To The Manner Born: On ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’
I first watched Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley about three weeks ago. I would put it as a solidly three-and-a-half star affair — it probably wasn’t in with a fair shot considering I had just watched Fassbender’s Querelle, which is a titan of queer cinema against which the relatively tame and conventional Ripley cannot quite compete. All the same, Minghella’s adaptation of Highsmith’s 1955 novel is a textured and substantial piece; it comes across as genuinely invested in the discourse of ts point of origin without being swallowed by it. To give a brief summary: Tom Ripley is a man whose true past is never revealed to us, because he tells opportunistic lies at every turn, and the audience is no exception in his theatre of constant changeability. The Greenleaf family (wealthy, American) promise a large sum of money if he can go to Mongibello, Italy, and convince the wayward and capricious Dickie Greenleaf to come home. Dickie enjoys jazz and the company of Marge Sherwood, and lives in a vacuous version of Italy that amounts to little more than a wealthy American playground but that he imagines lends him a measure of credibility against the claim of American myopia. Tom inserts himself into Dickie’s social circle, but routinely falls out with him when he skirts too close to giving a name to the governing structure of tension between them; a final, decisive fallout sees Tom all but soliciting Dickie before killing him with an oar in a boat off San Remo. The rest of the film follows Tom’s extravagant efforts to cover up the murder, a substantial portion of which involves his assuming Dickie’s identity and ingratiating himself into the newly opened-up social world of the ultra-wealthy. Just when he appears to get away with it, a woman who knows him as Dickie Greenleaf encounters him on yet another boat with his (male) lover who knows him as Tom Ripley; to prevent the two from meeting, he strangles his lover, and the film comes to an end.
I am far less interested in the narrative of The Talented Mr. Ripley as one of psychological profiling — as its reception points to, a tale of ‘psychopathy’ or other such voyeuristic projections of lazy and essentialising psychology — as I am in picking at the discourse by which Highsmith and Minghella constitute queerness as a peripheral threat to the confines of heterosexuality; I find that zeroing in on these questions of sexual norms and deviations thereof make for a useful exegetical practice.
Tom Ripley enters the narrative as the threat of homosexual embodiment — though it might be more precise to name him as homosexual contagion. He acts initially as a disciplining structure towards the governance of the family, tasked as he is with the mission to bring Dickie Greenleaf home to America and, presumably, set him on a path that involves gainful employment and reproductive futurity pleasantly ensconced in heterosexuality. Dickie’s having absconded to Italy ushers in the kinds of potentialities encoded in, for instance, a lingering shot of two men embracing on a street corner, or the classical homosexual tradition invoked by Peter, or Freddie Miles’ campily foppish (though heterosexual) demeanour. For all that Dickie Greenleaf is presented to us as rather assuredly straight, the possibility — threat — of deviation from hegemonic sexual paradigms constantly mediates his relationships with men and women alike, and such a deviation comes home to roost when queer contagion in the form of Tom Ripley takes on the form, language, and desires of the American family unit.
Tom begins as something of an awkward appendage latching onto Dickie and Marge. He charms his way into Dickie’s inner circle by informing him that his principle talents consist of ‘forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody,’ and demonstrating as much with an impression of Dickie’s self-serious father. We see him rehearsing similar such impressions of Dickie and Marge for, ostensibly, his own amusement; we also see him adopt with ease the sorts of characteristics by which Dickie might find him charming. All of this lays narrative groundwork for the driving force of the second part of the film, when Tom murders Dickie and adopts his identity. Moments before the murder, Dickie protests in anger that he ‘can’t move without [Tom] moving.’
Essential to all of this is that Tom Ripley is a rather transparent queer; reserved and a little effete, craving homosociality and all but prancing around Dickie’s bedroom in Dickie’s clothes. His desire to ingratiate himself with Dickie extends beyond the obligations imposed on him by the Greenleaf patriarch; he is seduced not only by wealth, but by the homosocial possibilities that wealth can usher in. His desire for Dickie extends beyond a discrete distinction whereby Tom is subject and Dickie is coveted object; to fuck Dickie Greenleaf would be to become Dickie Greenleaf, and Tom does not separate one from another. Following the murder, he assembles himself and the dead Dickie in an erotic embrace at the bottom of the boat.
What I mean to get at here is that Tom Ripley is a mutable subject — a narrative mechanism that could not be pinned down into one distinct, discrete form, but instead threatens to inhabit, possess, and subsume those around him. If a classic paradigm of homophobic thought runs that there is a regular, heterosexual articulation of the homosexual subject extant and able to be liberated once the homosexuality can be ‘purged’ (repression, conversion therapy, exorcism, &c.), then Tom Ripley is that unpurged contagion made manifest.
