Tom Ripley's Empty Intelligence
Why the "Ripley" TV series evokes the novels all too well — with a nod to Charles Baxter's "Wonderlands" and (yes) ChatGPT
About a year and a half ago, I read three of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, and I didn’t like them. Yet I felt compelled to finish them. They taught me a lot about propulsive narrative and how disturbing it is to spend time in a serial killer’s head.
If you’re watching the excellent new Netflix series Ripley, this isn’t a spoiler. The very first scene depicts Ripley bumping a dead body down the stairs. The thing is, I doubt any specific plot machinations are really spoilers. The mystery of the whole thing is Tom Ripley. How does a person become such a moral void?
I began reading the novels in August 2022. I finished the 900-page “Everyman’s Library” edition I’d checked out of the library by the end of that October, as if I were pushing myself to complete an emotional marathon.1 The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) is the most well known — Ripley Under Ground (1970) and Ripley’s Game (1974) are the other two I read — and several film adaptations have preceded Ripley.
I’m revisiting my reading marathon because of a great recent post, “A Tom Ripley for Our Times,” by
. The “inexpressive black hole” at the core of Ripley, in Susan’s words, is chillingly evoked by Andrew Scott in the eight-episode series from screenwriter and director Steven Zaillian. That empty intelligence has all sorts of resonances now. As I watched Ripley, I couldn’t help thinking how effortless an AI helper would have made his gruelingly physical maneuverings.In the opening chapters of The Talented Mr. Ripley, eking his way in New York, Ripley grabs an unexpected opportunity via the wealthy father of an acquaintance — Dickie Greenleaf (played by Johnny Flynn in the series and the oh-so-pretty Jude Law in the 1999 movie). Dickie’s parents want Ripley to convince their wayward son, who’s dabbling as an artist in a village south of Naples, to return home. Greenleaf senior provides Ripley with an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy, and away he goes.
Ripley is faithful to Highsmith’s Ripley, the empty con artist, even if not every plot detail from the novel is exact. In the first episode, he’s playing a mail-fraud scheme in his dump of an apartment in the Bowery, pounding out fake dunning letters on a manual typewriter.
The black-and-white cinematography, the gritty communal toilets and shared land line, might seem antique. Yet there’s nothing quaint about this noirish take, with all its grotesque shadows and other Hitchcock riffs. Those juryrigged wires across a cracked apartment wall pin down the ugly quotidian. And once Ripley makes it to Italy, the stunning black-and-white images keep shifting from gorgeous to creepy, even surreal, like vintage postcards of the Amalfi Coast or Venice.
Who wouldn’t want to reshape the quotidian? Ripley’s many cons, starting with the fake letters, are perfectly matched to our virtual era of generative AI and disinformation. With a bot, you can select a style to change your writing voice, making it more or less formal. You can set the “temperature” on a creativity gauge. You can prompt the machine to generate different versions of yourself, filling in the emptiness. At times, Scott’s dark eyes seem as glittery as a cyborg’s.
Before I began my Ripley reading project, I’d never been drawn to Highsmith’s work. I recall liking Matt Damon as Ripley in the 1999 movie, but maybe that’s just because I like Matt Damon. As Susan notes, he’s a puppy-doggish version of Ripley. The spark for me came from writer Charles Baxter, who mentions Ripley and Highsmith in his illuminating 2022 book Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature.
In “Captain Happen: Some Notes on Narrative Urgency,” Baxter highlights characters who make things happen in a story, even if they’re reprehensible: “Captain Happen is a dropout from charm school, and the title is not gender specific. They may well be fuck-ups, cheats, liars, creeps. . . .” Of Highsmith’s creation, Baxter notes, “I despise her character Tom Ripley, but he compels my attention.”
Ripley’s world, evoked so well by Highsmith, also exemplifies the fictional “wonderlands” of Baxter’s book title. It’s hyper-real yet unreal. It conjures its time period in post-World War II Europe, but the granularity of Ripley’s prosaic concerns, especially in the later novels — his gardens, learning to play the harpsichord, his housekeeper’s food, the drinks available on a bar cart, how a garrotte digs into a victim's neck — makes everything seem to have the same moral valence.
