On Highsmith, Ripley, and just let Andrew Scott be 50

Including a dangerous look into my own mind in year 2007

Happy April, to those who observe. I would call it more a March 10th, myself; maybe a 14th. In any event, The Talented Mr. Ripley has emerged from a doze in the form of a new Netflix series, and I’ve…made my way through it. I want to start, though, with Patricia Highsmith, the author, because even as far as authors go she was fairly wretched, described post-humously by her editor as a “mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being.” Woof.

Highsmith entered this world as a product of a failed DIY turpentine abortion which, I imagine, might’ve set a certain tone. She later blamed her mother for her own homosexuality, which she viewed as aberrant, but nonetheless went on to have many, many female lovers; she also became a flagrant alcoholic, starting with her “breakfast drinks.” (There were also “walking drinks.”) She was a horrid racist and anti-semite, and those things do not amuse me. However, her documented hatred of the French due to their consumption of snails, her favorite animal, does.

Of course, she found time between drinks and seductions to write her Ripley series, in addition to Carol, Strangers on a Train, and other works, and that first in the series, The Talented Mr. Ripley, has found the most screen adaptations. The most well-regarded - and one of my dearly loved films - came in 1999, with Matt Damon as Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge, Dickie’s girl. We also have Seymour Hoffman as Freddy, and Blanchett as a new addition. What a cast, and I include in that Jude Law’s face, that rare beautiful creature capable of the grotesque.

Directed by Anthony Minghella, this story, set in 1950’s Italy, starts out all sun and sea and jazz, throwing bright notes up against the novel’s pathos. Minghella gave us an explicitly queer film with deftly handled nuance, one which complicates Tom Ripley’s notions of selfhood with his desire for a man he both sees as a hero and calls a “brother.” By a certain point one starts to wonder, “Do I want to be him, be with him, both, or maybe both at once while cradled in his dead arms at the bottom of a boat?” These are ALL EXCELLENT QUESTIONS to explore, excluding the last one, and at 25 years old the film is still one of the better handlings of repression and queer exploration that I’ve found in a thriller.

This year’s black-and-white Netflix series, directed by a Steven Zaillian, stars Andrew Scott as Ripley, and I’d first thought, “Ah finally, we get the first Ripley played by an openly gay actor,” as well as “Huh, why is this 48-year-old man playing a 25-year-old?” I’ve come to imagine that Andrew Scott received director’s notes along these lines: “1. I hear you’re charming. Stop that. 2. You gotta seem young so make your voice super nasal, you charming Irish bastard. 3. You’re gonna be doing a lot of cleaning so let’s really lean into that aspect of the character. No gay stuff. Ok good Dictated by Siri.” Because golly is it sterile.

Highsmith claimed in a late interview, a couple years before her death, that her character Ripley was not gay. But an author’s statement is not the same as an author’s text, and remember that she originally published Carol under a pseudonym, fearing a reputation as “the lesbian author.” Ripley is clearly queer in the text, though not openly (the novels begin in 1955), and it’s quite bizarre to see a Ripley adaptation - especially one stretched across 8 one-hour episodes - show so few sexual overtones. There are a few allusions to homosexuality, but they are clinical and almost rote in their intent to shame, and gone is the homoerotic tension of the ’99 film and the novel, a strange and glaring absence. There is one interesting exception:

This scene is a rewrite of one from the novel - in the book, Tom is overtaken by hot shame, and goes into a silent spiral of self-censorship. Here, he shows no distress and just issues a cool response to Dickie, one which Dickie himself has no answer for. It could be interesting, if Zaillian had leaned into this Ripley-in-command-of-his-sexual-identity. But he didn’t. We get this one moment, where Ripley takes Highsmith’s shame and turns it into allyship, and no more - which makes the scene more seem a lazy aberration on Zaillian’s part than an intentional display of sexual confidence. Later on, in fact, Ripley moves away from this, playing into notions of homosexuality as a moral failing, and it’s a let-down.

I don’t insist on a remake of the Minghella world, but there’s a lot of void in this one, and a whole lot of time performing noir cinematography. There are so many low angle goddamn staircase shots, I cannot tell you. Zaillian leans on style to convince us we’re watching a thriller; not only have we lost our fraught homoerotic love triangle, but there are virtually no stakes. Back in 1999, Minghella said this about his own Ripley: “If I’m going to tell a story that’s so bleak and so much a journey of a soul, if in the end Ripley was just going to go about his business, what’s the journey?” Yes.

I can kind of pinpoint the moment when any support network around Zaillian gave up on intervening, but for this, you need to know that Ripley is given a Caravaggio obsession in this version, one explained only by the moment he learns Caravaggio murdered a man. That’s it. That’s all he needed to hear. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY ARTISTS DID BAD STUFF, YOU SIMPLE SIMPLE MAN.

Andrew Scott is admittedly very funny and very good, and I'd love to see his Ripley decoupled from this team.

So, the scene: Ripley learns that he’ll be receiving a visit from a police inspector with whom he spoke several times while posing as Dickie (dead in boat). Ripley wonders, ah, what to do, what to do, what a pickle. No he doesn’t! He wonders none of that. As one might consult a Reddit, Ripley goes straight to his massive hardcover Caravaggio book. The curtains are whisked down, and 20 minutes later we are looking at Andrew Scott in a full Caravaggio wig and beard. He receives the inspector in this getup, and due to the infallibility of - I emphasize - the Caravaggio wig and beard, the inspector never catches on. Again, I emphasize - ok, just look.

I’m sorry. You’re making “restrained art” or whatever you think you’re doing and then we get, what, some claymation of a Ruffalo-adjacent Jesus fresco? Which Hitchcock was that from? HIS OWN ADAPTATION OF A HIGHSMITH, PERHAPS?????

Anyhow, after all this, I opened up an ancient Williams College comp lit paper that was last saved in 2007 at 1 AM, and it is a DOOZY. Its stated purpose was to read The Talented Mr. Ripley through Lacan and Freud, but at one point I got very distracted by a scene in a train station, and then wrote…multiple paragraphs about the train station itself. No theory, just station. And then back to Lacan, like nothing happened. It’s the most coked-up thing I’ve ever read from someone who’s never touched coke.

Let me leave you with what I apparently considered to be an incredibly vital visual in this paper.

Source: Tammany, 2007, unpublished