Ripley fails to capture what makes Highsmith’s book so compelling.
First, the bad news: Netflix’s new show Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmith’s immortal novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, is a snooze.
It’s shot beautifully. Under the auspices of showrunner Steven Zaillian (the screenwriter for the movie Schindler’s List, among others) and Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit, Ripley renders its exquisite Italian landscapes and architecture in gorgeous, sinister black and white. The camera is forever panning across a Caravaggio or a palazzo, leaving your eyes time to linger. Each frame is elegantly composed.
Yet everything happening within those frames is so boring that it feels like a waste of beauty — not to mention a waste of a more than capable cast. Andrew Scott, who has been so charismatic and emotive in Fleabag and Sherlock and All of Us Strangers, plays Ripley with a careful detachment, as if he’s been warned not to try to make the audience feel anything. Likable Johnny Flynn (Emma., Lovesick), in the less showy role of Ripley’s callow mark Dickie, has himself so reined in that it becomes difficult to understand why Ripley is so drawn to him in the first place. The spark between them that is meant to set the whole plot ablaze ends up feeble and barely visible. (It doesn’t help matters that both Scott and Flynn are over 40, making it difficult to buy them as the sort of just-out-of-college gallivanters whose worried parents might plausibly be keeping a too-close watch on them.)
The biggest waste, though, is the waste of the story itself. Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is a particularly stylish entry in a highly specific grouping of stories that are currently having a bit of a moment. Besides Netflix’s Ripley, last fall’s Saltburn launched a thousand internet arguments. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History remains the darling of the dark academia readers of TikTok. This is the genre I’ve started to call “striver gothic,” the stories of pretenders striving to make it among the careless and idle wealthy, even if they have to kill to do so. They are stories about how even for the smoothest operator, the sheer force of wanting can eat you alive.
Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is a perfect iteration of the striver gothic. Netflix’s Ripley does not stick the landing. Looking at the ways it falls apart can tell us a lot about why these stories appeal to us.
Toward a working definition of “striver gothic”
Striver gothic is a term I developed with my friend Kirsten Carleton to describe stories that pull from a specific set of tropes. Here are the basics:
- An outsider main character is desperate for inclusion in a rarified upper-class world. He (and this character usually is a he) is the striver, and it is his desire to ascend from the bourgeoisie to the upper class that powers the story. The upper class is represented in metonymy by a friend group or family with intense, almost cultish insider dynamics. Frequently their group dynamic was formed within the cloistered walls of a school, creating some overlap between this genre and dark academia. They are either Ivy League or Oxbridge — or they borrow the aesthetic.
- A country house or manor represents sanctuary, prize, and inclusion within the group.
- The main character is obsessed with the leader of the group, frequently with queer undertones: Do I want to be him, or do I want to be with him?
- Identities are doubled and doppelgängers abound.
- There will be at least one murder, committed either by the striver or by the group he is trying to infiltrate. The boundaries of this world are guarded fiercely, and any attempt to break them ends in death.
The nonnegotiables of the striver gothic are a striver and a murder. Everything else you can fiddle with.
For its part, in Netflix’s Ripley, Dickie, his girlfriend Marge, and his friend Freddie are the upper-class friend group that striver Tom longs to penetrate. In his attempt to get there, Tom murders Dickie and takes over his identity, then murders Freddie, too, to cover the whole thing up. Ripley doesn’t quite have a country house (Tom does briefly move into Dickie’s Italian country home, although he prefers city palazzos), but the rest of the tropes are all there. Tom doesn’t have to long for Dickie’s house when he can simply take over Dickie’s whole identity instead.
Brideshead Revisited set the template for this genre. It is not a striver gothic in and of itself; it’s not gothic and it contains no murders. It is nonetheless a striver story, with middle-class Charles seduced into a corrupt and decadent wealthy world via his love for aloof, androgynous Sebastian and the enchanted realm they build together at Oxford in the 1920s. In some ways, all the striver gothic stories are attempts to play out the subtext of Brideshead, to bring its suppressed gay longings and its numbed wartime rages out into the light of day.
That is in part what happens in The Secret History, perhaps the most complete entry in the genre. There, Richard the pretender makes his way into the rarified world of his college’s classics students by helping them commit and cover up a murder so that they’ll let him stay at their picturesque country lake house. In The Secret History, Richard’s desire for inclusion in the group crosses the line into sexual desire more than once, and the group’s aversion to anyone who betrays the aesthetics of their class is what turns them murderous.
