The Art of Putting On Airs

The paintings in Dickie Greenleaf’s studio are bad. Hilariously bad, so much so that the set dressers on Ripley, the Netflix adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, must have let out a real cackle when they were commissioned. Dickie, the Ivy-educated dilettante son of a New York ship-building titan who has moved to seaside Italy to fritter away his inheritance, claims, about his work, “I happen to be pretty good at it.” But he can’t see what the audience can: the droopy Modigliani knockoffs and derivative Cubist faces that would make Picasso wince. When Tom Ripley, who will soon focus his affection and envy and rage at Dickie, first looks at the paintings, he practically laughs into his sleeve. As he quickly comes to realize, it doesn’t matter that the paintings are tripe—Dickie himself is a piece of art worth copying.

The Ripley canon, which includes Highsmith’s quick-twisting 1955 novel, the sun-drenched 1999 Anthony Minghella film, and the new television series from Steven Zaillian, has always been about American reinvention. Not only does the peon and con man Tom end up refashioning himself as the rich and carefree Dickie, but Highsmith’s novel itself was a retelling of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Each subsequent version has added another layer, transparent enough to still show the original but sturdy enough to stand on its own. And one facet of the story stands out more clearly than ever: This latest revival of Tom Ripley and his elaborate charade is of a part with the 21st-century obsession with optimizing one’s personality into its most ideal and palatable version.

Tom starts out as a nobody, or at least as the kind of person whom Dickie would think of as a nobody. In the novel, Tom is so vaguely drawn that we don’t know precisely what he looks like or where he comes from, just that he’s been running a small-time con in Manhattan. Dickie, on the other hand, is a golden god, with blue eyes and crinkly blond hair and a decided ease about him. He’s always mixing drinks and stretching out his legs, buoyantly chatting with Italian townspeople and taking up new friends like Tom, whom he invites to move into his home almost immediately after they meet. Dickie has it—charisma, insouciance, a devil-may-care freedom, all of which Tom wants for himself.  

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Eventually, Tom’s talent for ingratiating himself wears thin, and when he realizes he’s about to lose access to Dickie and his vibes, he bashes Dickie’s head in while they boat around San Remo, and formally takes over his identity. Tom spends the rest of the story signing into various Italian hotels as Signor Greenleaf, and writing letters and cashing checks with forged signatures to keep up the ruse that Dickie is alive but off the grid. And yet, his aim isn’t just to avoid the police or spend Dickie’s inheritance. If Tom merely wanted the Greenleaf money, he could have scammed Dickie out of it; if he’d wanted Dickie’s life, he’d have found a way to stay among his friends, and further stitch himself into their community of expat layabouts.

What he wants, however, is Dickie’s sense of self: his nonchalance, his elitist disdain for the second-rate, his innate effortlessness. And so that is what he takes, even though becoming Dickie exposes Tom to far more risk. He can’t exactly have Dickie’s face, and, depending on the version, it’s either more or less believable that he might freely jaunt around Italy using Dickie’s passport. But in every Ripley story, we see Tom practicing playing Dickie—his loucheness, his forceful voice, his sure and irrefutable stare—before fully embodying the role. Tom may be a murderer, but it’s tempting to admire the rigor and completeness of his transformation.

In many ways, Tom was ahead of his time; identity is more performance-based than ever. Public life, of which social media is one component, wants and needs fine-tuned, particularized selves to populate it. Those identities require two things: a face and a personality. Faces function as business cards, attached to us in the same way as our names. They’re everywhere, replicated ad infinitum across screens; as a result, perfect strangers appear as familiar as family members. The face is the canvas of the 21st century, a token that is both recognizable and subject to change.

Personalities—our likes, dislikes, tendencies, faults, strengths—are just as fervently distilled into consumable little bites online. The demands of the internet push users toward presenting themselves as a type, a category that can be marketed to and sent just the right kinds of ads.  The proliferation of online profiles, self-summaries where all the haze and contradictions of a person are left out, hastened this process; hashtags turned personal branding into a sport, and the algorithms took things from there.