In order to encounter such an unpurged contagion, one must only go so far as to look in a mirror. It goes without saying that homoerotic desire cannot be acted upon directly. An echo of Wilde’s Salomé gilds the piece — as Herod proclaims, Your beauty has grievously troubled me, and I have looked at you too much. But I will look at you no more. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks, so too does Tom covet the naked Dickie reflected in a full-length mirror after goading him into getting out of the bath, and so too does he watch the reflection of Dickie and Marge have sex from the upper deck of a boat. Mirrors allow for the refraction and mediation of desire, neutralising a threat by rendering it unrealisable. At the same time, the mirror inserts the agent of desire — the looker — into the scene; mirrors, after all, ought to show us our own reflection. Tom looks in a mirror and sees a naked Dickie, object of erotic desire from another man; Tom, in the mirror, inserts himself into the image of heterosexual coupling; Tom then becomes Dickie in a manner that the film works hard to suggest might as well have been fucking him.
Of course, the most iconic use of a mirror in the film comes to us when we see Tom trying on Dickie’s clothes, only to be caught by Dickie coming home unexpectedly. Trouserless, with his bare legs on display, Tom dances around Dickie’s room in a manner we might best call girlish. Looking at himself in the mirror bent delicately over with both hands perched on his waist, we suddenly see Dickie reflected in the doorway; Tom turns in horror, his mouth still in a pout, as Dickie absorbs the scene of an effete and emasculated queer wearing his clothes and dancing in his room. There stands behind Tom’s shoulder the miniature torso of Michaelangelo’s David — no head, no limbs, just a chiseled body and a cock.
Tom runs to hide behind the mirror, and Dickie’s reflection is his own again. Their relationship denatures rapidly — though not to so severe an extent as to deter Tom from later insisting, as Dickie announces an intention to marry Marge, that ‘You love me, but you’re not marrying me.’ Dickie has to die when the possibility of homosexuality becomes too overt — he recognises Tom’s desire for what it is, and pushes back against Tom’s insistence that moments such as that with the mirror in the bathroom speak to the possibility of actualisation, accusing Tom of behaving like a ‘little girl.’ Confronted with so overt an assertion of the heterosexual regime — the gendered nightmare! — Tom brings the becoming-fucking to its crescendo, forcing Dickie into a queerness-subjectivity put into practice by killing and subsuming him.
If we follow this reading of homosexual contagion, perhaps the lesson here is to always be looking over your shoulder. Even the most insistent heterosexual might be vulnerable to what the world of mirrors — typically a world of tricksters, inversion — might manage to usher in, what might be hiding behind a reflection that you surely cannot trust all the way. Tom Ripley is not himself a person, but an alchemical process waiting to happen — an ingredient representing what a person might become.
(Incidentally, the rocky and mutable dialectical state of desire and embodiment as rendered in the film is not limited to Tom, though he certainly serves as our centrepiece. Following Tom’s machinated ‘reveal’ that Dickie was allegedly having an affair with Meredith, Marge begins to dress more like her presumed romantic rival. Desire in the narrative is a game of dressing-up.)
Yet there are moments when Minghella breaks with his construction of Tom Ripley as a mutable subject whose stable interiority exists somewhere far away from the audience’s gaze or reach. One is when we see him admit to his lover, Peter, that he has ‘put the past in a room, in a cellar, and [locked] the door; that he cannot conceive of inviting another person to look into this room, because it is
dark and there are demons and if anybody saw how ugly it was […] I keep wanting to do that — fling open the door — let the light in, clean everything out. If I could get a huge eraser and rub everything out, starting with myself …
Another such moment of vulnerability comes at the film’s close, when he strangles Peter with the cord on his dressing-gown. Before doing so, he asks Peter: Tell me some good things about Tom Ripley. This sudden swell of appetite for intimacy and legibility from a man who previously professed his desire to be ‘erased’ from his own history reaches a crescendo at the transition from a romantic flirtation to murder — ‘Tom has someone to love him. That is a good thing. Tom is crushing me. Tom is crushing me.’
If Tom is the threat of homosexuality behind the glass then perhaps we might read Peter as its realisation — its emergence into a stable and survivable subject position. Certainly his death is an enforcement of heterosexuality and a recloseting; he is unfortunate enough to have spotted Tom on the deck with Meredith who still believes him to be ‘Dickie’ and thus runs the risk of uncovering the ruse. More precisely, he sees Tom and Meredith exchange a kiss, at which he prickles with a suggested jealousy. In this capacity, Meredith represents the destabilisation of that ‘Tom Ripley’ that Tom then provokes Peter to assert; she also reintroduces the necessity of heterosexual playacting over genuine homosexual embodiment not dissimilar to that which Dickie sought with Marge. In killing Peter, Tom chooses Meredith.