Meanwhile, Saltburn wears its derivative nature on its sleeve and straightforwardly places the action of Ripley into the setting of Brideshead. It’s a movie that cannot quite decide if it’s going to be a pastiche, a subversion, or a straight iteration of the striver gothic, which is part of why it’s such a mess.
I haven’t made a conclusive list here. Tana French’s The Likeness and arguably Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca are both striver gothics with female strivers. The movie Bodies, Bodies, Bodies parodies the genre, and the most recent season of You sends the murderous Joe Goldberg into a Secret History-style world. Popular culture abounds with strivers.
But Tom Ripley is unique. Where Brideshead’s Charles is too earnest, Secret History’s Richard too opaque, and Saltburn’s Oliver simply too psychologically improbable, Tom Ripley is endlessly, delightfully fascinating. That’s probably why people have told his story so many times.
Tom Ripley is the ultimate striver
Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is a man who is always hunting or being hunted.
Highsmith drops us straight into Tom’s paranoid, obsessive head from her first page. Her novel opens with Tom fleeing from one bar to another, certain that he’s being followed by the police and that they’re going to arrest him for one of his many petty crimes of forgery and fraud.
Tom’s right that he’s being followed, but his pursuer isn’t a police officer. He’s the father of Dickie Greenleaf, an old acquaintance of Tom’s, who thought he recognized Tom and wanted to come say hello. As soon as Tom understands this, he pivots effortlessly. He stops worrying about what his pursuer might have on him, and he starts thinking about what he might be able to get out of his pursuer.
In this case, it turns out that Tom can get quite a lot out of Dickie’s father. Dickie, it develops, has been in Italy for years, refusing to come home to New York, no matter how much his parents beg him. With the gentlest of pushes from Tom, Dickie’s businessman father hits on the plan of having Tom go to Italy to persuade Dickie back home — all Tom’s expenses to be paid for on the Greenleaf dime.
That’s how Tom Ripley works. He sees the world in a binary of hunter and hunted, target and prey, and always, he is determined to come out ahead. His philosophy is not to worry about the future because something always comes up, and as such, he burns his bridges merrily and without hesitation. It’s nothing new to Tom to have angry people after him, and someone new will always happen along whom he can use to get himself out of one bad situation and into a new one.
There are a lot of sociopaths in literature, but Tom is a peculiar one, an intelligent man who acts almost purely on instinct. He is suave enough to grant the reader pleasure at his exquisite taste, but always wrong on one or two telling details that the truly wealthy observer will inevitably pick up on, marking him as a class pretender. He’s self-aware enough to be funny, but he’s emotionally obtuse enough to miss the subtext in half his conversations and to lie to himself about the other half.
Tom’s contradictions, his combination of playfulness, methodical care, and murderous caprice, are part of what make The Talented Mr. Ripley stand out among its peers in the striver gothic. Tom is a striver among strivers, at once fiercely focused on his goals and incapable of considering them too closely. When Tom decides that what he wants, more than anything in the world, is to make Dickie like him, he doesn’t bother to consider closely what it is about Dickie that attracts him, whether he longs for Dickie’s wealth and easy lifestyle or whether he longs for Dickie’s love and admiration for their own sake. He simply identifies his target and acts to reach it.
Why Ripley fails
Netflix’s Ripley is the third major adaptation of Highsmith’s novel and, in some ways, the most faithful. It is also the weakest artistically.
In 1960, the French director René Clément transformed Ripley into Plein Soleil, marketed in the US as Purple Noon. There, Tom becomes a suave and beautiful con artist, more Thomas Crown than Tom Ripley, and he murders his friend less out of frustrated desire than out of rage at his sadism. In Clément’s hands, the story is no longer striver gothic, but it is a sun-soaked and brutal piece of filmmaking.
Probably the most successful adaptation is also the most famous: Anthony Minghella’s 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon as Tom and Jude Law as Dickie. Minghella’s film doesn’t match entirely with Highsmith’s version of the characters. After Highsmith’s Tom murders Dickie, he falls asleep that night “happy, content, and utterly, utterly confident,” but Damon renders Tom a vulnerable sweetheart of a character who weeps as he kills. Moreover, while Highsmith’s Tom is utterly isolated, Minghella invents two new characters he can talk to, through which the audience can learn exactly what the enigmatic Mr. Ripley is thinking. Through those conversations, and through Minghella’s ecstatic camera as it pans over his beautiful actors on luminous Italian beaches, we can see exactly how Tom’s obsession with Dickie takes seed and blossoms, until he feels he has no choice but to murder in the face of Dickie’s rejection.