The Ripley novels are told in the third-person voice, but often close to the protagonist, a seemingly harmless sociopath. In the second and third novels, when he’s living in France, the minutia of bourgeois life appear so normal it’s easy to get sucked into Ripley’s satisfaction with the identity he’s built for himself.
This implicates the reader in uncomfortable ways. I felt complicit, as if I needed to give my mind a bath when the killings and disposals of bodies were described in flat detail. With the Ripley series, I almost bailed out during the grimness of Episode 3, although I knew what this Captain Happen would make happen. I’m not sure the novels or any film adaptation can explain why Ripley (I doubt this is a spoiler) kills Dickie Greenleaf, taking on his identity and gaining access to his money.
Except yes, they do offer surface explanations, getting across his desire for better things, his insecurity as a callow American, his sexual attraction to Dickie. The latter is veiled in the novels (later Ripley is married), but there are implications. It’s in the closely observed mannerisms, although passion seems beside the point. The action, particularly the multiple murders he commits, is described clinically. Ripley’s thoughts remain on the surface.
It’s mostly believable as the dissociated action of the moment based on previous calculations. And yet, as with violence in the real world, be it mass shootings or Mafia hits, it’s not really possible to explain why somebody crosses ethical and moral lines. Or the banality of evil, which these novels surely touch on.
The second novel, Ripley Under Ground, is set a few years later and has him fronting an art gallery that sells forgeries of a Matisse-like figure named Derwatt. The master painter, unbeknownst to the public, has been dead for years, but a talented artist-forger working with the gallery continues to turn out new “Derwatts.” The murders in this one seem unnecessary, farcical in a way that makes me queasy. Ripley’s inner emptiness is palpable, but I was still gripped by the increasingly improbable cascade of events. It ends on a cliffhanger, with police in several countries on his heels.
In the third novel, Ripley’s Game, Jonathan Trevanny, another ex-pat in suburban France, starts off as an upstanding citizen with a wife and young son. Trevanny, a gloomy British guy, is also poor and dying of leukemia. This becomes fodder for Tom Ripley to put his “game” in motion after Trevanny insults him at a party.
Ripley passes along Trevanny’s name to his criminal associate Reeves Minot, who then manages to draw the guy into a scheme to kill two mafiosos in order to provide his wife and child with a nest egg. (Reeves pops up in the last episode of Ripley, too, played by John Malkovich, who was Ripley in the 2002 film of Ripley’s Game.)
In the novel, seeing all this unfold from Trevanny’s point of view is not thrilling. While his need for the money makes sense, the narrative bears down on how easily the most righteous person can do something against their principles. I get it, but the Mafia is relentless (and relentlessly clichéd, be it Sicilian or the Camorra in Naples). Ripley eventually feels a bit of guilt that his game has embroiled the other in something so dangerous. I admit I was glad to return to his perspective. Ripley is Captain Happen. But ultimately, I’m not sure entertainment justifies ethical blankness.
By the end, he’s doing fine, while Trevanny . . . not so much. Trevanny’s Catholic wife, Simone, is appalled by the outcome but doesn’t tell the police what she knows. The Mafia appear to have decided Ripley wasn’t involved. He goes back to French country living, grousing to himself about getting workers to finish his new greenhouse. But a month or so later, when he encounters Simone on the street, she spits at him.
And so these lines at the close of Ripley’s Game:
“In fact, the spit was a kind of guarantee, unpleasant to be sure, whether it hit or not. But if Simone hadn’t decided to hang on to the money in Switzerland, she wouldn’t have bothered spitting and he himself would be in prison. Simone was just a trifle ashamed of herself, Tom thought. In that, she joined much of the rest of the world.”
As a reader, I felt ashamed for allowing Ripley’s calculations to spin out in my mind. Maybe we readers become Simone at the end, spitting at Ripley, loathing him, but also compelled to know what he might do next.
After my reading marathon, I turned up the New York Times piece “How ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ Foretold Our Era of Grifting” by Megan O’Grady from 2020. She rightly points out that imposters and con artists continue to fascinate us. Tom Ripley would fit into our particular age of deceivers, O’Grady writes, and, yes, I thought of Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos as I read these novels.2
O’Grady notes how the foundational myths about American equality have been exposed, leading to discomfort and anger regarding who we’re supposed to be:
“If the creation of a stable private self depends upon a coherent external reality, or at least a consensus view of it, maybe it’s no wonder that we’ve become confused about where our self-fashioning begins and ends. Now that personality has become a branding opportunity, should we assume that all identities are largely assumed?”
