Sinful Sundays: Tom Ripley and the Charisma of Queerness in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"
As portrayed by Matt Damon, Patricia Highsmith's infamous villain is a boyishly charming and supremely deadly queer villain.
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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.
There’s something irrepressibly appealing and alluring about Tom Ripley, the sinister queer villain created by Patricia Highsmith in her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (he would go on to appear in several of her other novels). He’s also appeared in a number of films over the years, and he is currently slated to appear in a Netflix series starring the great Andrew Scott. Though I’ve no doubt that Scott will be sublime in the role–since he’s great in basically anything–he’ll still have to contend with the mighty shadow cast by the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which he is played by a very young, charming, and handsome Matt Damon.
When the film begins Ripley is playing piano for a gathering of glittering socialites. After he is mistaken for being a Princeton alum by Herbert Greenleaf, he is dispatched to Italy to procure the latter’s reprobate son, Dickie (Jude Law). Soon enough Ripley is on his way to the Mediterranean, where he soon falls under the magnetic spell of Dickie himself. Through a combination of his own innate cunning (one might even say brilliance) and a heavy dose of luck (one might even say fortuitous plot contrivances), Ripley manages to ingratiate himself with the young man he is supposed to be bringing home, even as events soon begin to spin nearly out of his control.
It’s immediately obvious that Ripley is hopelessly smitten with the arrogant and beautiful Dickie Greenleaf. I mean, who wouldn’t be? After all, he is played by a young and very handsome Jude Law, whose charisma and vitality positively leap off the screen. The film abounds with numerous instances of Ripley holding Dickie in his gaze, and there’s something almost pathetic about the nakedness of his longing for him and the careless life of leisure he wields. There are smoldering looks in the bath–the scene in which Ripley gazes at Dickie’s naked form is a master-class in queer longing–and there’s the desperate way Ripley tries to fit in with Dickie’s upper-crust set even when it becomes ever clearer that not only does he not fit in; he’s not wanted.
Ultimately, of course, this can only end one way: with Dickie’s vicious repudiation of Ripley and the latter’s bludgeoning of him to death with an oar, after which he hides the body, sinks the boat, and constructs an elaborate ruse whereby he manages to convince everyone Dickie is still alive. Thus begins the game of cat and mouse that will take Ripley throughout Italy, always trying to stay one step ahead of everyone, including Dickie’s sometime-fiancee Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the unctuous Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The latter comes perilously close to exposing the ruse, which leads Ripley to bludgeon him to death, leaving yet another body to try to hide.
Despite all the setbacks and bodies left in his wake, somehow Ripley manages to not only survive but thrive. He meets the handsome and dashing Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport) and the two are immediately smitten with one another, and Dickie’s father even gives him a substantial amount of his son’s trust fund in return for his faithfulness. He does come perilously close to murdering Marge when it seems that she is going to bring his house of cards crashing down into ruin, but fortunately he’s able to rely on everyone else’s innate misogyny to do the dirty work for him. They refuse to believe her cries that Ripley has murdered Dickie (this is one of those plot contrivances I was talking about).
Despite his terrible actions, and unlike many other queer villains, Ripley isn’t totally irredeemable, at least not at first. He genuinely seems to want to start a new life with Peter, who offers him a chance to leave the old ugliness of his life behind. Indeed, Peter is one of those who is able to see into Tom’s heart, or at least what he allows others to see of it. In one of their last scenes together he comes as close as he ever does to really revealing the truth about himself, giving a truly remarkable speech: “Don't you just take the past and put it in a room in a basement and lock the door and never go in there?” he asks. “That's what I do. And then you meet someone special and all you want to do is to toss them the key and say, "Open up, step inside," but you can't because it's dark. There's demons, and if anybody saw how ugly it is... I keep wanting to do that: fling the door open, just let light in and clean everything out.”
But such is not the fate for a tragic queer villain like Ripley, for once again he is robbed of the chance to start again when his lies catch up to him again and he’s forced to choose between his love (if that’s what it is) for Peter and his future success and wealth. He obviously chooses the latter and, as Peter declaims some of the things he likes most about his beloved, Ripley brutally strangles him to death, Peter’s endearments segueing disturbingly into desperate and increasingly futile gasps for survival. In a very real way, it’s as if Ripley is literally killing those positive and heroic aspects of himself that Peter is uniquely able to see. Sure, he might still have all of the money and wealth and privilege that he has gained, but now he knows that there will be escape from the darkness that eats away at his soul. Rather than running from him, he now has no choice but to embrace it. He has become, in some ways, the very embodiment of Lee Edelmen’s death drive. He has killed the future; there is now only the long dark of the present.
And yet, beneath all of that, there is also something sadder, almost tragic about Ripley’s arc. In keeping with his queer death drive-ness, he seems to yearn for oblivion, to erase himself. As he says at the beginning of the film, “If I could just go back. If I could rub everything out. Starting with myself. Starting with borrowing a jacket.” This is a man, after all, who has left a trail of death and destruction behind him, who has taken the life of the one person in the entire world who saw something good in him. Of course, this is Ridley we’re talking about, and so we know that he won’t let this stop him. He’ll continue to add new rooms to that basement, shoving more and more bad memories there, while he goes on to live the life he always wanted and feels he deserved.
The scariest thing is that we want him to succeed. And that, I think, is the mark of a truly great queer villain.