Ripley is a straight adaptation. It contains barely a scene that does not appear in Highsmith’s book; hardly a scene that does appear in Highsmith’s book gets omitted. What gets left out is Tom’s sense of playfulness, the fun he finds in lying and deceiving. Where Highsmith’s Tom is prone to giggle fits when he thinks of his crimes, Zaillian’s stays sad-eyed and grim. Under Zaillian’s restrained touch, the emotional connections that drive Tom to kill are barely sketched in. Instead, we spend inordinate amounts of time watching him cover up his crimes: lugging bodies painfully and silently around and then scrubbing up the blood.
Highsmith, too, pays attention to the details of Tom’s coverups. But she writes about those details with panache. She delights in the elegance and thoroughness of Tom’s work. She makes it glamorous. Zaillian makes it hard and dull and unpleasant. This is doubtless an emotionally accurate depiction of what it’s like to dispose of dead bodies, but who comes to Ripley for that?
We come to Ripley for Tom Ripley himself. Tom’s flair, his playfulness, his social adroitness mixed with profound blindness regarding his own desires for human intimacy — these are the elements that make this subgenre compelling.
One of the pleasures of the striver gothic is the deep ambiguity about why, exactly, the striver is working so hard to get in with the group he’s targeted. Is he doing it because he genuinely likes them? Or because he likes their lifestyle? By extension: Is the genre about how much we long for intimacy from the people we admire? Or is it about how much we long for their money and their beautiful things?
Well, after all, asks Tom Ripley: Why can’t it be both?
A new book shows how conservative grift started long before branded bibles and $400 sneakers.
During his time atop the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s lifetime habits of fraud and grifting have fused seamlessly with conservative politics. In 2024 alone, Trump debuted $399 gold sneakers emblazoned with the American flag, sold a $60 “God Bless the USA” Bible endorsed by singer Lee Greenwood, and convinced millions to purchase stock in Truth Social’s unprofitable parent company.
Trump is often treated as a political hijacker who rerouted the Republican Party to his own self-interested ends. Surely that’s part of the truth. But at the same time, there’s a decent case that, when it comes to grifting, his hijacking attempt could only succeed due to the conservative movement’s ingrained scammy tendencies.
From paranoid anti-Communist lecture series in the 1950s to crowdfunded birther investigations to Alex Jones peddling fake coronavirus cures, there’s a long and storied history of elites peddling fear and paranoia to make a buck. The problem has gotten so bad that, in the past several years, many prominent conservatives have publicly bemoaned the omnipresence of grifts in the conservative ranks.
But where did this culture come from, and how important was it to Trump’s rise?
These questions are at the heart of The Longest Con, a forthcoming book on the history of right-wing scams and frauds. The book’s author, Joe Conason, is a veteran New York journalist; he personally knew some of the key figures in the scammy right’s history, like mobbed-up lawyer and Trump mentor Roy Cohn.
Conason locates the origins of the grift tradition with Joe McCarthy, whose anti-Communist campaign proved that paranoid lies could be a ticket to popularity on the grassroots right. Cohn, who worked for McCarthy, figured out a way to transmute that popularity into profit: exploiting fears of Communism to, among other things, finance a lavish trip to Europe.
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Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
“The template for right-wing grift … followed in McCarthy’s wake,” Conason writes. “By creating such an atmosphere of utter dread — and then promising that they alone could prevent America’s doom — [hucksters] induced thousands of suckers to hand over large wads of cash.”
As the conservative movement grew, the grifts grew with it. Conason pinpoints Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run as a key turning point. The campaign produced a massive mailing list that scammers could solicit for donations to alleged political causes that mostly lined their own pockets. When these “direct mail” scams proved immensely profitable, they expanded, normalizing an ethos of grifting on the right that, ultimately, would reach its apogee in Donald Trump.
I spoke to Conason about this fascinating, hidden-in-plain-sight history: about how it started, why it succeeded, how it paved the way for Trump’s rise, and whether there’s any equivalent grifting culture on the American left. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Zack Beauchamp
So Roy Cohn. He starts his career as this corrupt New York lawyer, bridging the worlds of Democratic politics, high society, and mafiosos. When does he make the jump to the right, and how important is he in the rise of conservative grift culture?
Joe Conason
I think pretty important. The people who tolerated him for the longest time — William Safire, very respectable, Bill Buckley, very respectable. These people, they knew what Roy was. They knew he was a crook and a con man and a liar and a cheater, and yet, that was okay. To me, that was a sign of something very wrong in conservative culture, looking back, that that guy would be not only tolerated but celebrated.