Everyone knows just enough pop psychology to classify friends and strangers: People are toxic or maybe narcissists, simple baskets in which to dump entire ranges of human behavior. The absurdly quick emergence of new micro-trends means that users become, en masse, “bedrotters” or “coastal grandmothers” or “rat girls.” For a brief period of time this winter, a mass of young women on social media proclaimed that their entire personality now revolved around bows. And if you struggle to lock down the exact parameters of who you are, don’t worry: Numerology, astrology, or enneagram tests might help sort you into some just-vague-enough group and explain away any less-than-admirable traits.

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Buying into any of these typecasts entails some performance, yes, but they’re also meant to be interpreted as an indicator of precisely who one wants to be. The quick-change artist is someone who can’t be left behind or out of date, someone who’s always freshly appealing to their audience without losing their essence. Culture has learned a lesson from literature’s most prominent con man: A personality morphs and stabilizes depending on the circumstances, and the most common form of art being performed right now is the continual reinvention of the self.

Those performances can also take place behind closed doors. All of the versions of Tom stay in character as Dickie, even when he’s alone, evidence of his commitment to his new identity. Tom seems to evaluate the quality of his performance not based on whether or not it might get him caught but on whether or not his artistry can convince even himself. In Highsmith’s novel, he thinks of himself as a tabula rasa, and considers his entire pre-Dickie life a different performance. When he occasionally has to “play” Tom again, he hams it up: “He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner,” Highsmith writes. The new Ripley deadens Tom into a blank-eyed cipher who comes alive only when he’s in his new life, fingering antiques and glorying in the fine furnishings and little trimmings that someone like Dickie can afford and that someone like Tom can only appreciate.

To press the point that Tom’s new personality is worthy of appraisal as a showpiece, Ripley is buffered with abundant long, steady, black-and-white shots of Renaissance paintings and chiseled architectural embellishments. This Italy isn’t just a playground for American expats, as it is in the Minghella film—it’s also the premier site for viewing the work of the masters. When Tom first arrives, Dickie insists that they go on a pilgrimage to the closest Caravaggio, but after they arrive at the church, Dickie barely glances at it. Art is a signifier for him, and nothing more. But when Tom finds the time and funds and social capital to be a man of leisure, he really takes it all in, and tours the country’s greatest artistic sites. In particular, he dives into the work of Caravaggio—the 17th-century painter who also notoriously murdered a rival—to see what it might tell him about how to proceed when your art and your life are in conflict.

Ripley’s focus is on how we decide what is worthy of being called art. Dickie’s ridiculous, egregious paintings are a demonstration that money, time, and desire still can’t manufacture talent. His girlfriend, Marge, is writing a book that we hear about in scraps, a facile “American in Europe” memoir written in prose so mealy-mouthed, it makes Tom cringe. But when Tom continues Dickie’s painting, he improves it, and the letters he writes are better than anything Marge turns out. For hours and hours, we watch as Tom picks up Dickie’s body language, hotel preferences, and sartorial leanings, mimicking them with perfect accuracy—an art form of a different order.

Just as Dickie’s paintings riff on the ideas of the Modernists, neither is Tom’s performance very original. But like Highsmith before him, he’s taken something sublime and transformed it for his own purposes, with a result that is, arguably, better than the original. In Ripley, just after Tom moves into Dickie’s house, he’s left alone for an evening. He sorts through Dickie’s clothes—a fine suit, Brooks Brothers shirts, even his underwear—and puts it all on. Gazing at himself in the mirror, Tom embodies Dickie for the first time, and asks: “You like art, Tom? Well, you’re in the right place.” As he performs, Picasso’s The Guitar Player—the actual painting, which Dickie owns—hangs just beside him in the frame, standing parallel to Tom’s own art. Both are classics.

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