Sinful Sunday: Savoring the Queer Enigma of "Ripley"
Andrew Scott's take on the classic Highsmith character is both queerer and more unknowable than any of his on-screen predecessors.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
Readers of this newsletter will recall that a couple of months ago I wrote about the charismatic but sinister appeal of Matt Damon in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley. I found myself absolutely mesmerized by Damon’s performance, particularly the extent to which he was able to give voice to Ripley’s queer longing and his simultaneous realization that such longing was doomed to be unfulfilled. It was understandable, then, that I was a little on the fence about whether Ripley, the new Netflix series, created by Steven Zaillian and starring Andrew Scott as the title character. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always happy to see the works of Highsmith brought to either the big or the small screen, and I’ll definitely take a new queer villain wherever I can. However, I was afraid that the shadow of the 1999 film would be so overwhelming and so long-lasting that the new one couldn’t help but fade in its shadow.
Reader, you may rest assured that this series is well worth the investment. It’s about as different from Minghella’s version as it’s possible to be, far more cold-blooded and cynically noir than its predecessor. Its black-and-white cinematography is both clinical and unsettling and utterly compelling, drawing you into Ripley’s world of moral ambiguity and deception. It’s as if a cool 1960s noir had been transplanted into the present, and you can bet I was here for every minute of it.
Of course, it probably goes without saying that one of the series’ biggest appeals is its star, Andrew Scott, who has been having quite a good couple of years, thanks in no small part to his emotionally rich and complex performance in the haunting queer drama All Of Us Strangers. In Ripley he shows why should be regarded as one of his generation’s most extraordinary and versatile actors. His Ripley begins the series as a small-time fraudster and scammer, but he’s soon recruited by a wealthy shipbuilder to retrieve his prodigal son Dickie from Italy, leading to a series of events that will forever change Tom’s life.
What I particularly appreciated about Scott’s take on the character of Ripley is that this is an older version of the character, so he’s seen a bit more and, as a result, is more than a little cynical and jaundiced about the world around him. And, while Damon’s iteration was almost puppy-like in his enthusiasm, this version is much more calculating and deliberate in his movements. To be sure, he’s a bit uncertain at first about how well he fits into Dickie’s wealthy millieu, but once he finds that he actually quite likes it–there’s the requisite scene in which he masquerades in Dickie’s clothes and pretends to be him while gazing in the mirror–things begin to get more interesting.
As fans of the book know, it’s not long before Dickie spurns Tom, leading the latter to murder him and sink his body in the sea. What follows is a game of cat-and-mouse, as Tom tries to stay one step ahead of everyone in Dickie’s life–including his girlfriend, Marge, played here by a cool but endlessly captivating Dakota Fanning and the ethereal queer Freddie Miles, portrayed by a gnomic Eliot Sumner–well as the police. There’s a unique pleasure to be had in watching Tom’s efforts, and the brilliance of Scott’s performance stems in large part from his ability to somehow convey both the character’s increasingly frantic determination to avoid detection of his crimes and the deliberate way in which he moves through the world despite his plans and schemes always being in danger of falling apart.
And then there’s the question of queerness.
This question has haunted Ripley almost since the moment of his creation, thanks in no small part to the sexuality of his creator, noted lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith (I don’t doubt that she would hate that designation, but I’m sticking with it) and her own mixed messaging about the issue. Is Ripley’s desire for Dickie simply a matter of him wanting the other man’s wealth and privilege and lifestyle, or is that he also desires his body? This question of Ripley’s sexuality was more explicit in the ‘99 version of the film, particularly since he was given a male lover, albeit one that he was forced to murder in the end, anyway.
Ripley, unlike its 1990s predecessor, plays a bit more coy with the question of its title character’s queerness, and Scott does as well. To be sure, the star’s own visibility as one of today’s hottest gay actors certainly has a part to play in shaping our perception of him, and his undeniable hotness–and the intensity of that basilisk gaze–certainly lends itself to a queer appreciation. After all, there are few things more alluring to a queer male audience than the guy with the smoldering good looks that you know is going to be bad for you.
Rom’s queerness goes beyond his attractiveness, however, because like so many other compelling television antiheroes he denies any efforts to make him into an object of sympathy for the viewer. There’s a coldness to Tom that keeps us at arm’s length, never quite sure where we stand with him (the same is also true of the characters, none of whom can ever quite tell what he thinks of them, whether he’s masquerading as Dickie or actually being himself). We might find ourselves wanting him to get away with his various misdeeds–being gay and doing crime is all the rage these days, after all–but it’s going too far to say that we empathize with him. He’s simply too cold for that.
Perhaps the queerest thing about Ripley, however, is just how skilled he is as a performer. Like many gay men of that generation (and subsequent ones), he knows how to pretend to be something he’s not, first literally in that he adopts Dickie’s identity and then later when, confronted again by the relentless and indefatigable Inspector Ravini, he masquerades as himself, complete with a new wig and facial hair. He knows how people view him–and how they understand him as a person–is predicated almost entirely on appearances. If there’s one thing Tom is good at, it’s pretending to be something else, often to such an extent that he can’t even tell the difference himself.
For me, though, the queerest moment of all comes near the very end, when Tom attends a fancy party and meets an enigmatic art dealer named Reeves Minot, played by the great John Malkovich. There’s a fascinating bit of doubling going on here for those in the know, for Malkovich himself played Ripley in the 2002 movie Ripley’s Game. However, the subtlety goes beyond that, for it’s very clear that though the two are supposedly talking about art and wine, what they’re really talking about is a potential gay encounter. If their whole exchange isn’t a bit of high-class cruising, then I don’t know what is.
The painter Caravaggio, famous for, among other things, his violence as well as his artistic brilliance, hangs like a shadow over the entire film, proving to be a particular inspiration to Tom. Just as the Renaissance painter was something of an enigma to those in his own time, so Tom is a sphinx-like being in our own. He embodies so many of the contradictions of queer desire–its fetishizing of beauty, its slipperiness and yes, even its violence–and for this reason he continues to allure us even as he reminds us of the dangers inherent in desire of any kind. He makes hungry where most he seems to satisfy, and the more we think we understand him, the more he recedes into the shadows, giving us a pleasurable shiver of the unknown