As I say in the book, they would have big parties to celebrate him. Ronald Reagan had Roy to the White House, and when Roy was sick, they bent the rules to get him treatment that nobody knew about, even though he was pretending not to have AIDS. Roger Stone, who became very powerful in the conservative movement, was a protégé of Roy’s.
He had some kind of charm or attraction or something for these conservatives, who otherwise I think would’ve told you that they themselves would never contemplate doing the kinds of things that Roy did, which is basically stiffing the IRS for 20 years or 30 years or however long it was, and not paying his creditors, which is a thing that Trump seems to have picked up from him.
He was a rogue, and I think [they thought] “Oh, he was a roguish fellow. Wasn’t he fun?” But at some point, you catch a little of the disease yourself. And I think the willingness to overlook Roy’s deep, deep corruption was — let’s just say it was a bad sign. I can’t tell you that that caused anything, but it was not a good sign about the moral character of that movement in its earliest days.
Zack Beauchamp
Let’s talk about the expansion of this, because obviously, grifting in the conservative movement isn’t just a Roy Cohn story — though he was a pioneer in some of the earliest versions of these ways of grifting, about selling fear of communism.
Joe Conason
In the aftermath of McCarthy, the impulse and the marketability of anti-communism as an ideology did not go away. To turn it into a business, you would sell lectures. There were a series of them that I profiled in the book that had different ways of marketing a hysterical version of anti-communism to middle-class and upper-middle-class people who were terrified. They would pay a lot to go to a lecture, they’d buy lecture tapes, they would buy books. It could cost them hundreds of dollars, which in 2024 dollars is thousands of dollars.
This got so bad that J. Edgar Hoover — who was considered the greatest authority on communism on the right, had a whole apparatus to root out communism in the country — was appalled by these people. I found communications between Hoover and his deputies about some of these individuals they thought of as grifters and con men and crooks, and they investigated them. That’s how bad it was: J. Edgar Hoover thought “these guys are crooks and they’re giving anti-communism a bad name.”
Zack Beauchamp
During the Cold War period, how central was the grifting and con man stuff to the conservative movement? The standard history is that, sure, maybe there were some cranks on the side, but Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley defined a new and principled way of thinking about American politics.
Your book offers an alternative history, positioning the profiteering and swindling as something that grew with the post-war conservative movement. Just how deeply intertwined is the grift with the more committed side of the movement?
Joe Conason
What I would say is that the grifting side — the side that doesn’t really believe in anything very much except its own enrichment — has grown. It wasn’t necessarily the dominant portion in the beginning at all. But there’s a point in the book where Richard Viguerie discovers direct mail and how he can use the Goldwater movement [in 1964] to build a huge direct mail industry. I’d say that was a turning point.
Richard Viguerie was a guy who had been brought into the direct mail business with the Buckley crowd — Young Americans for Freedom, which was their central organization, aside from the National Review, for raising money. He realized that you could just ask people for money and they would give it to you.
Zack Beauchamp
You don’t even need to be selling them anything physical, right? That’s the innovation here, you just send them a mailer promising to fight for what they believed in.
Joe Conason
Yes. But the problem was that in order for that to be really effective on a national level, you needed lists of names. And lists of names of conservatives just didn’t exist until the Goldwater campaign in 1964. Viguerie realized that the donors to the Goldwater campaign comprised a national list of conservatives who would donate money. He said [it] was like a key to Fort Knox. It turned out he was right: Those people would give money. And it built from there.
People who are giving you money don’t really know what you’re doing with the money. You’re telling them you’re doing this and that, and maybe you are and maybe you’re not. In many cases not, and they don’t have any way of knowing.
What they know is that they have grievances and concerns that you’re addressing, or you’re telling them you’re addressing. They’re willing to give money to make themselves, I guess, feel better about that.
Now, it took a while for it to take over. But once that starts, it was impossible to stop. It takes over a larger and larger portion of the conservative movement, to the point where we now have Trump.
One of the reasons I wrote the book is you can see how, over time, this impulse to swindle and grift became a bigger and bigger part of conservatism. And the honest conservatism — the ideological and philosophical [principles], what they considered moral virtue — has been stripped away.
Zack Beauchamp
So you just jumped from Viguerie in the ’60s all the way forward to Trump in 2016. There’s a wealth of time during which this spreading happens. What are some of the key events in between, the ones that fueled the rise of right-wing grift culture?
