subtlest facial tics. This new performance is, in just about every way, that one’s counterpart. In having Scott dial everything down to nearly zero, Zallian forces him to perform the emotional blankness that's at the core of people like him, the thing that comprises their talent: their absence of humanity. 

In fact, I'm not sure Scott is convinced that his character has much interior life at all. New York magazine's Mark Harris gets to the point when he writes that "Scott’s impeccable performance finds a thousand shades of moon-faced blankness in Ripley’s sociopathy."

Which is, I’d argue, the core of this Ripley's talent.

Delon's Ripley is a deeply-tanned, island- and boat-hopping imp of the perverse, a dangerous stray. Damon's is a soulful, repressed gay man of modest origins desperate to ascend in post-war American society. Scott's Ripley is something else entirely. 

We're told he's an orphan, which may explain the primal wound that produced him. But he's not a callow striver or indolent thief. He's not a tormented soul waging war with his own desires. This Ripley, with his moon-faced blankness and glittering black eyes, is a reptile. 

Most media refers to Scott as “the hot priest,” for his role in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sitcom Fleabag, in which his hotness is less about his physical appearance and more about his charm, intelligence, wit, sweetness, vulnerability — ideal-boyfriend qualities — combined with the tempting unavailability of a priest. In this sense, Scott’s hotness in Fleabag is like his talent in Ripley, a product of his position in society, and his attenuated relation to other people.

Scott shows this in a million tiny gestures, as he shifts from arrested schoolboy awkwardness to the steely poise of a moneyed aesthete, but never undergoes the kind of change that typically defines a protagonist. This Tom Ripley just gets incrementally better at being a sociopath, someone whose talent is an absence, and relies on the humanity of other people.

What Zallian's Ripley achieves, better than Purple Noon, better than the Highsmith novel, maybe better than most recent fiction, is a clinical, naturalistic portrait of a sociopath. And if it feels like a four-episode series stretched out to an enervating eight, this may be part of the reason.

Is this exquisitely composed mis-en-scene wth its high-contrast monochrome really gorgeous enough to sustain so many hours of uneventful clinical study? Or is it cold, drained of color, like its protagonist's emotional life? Scott's Ripley is less devious than amoral, a step or two outside of humanity, looking in. He simply doesn't register right, wrong, or other people's feelings. He's colorblind, able to only see shapes, angles, ingresses, escape routes. 

Because unfortunately, and counter to many popular media misconceptions, sociopathology — like autism, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia — is a mental illness, not a superpower. It doesn't actually come with amazing compensatory abilities, as either adaptive strategies or Marvel-informed wishful thinking. Ripley, especially the Netflix Ripley, is only talented to himself. He’s a public health hazard to everyone else.

His talent relies on the pro-social qualities of others: trust, acceptance, friendliness. He's nothing without a mark and anyone can be a mark, if only once. Once he burns them, Ripley's talent quickly erases guilt and retrofits all memory of the offense. In Highsmith's novel, Ripley gets about as close as he'll ever get to a moment of clarity about his actions:

He didn’t want to be a murderer. Sometimes he could absolutely forget that he had murdered, he realized. But sometimes — like now — he couldn’t. He had surely forgotten for a while tonight, when he had been thinking about the meaning of possessions, and why he liked to live in Europe.

The sociopath's calculation is fast because it's frictionless, without attachment, conscience, or other egoic structures gumming up the works. 

The talents that Tom playfully claims are: forging signatures, telling lies, and impersonating almost anyone.

The first is a talent, but Matt Damon hardly morphs into Jude Law, and Scott doesn't even try to resemble Johnny Flynn's dud of a blond Dickie, and his vocal impersonations require terrible telephone connections to barely succeed. Forgery is a talent, though Tom's is insufficient to escape detection by at least two banks. This leaves lying. Which does take a certain kind of ghastly talent. 

