Tom Ripley’s Guide to the Good Life.
If you haven’t read the Ripliad, the five novels featuring Tom Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, what on earth have you been doing? The movie with Matt Damon doesn’t count. It looks pretty, but misses the point of the novel completely.
I am becoming increasingly sympathetic to Tom Ripley. He murders people, sure, but he does it because of his overwhelming desire, nay need, for the cultured, leisurely lifestyle of the born-wealthy (and because of his painfully repressed love for Dickie Greenleaf of course). How unjust that Tom, a clever, sensitive, intelligent man must devote his life to menial work when all he desires is the freedom to pursue the life of the mind?
When he is sent to Italy to find Dickie Greenleaf and bring him home, it is Tom’s first real encounter with the freedom of wealth. Dickie, son of a shipping magnate, lives in the tiny fishing village of Mongibello (Mongey to those who belong) and spends his days painting (badly), eating (too well), swimming, drinking and carousing with the locals. He is the magnanimous American abroad, smiling down from his humbly furnished house by the sea.
Once Tom has had a taste of this life, how could he ever willingly go back to the petty crime and dingy apartments he knew before? Especially as Tom is much cleverer than Dickie, much more appreciative of the European lifestyle with it’s art and culture and language and style. If youth is wasted on the young, then wealth is most assuredly wasted on the wealthy.
And so Tom murders Dickie, he obtains his fortune, he marries an heiress, he oversees an elaborate art fraud. How much easier if Tom had just been born wealthy? Is it his fault that he was not? Can we blame him for trying to rectify this accident of birth? I don’t. I envy him his tastefully furnished house in the South of France and his classic tailoring and his leisurely routine of reading, learning, thinking.
Jobs are for suckas.
I haven’t read the books, but I thought the movie was pretty good, and all the thematic stuff you mentioned was stuff I saw in the movie. Plus Philip Seymour Hoffman is awesome (“How’s the peeping Tommy!”), Matt Damon is excruciating (in a good way) and it features Jude Law at the peak of his hotness (before the receding hairline demon took complete hold).
Anywayz, Long Live the Nouveau Riche!
Yes, perhaps the film isn’t THAT bad. But they change the ending hugely. The English dark-haired guy who Tom shacks up with at the end of the film doesn’t exist in the book. And I found there was a whole ‘he’s a psycho because he’s gay’ thing going on in the movie that is a lot subtler in the novels. Also the novels are just brilliantly written.
But Damon is very good as Tom. Probably too good-looking, but so obsequious and sly it still works.
We’re liberal arts students. Of course we’re more likely than most to want to watch films all day and faff about on bourgeois canopies eating gold leafed berries on organic yoghurt. Now, I’ve only seen the film, but the very fact that he’s committing crimes to achieve this way of life serves as a metaphor for how dangerous, unsustainable and selfish it is. P.J. O’Rourke recently argued that he was really excited about the growing nouveau riche in India and China cause it was expanding global economies. P.J. O’Rourke is living in a fantasy land. There aren’t enough resources on earth for every Indian student with a penchant for V.S.Naipul or Oliver Sacks to indulge those, and the same goes for the rest of us.
No, of course not. There definitely isn’t room for everyone who wants that lifestyle to actually have it. Perhaps only those willing to commit murder for it should be allowed to have it? Population control baby!
Oh OK. We’re playing the sincerity game are we? Irony aside, I agree with Bhakthi that the myth of a global middle class (the alleged goal of globalisation) is not sustainable. However, I think everyone is entitled to live a life of leisure. The problem is that the “life of leisure” is so restrictively defined by consumer capitalism: Trips to Nice, expensive clothes, bottles of wine, Gwyneth Paltrow, Apple computers whatever. The life of leisure needs to be redefined as walking through woods, digging through garbage tips, afternoon sex and drinking tea.
I don’t blame Tom Ripley for wanting a better life. Nor would I call him selfish for having that dream. His tragedy is that his externally imposed capitalist desires (being a pimp) alienate him from other becomings (anal sex with Freddie Miles/Jack Davenport/Rupert Everett lookalike). He’s chasing a dream that can’t bring him happiness.
Geez Bhakthi, why won’t you let the Indian students read Oliver Sacks! You’re so mean!