Tom seems to momentarily consider ‘[letting] the light in’ before electing instead to dispose of his lover for good. He speaks to Peter in cryptic half-confessions which compel a reminder that Peter ‘has the key,’ referring to the ‘locked door’ in which his past is buried. Naturally, Peter’s speaking him into existence — speaking of him in the third person, asserting what he perceives to be fixities around the name of Tom Ripley from which Tom has spent the film attempting to abscond — contravenes his earlier professed desire for erasure; Peter himself comes to us as a man who seems content and actualised, comfortable in his sexuality (to the point of glibly challenging the principles of Italian homophobia to a policeman who questions whether Tom is a homosexual) and open to a pleasant and reciprocal relationship. That he is ‘crushed’ by Tom speaks to an act of repression. At the close of the film, we hear Peter’s death offscreen as we sit with Tom in his cabin, and we are told that ‘the door of his closet flips open with the swell and he catches his reflection. It swings shut. Open then shut.’ Here the closet is a metaphor that I imagine does not need explaining; so too do we see the return of the mirror, an object that has throughout the film mediated and refracted homoerotic desire into the unstable and inward-facing trajectory that crafted Tom Ripley as we presently meet him. For the first time, no object of Tom’s desire is meeting him in the mirror; there is only the self that he could not bear to face.
There is an unpleasant tinge to the film’s idea of an actualised or stabilised homosexuality — I dislike the way in which Mighella shies away from problematising the classed aspect of Peter’s own access to queerness in a film which presides over a discourse concerned with the quotidian tyranny of wealth. Perhaps we might argue that Peter ultimately falls victim to the trappings of such a tyranny — quite literally suffocated by it and the obligations towards heterosexuality that it imposes, unfortunate as he was to choose Tom Ripley to participate in this party of actualisation — but I suppose I bristle a little at the sorts of discursive appeals made to establish him as likeable, respectable, and comfortable even amidst this ultimate act of repression and removal. What sticks out in particular is the film’s use of classical music — Peter is a musician — as a mediating force between the two men as their relationship develops, contrasted with Dickie and Tom’s mutual enjoyment of jazz (an affected enjoyment in the case of the latter) as a site of capricious, masculine, unstable bonding; jazz in the film signals Dickie’s vacuous skimming of a cultural surface outside of the hegemon, yes, but is given virtually no room to breathe beyond this constricting paradigm, and the film’s retreat into classical piano-playing as indicative of a greater legitimacy or gravitas strikes me as reactionary. All the same, there is something interesting in Minghella’s addition (Peter appears only fleetingly in Highsmith’s novel, and never as a romantic interest!) of a figure who ostensibly represents a happier life made possible for Tom being suddenly and brutally excised, and in the triumph of the tyranny of the closet.
A final word on Peter — I’m very interested in the fact that we see him speak of people in the third person multiple times. One such occasion is the final scene that I have already examined in depth; another is his simple observation that ‘Dickie loves Marge,’ to Marge’s face, during one of his earlier appearances in the film. (The more natural speech here might have been: ‘Dickie loves you.’) I wonder what it does to figure Peter as something of a detached observer peripheral to our ‘main’ cast of characters when Tom himself infiltrates and intrudes; Peter’s homosexuality exists at a distance by which the ‘threat’ that it might pose to Dickie, Marge, or Meredith can be neutralised.
It intrigues me that Highsmith’s novel would be ripe for adaptation at the time that it was. Certainly I am not suggesting that adaptations of decades- or centuries-old literature are especially remarkable — but I am interested in how a narrative chiefly concerned with homosexual contagion came to be of note in the late nineties, when the tail end of the peak of the AIDS crisis in the US left a trail of cultural debris by which the idea of contagion had taken on a gravitas extending beyond the boundaries of fifties moral-pearlclutching. The narrative is at once shaped by gay male death and the persistence of an abstract gay maleness — once again, Tom Ripley as mutable metaphor fails to settle into a stabilised subjectivity and instead insists upon existing all over, out of sight, in or behind the mirror. Perhaps the conclusion here is merely that fear of contagion from the sexually deviant transforms itself over time to remain legible amidst shifting hegemonic discourses of heteronormativity; or that how we use the language of contagion and disease to describe such deviances makes for a compelling heuristic in understanding how sexual hegemony is an operant force within the social language of fascism — we ought not to pollute nor degenerate our bodies. Dickie Greenleaf is so blonde and beautiful. Fascism, having run its course in Europe, ought to go home to America.