Joe Conason
It takes different forms over time. One is the religious right: Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority, Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition. Now the Prosperity Gospel types who are around Trump, who are just straight-up grifters. That becomes a big element in it.
Then you have the Reagan administration, which I describe as the most corrupt in history — up until Trump at least — in terms of the number of prosecutions and scandals. There were quite a few people who found ways to profit from government programs that they were supposedly going in there to end or reduce.
One of the most interesting is Paul Manafort, who turns up much later as Trump’s campaign manager. James Watt was another. A Western conservative who supposedly was against big government, he was just finding ways to get paid off and almost went to prison for it.
Then we come to the period just before Trump arises: the Tea Party and the birther movement. That too was a grift: There were certainly grifters getting people to give them money to prove that Obama shouldn’t be president or was not qualified to be president, but the lead figure in that was Trump. And so, logically, Trump becomes a force within the Republican Party, and meanwhile, the Republican Party is kind of losing its way in general and becomes very vulnerable to someone like him.
Zack Beauchamp
What I think is novel here in your book is seeing this history as laying a unique kind of pathway for Trump. You had these generations of people who built an expanding empire of profit grafted onto conservative ideology, and then Donald Trump comes along and he’s like, “Wait, I can just make the movement fully into that — an extension of my efforts at brand-building.” That’s a core part of what allows him to succeed in Republican politics: that brand-building and profiteering have already been built into it over the course of decades.
Joe Conason
I would point out that the creator of Trump, in a lot of ways, is Roger Stone, who’s been in the grifting business of conservatism for a really long time. Stone saw that Trump was a really outstanding possibility for the kind of politics that Roger represented, which was a hollow politics of demagoguery with more than a touch of racial paranoia and hate, and that could be perfectly flexible in terms of positions and issues and viewpoints and rhetoric.
Roger got to know Trump during the first Reagan campaign through Roy Cohn. And he figured out this was a guy who had real potential. They had a model, a way of conducting themselves politically that was both effective on a certain segment of the public and highly profitable. They had thought about it for many years before Trump finally agreed to run for president.
Trump was a perfect candidate [because] he had shown he would get involved in any kind of grift. He’d gotten involved in multilevel marketing. Trump University was a type of scam: the fake real estate investment seminar, which would get people to pay big money and promise them that they would make a lot of profit on real estate themselves. Trump had a perfect brand to get into, and so he did.
Roger Stone and others around him realized, “Hey, this is our guy. We can capitalize all of this that’s been built in the past and discard anything that’s inconvenient about conservatism because who cares?”
Zack Beauchamp
So now, we get the leading Republican presidential candidate hawking multi-hundred-dollar sneakers and an America-themed Bible as a means of making money — a full integration of political party with scam ventures. There’s nothing like this level of mainstream hucksterism on the Democratic side, as far as I can tell.
Joe Conason
In writing the book, I went out and looked for examples of this on the blue side. I think people get swindled by all kinds of things all the time, whatever their politics are.
Zack Beauchamp
I think you have some pretty solid examples of people on the left in your introduction who have grifted liberals. We can also talk about the Democratic machines in cities that are less ideological and more focused on maintaining power.
Joe Conason
Look, we have a Democratic senator right now who’s [been indicted for] hiding gold bars.
Zack Beauchamp
Right.
Joe Conason
I would never pretend that corruption or mendacity or greed is confined to the right, and I hope I didn’t give that impression in the book. But there are certain themes on the right that seem to lend themselves to these kinds of crooked schemes.
Roger Stone said long ago that one of his rules of politics is that hate triumphs over love in politics, that hate is the most saleable thing in politics. All of his campaigns have been based on that rather curdled insight, and a lot of the merchandising comes down to that as well.
It’s what they now call “own the libs,” but it’s been the same emotion for decades and decades now.
Why we need to take seemingly small earthquakes seriously
A magnitude 4.8 earthquake rocked the East Coast midmorning on Friday, sending high rises swaying in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
Californians and other West Coasters may scoff at the alarm expressed by their East Coast counterparts from a seemingly small quake. But this tremor struck the most densely populated region of the US, rocking some of the oldest buildings in the country, and alarming people who often take it for granted that the earth doesn’t move very much. So it’s worth taking seriously.
Can’t believe I got it on camera lol #earthquake pic.twitter.com/OevQ5q30ZF
— jared (@jareddemel) April 5, 2024
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US Geological Survey