That question is more relevant than ever with AI on the loose. Yet I don’t buy that all identities are assumed or that Ripley now comes off as more sympathetic than he did in Highsmith’s day — that he’s less a sociopath than driven by class insecurity and sexual repression to be a chameleon. In O’Grady’s view, he’s a closeted gay guy, longing for wealth as well as beautiful boy Dickie. Who wouldn’t be sympathetic with that? she asks, especially if you’ve grown up as a code switcher.
Well, I never found myself sympathizing. That reasoning comes close to over-explaining, even a backward version of the trauma plot, which I think Highsmith would have dismissed with a snort. “I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial,” she wrote in her book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (quoted by Baxter), “for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not. The public wants to see the law triumph . . . though at the same time the public likes brutality.”
Sure, Tom Ripley has a rough start, but then he makes choices, and he keeps making choices, and his overall lack of guilt damns him for me.
In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, “Don’t Call Him a Sociopath: Here’s How Andrew Scott Humanizes ‘Ripley,’” the actor says he wants viewers to feel some empathy for Ripley. However, in answer to her question about his “scary blank stare,” Scott opines that audiences like to see a “particularly intelligent character use his brain in a very particular way.” Ripley’s blankness is “actually just in the audience’s mind,” Scott insists, inviting them “into a kind of complicity with you.”
Maybe. Except that AI chatbots could also be called blank slates, thinking through what an audience wants to see. They can seem “particularly intelligent,” as the AI-generated image in my opening and the ChatGPT letter from “Dickie” below indicate.3 But it’s an empty intelligence, devoid of soul.
In the series, Ripley is often shown staring at a mirror, performing different identities. All the attempts to humanize him validate the fakery we’re prone to. But I take no comfort in such validation, just as I worry about shrugging off the way AI systems fake voices and images. It’s dangerous, cozying up to con artists.
Think of Ripley putting on his friend’s clothes in the second episode, mimicking Dickie’s expressions and manner of speaking during their idyll.
Or in the first episode, when he dons Ivy League-style eyeglasses before meeting Dickie’s parents, smiling at his reflection but without an ounce of genuine emotion.
Then consider the essays and stories and memos generated by ChatGPT or any other bot that mimics what you tell it to. The opening of the third episode of Ripley brings this to life almost literally, as he faces the camera and speaks in fluent beginner’s Italian about who he is — only to pull back to show he’s practicing with a tutor.
“Something always turns up,” Ripley says with a deprecating smile. “Questa è la mia filosofia di vita” (“That’s my philosophy of life”). Fausto the tutor compliments his studious performance, as polite as ChatGPT.
How does a person or machine become such a moral void? By searching for patterns of human language and interaction, responding to one prompt, then another, then another — until the void reflects our fantasies with ease.
When I finished the three Ripley novels in 2022, I made an entry in my private reading journal, some of which is included here.
In 2022, I also inhaled the investigative book about Theranos, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou with far more glee than Highsmith’s fictions.
Using three short prompts, I generated the following fake letter from Tom Ripley to Marge, Dickie’s sort-of girlfriend (Dakota Fanning in Ripley), in under five minutes with ChatGPT 4:
Dearest Marge,
As I’ve been out at sea, I’ve come to realize some important truths about my life and my desires. In this spirit of clarity, I have decided to entrust Tom Ripley with managing all of my financial affairs. This is not a decision made lightly.
I see in Tom a sharpness and a drive that I perhaps lack, and I believe he has the potential to manage this aspect of my life better than I ever could. I’m asking you, Marge, not just as a friend but as someone I hold dear, to support him in this new role.
I trust this will bring about a positive change, one that benefits us all. Your guidance and insight will be invaluable to him, as they have been to me.
With all my affection and trust,
Dickie
As always, a fascinating read Martha, and food for thought. Thank you!
I haven't read these or watched the series. The Books have been on my radar for years but life is finite and I haven't figured out a way to read everything! Thanks for the great article.