You notice it in people who can put the most obvious whoppers over with a straight, unworried face. Their talent is a liberating absence — of concern for the truth, of conventional ethics, of belief in the subjectivity of others — but it's still an absence. 

In order to lie convincingly, Ripley has to believe the lie, if only for a moment, and to find a willing mark. There's no DSM diagnosis "pathological liar," despite how frequently current events seem to call for one. Psychiatrists diagnose the conditions beneath these constant lies. 

Sometimes, as in the case of J.D. Vance, they practically wear them on their sleeve. A deeply wounded product of a broken home, in perpetual search of a stable father figure, he is, like Ripley, carefully scrutinizing the speech, mannerisms, and insults of his latest chosen tribe, sometimes overdoing it to the point of camp.

This is not the talent of a mob boss but of one of his foot soldiers, the guy who screws over union negotiators, entraps store owners in protection rackets It's the talent of a millennial reality-TV cast member, back before they had to be chefs, singers, designers, or drag queens. When they only needed either youthful sexiness or name recognition, and a certain psychiatric diagnosis. 

American media didn't invent this disorder but it became expert at recognizing it, and for decades it was common knowledge in reality-TV casting departments that the kind of person you needed to bring into your controlled experiment — where proximity, competition, and alcohol might not be enough to guarantee "good television" — was a human talent similar to Tom Ripley's.  

You need cast members who are in that sweet spot of psychiatric disorders known as cluster-b — a catch-all term for pathological narcissists who don’t necessarily threaten imminent violence. And the biggest selector for this type of personality is the show itself. What kind of person would audition for a TV show in which their role is to perform their own personality in contrived situations? There were three types you could count on: sexy basketcases, marginal celebrities, Machiavellian psychos, or some combination of all three. 

While sociopaths have a burn rate and limited amount of runway, a city like New York is big enough that you can spend 25 years stiffing contractors, betraying partners, and defrauding investors, just within the limits of the law, and still do business. Just as in an industry like Hollywood, you can do something similar for decades in broad daylight, if you’re still making other people money.

You do have to cast the net increasingly wide and, eventually, find a new set of marks and enablers. One real estate developer did this in the early-00s, when a TV production company offered the "sleazy New York tabloid hustler," then facing yet another bankruptcy, to play a sage, savvy, lavishly successful businessman on TV, which it helped sell to the rest of the country.

"No one involved in The Apprentice — from the production company or the network, to the cast and crew — was involved in a con with malicious intent," writes show producer Mark Pruitt, whose 20-year NDA for the show recently elapsed. "It was a TV show, and it was made for entertainment. I still believe that. But we played fast and loose with the facts, particularly regarding Trump, and if you were one of the 28 million who tuned in, chances are you were conned."

Or one of the 74 million who voted for him in 2020.

Once someone knows the trick, it's over, but Trump's success in 2016 made the criteria for reality TV cast-member increasingly hard to distinguish from the criteria for winning the presidency of the US. Trump’s burn rate is unknown but he'll be out of runway some day.

At some point, the part of the country that’s paying attention will realize how numbed it is by the lying, drama, tantrums, betrayals, and reversals of the single bold-faced name to be credibly associated with some of the most ludicrous statements in public life. No longer new, no entertaining, he’ll make the boring competence and compromised politics of the Harris/Walz ticket feel like a novelty.

Today’s Trump is obviously too floridly unwell to be a convincing Tom Ripley — other then maybe the one in Highsmith’s final 1991 Ripley novel, Ripley Under Water, where he’s lost a step or two, tinkling away on his harpsichord in his Mar-a-Lago on the Seine-et-Marne. But I bet he’ll remain the paragon example of the hollow talent Highsmith’s hero develops in that first novel for years to come. A talent that’s nothing without the normal, trusting, imperfect people who comprise the rest of the world — as well as those chancers who still see an angle in his success.

By age three, every kid knows how easy it is to lie. All you need is people who expect the truth. We’re the ones who make Ripley talented. Without us, he’s back to the sewers.