Lifestyle
Why Patricia Highsmith's most famous creature, Tom Ripley, continues to fascinate
Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley in the new Netflix series, Ripley, drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s novel.
Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021
hide caption
toggle caption
Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021
Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley in the new Netflix series, Ripley, drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s novel.
Lorenzo Sisti/Netflix © 2021
For a total psychopath, Tom Ripley is remarkably popular. As we near the 25th anniversary of the acclaimed Oscar-nominated big screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s most infamous creation, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Netflix has released a striking new reimagining, simply titled Ripley. Sinister and visually stunning, the series reminds us why the book continues to influence popular culture.
Through seven decades, Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley has grown in allure as a masterwork of American noir, boosted by – but distinct from – its adaptations. The core story is always the same: A wealthy man enlists fraudster Tom Ripley, his son’s distant acquaintance, to travel to Italy and woo his errant, playboy son back to the fold; but rather than returning Dickie to his family, an envious Tom disposes of him and assumes his identity. Other murders follow to cover the first.
This bloody-minded serial killer fantasist and antisocial social climber would become Patricia Highsmith’s best known and best loved creation. She published five Ripley novels in all from 1955 to 1991, the last a few years before her death. Since his debut, her all-American psychopath has inspired six screen adaptations, a play by Phyllis Nagy, and a musical staging. That legacy is a testament to Ripley’s complicated appeal – amoral, unassuming and audacious — and Highsmith’s scalpel-sharp writing. There’s something irresistible about an unapologetic grifter, who seizes the chance at a better life by stealing someone else’s. The text is rich enough to handle wildly different interpretations that feel true to the original and brilliant in their own right.
A window into Ripley’s roots
In the first Ripley novel, one childhood scene is especially vivid. When he was 12, and his parents long dead, Tom’s reluctant guardian Aunt Dottie made him get out of her car and run an errand on foot while stuck in traffic. When the cars started moving again, Tom was forced into “running between huge, inching cars, always about to touch the door of Aunt Dottie’s car and never being quite able to…” Instead of waiting, his aunt “had kept inching along as fast as she could go…” Worse, she taunted him, “yelling, ‘Come on, come on, slowpoke!’ out the window.” The memory ends with Tom in teary frustration and his aunt hurling a slur at him: “Sissy! He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!”
This story bubbles up into the memory of the adult con man Tom Ripley while he’s lying on a ship deck chair on the way to Europe. Buoyed in body and spirit by the luxury and abundance of his surroundings, Tom starts to plot a brighter future for himself. But he keeps returning to past indignities, and that cruel vignette stands out. Looking back from his comfortable perch, Ripley thinks, “It was a wonder he had emerged from such treatment as well as he had.” This isn’t justification, just a part of Ripley’s essence – Ripley as a vulnerable boy rather than cipher or leech or thief, a man whose emotional and physical deprivations curdle into resentment and violence.
Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley in the Netflix series Ripley.
Philippe Antonello/Netflix © 2023
hide caption
toggle caption
Philippe Antonello/Netflix © 2023
That window into Ripley’s roots is one reason I loved re-reading the novel in the lead up to a new adaptation. Highsmith illuminates the inner life of what she recognized as her “psychopath hero” with identification rather than judgment (Highsmith was openly enamored of her creation). That intense interiority is one reason Highsmith is often credited with helping reinvent and popularize the psychological thriller, a genre with roots in the 19th century, and why her influence persists despite a deservedly controversial reputation. Her debut novel became Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) less than a year after publication, and her 1957 novel Deep Water appears on The Atlantic’s list of 100 Great American novels.
With Ripley, the narration lives outside of Tom but close enough for dissection. We learn that he’s a loner but not completely, that he gets antsy around people, only able to sustain a performance of normalcy for so long. He’s caught between a need for independence born of his smothering yet loveless upbringing and an aching desire for other people’s good regard.
In proximity to beauty and privilege but not of it, Tom’s neediness escalates. He’s ruthless and amoral, but human and self-conscious. He sobs! And he yearns.. Scene by masterful scene, sentence by sentence, with each disturbing thought and memory, Highsmith reveals how Ripley’s psyche veers out of bounds, a slow drip punctuated by shocking jumps. When Dickie and Tom give a taxi home to a local girl they bump into, and she thanks them, calling them the nicest Americans she’s ever met, Tom remarks to Dickie, “You know what most crummy Americans would do in a case like that—rape her.” It’s a sharp kick in the midst of banality.
Worse, when real violent thoughts finally result in action, Tom revels like a pig in mud in his stolen persona. Feeling “blameless and free,” he likens his confidence in Dickie’s shoes to how “a fine actor probably feels when he plays an important role on a stage with the conviction that the role he is playing could not be played better by anyone else.” The great beauty of Highsmith’s novel lies in moments like this, illuminating the dark recesses of a psyche spinning out of control.
A story ripe for retelling
A portrait this faceted begs for retelling and reinvention — it’s a dream role for an actor — but the text also defies total capture. Highsmith could make a two-act play out of the domestic symbolism and social psychological dynamics of Dickie purchasing a refrigerator.
The beauty of the 1999 movie and 2024 series interpretations of Ripley, despite this high bar, is that they’re fully formed artworks of their own.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
hide caption
toggle caption
Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Netflix’s series has both the text and the sublimely entertaining 1999 movie with its constellation of Hollywood stars to live up to. Matt Damon and Jude Law were at the height of their powers as Tom Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf (Law earned a best supporting actor Oscar nomination), and Gwyneth Paltrow was incandescent and multidimensional as Dickie’s girlfriend Marge. They’re memorably supported by Cate Blanchette and Philip Seymour Hoffman as trust fund-babies abroad. Their production is gorgeously shot in the sun-drenched Amalfi coast and the Oscar nominated soundtrack beautifully amplifies the emotion and story. In Anthony Minghella’s screenplay, when the nastiness and violence emerge from Dickie as well as Tom it’s an arresting aberration against this deliberately effervescent, candy-colored backdrop.
The appeal of Minghella’s acclaimed and popular film has more than endured, but it’s not the only classic iteration of Ripley’s debut. The first significant big screen rendering was the 1960 French thriller Purple Noon, starring Alain Delon as a Ripley with beauty that rivals Dickie’s. There are three less celebrated adaptations of other Ripley novels. 2023’s Saltburn wasn’t a Ripley reimagining but its story of upper class ruin at the hands of an interloper seem to spring from a similar well. Plus, the film’s most audacious interlude reads as an homage to Jude Law and Matt Damon’s homoerotic bathtub scene, and the movie and discourse around added new heat to the Highsmith mystique.
Anthony Minghella, far left, director of the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” poses with cast members, from left, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman at the premiere of the film on Dec. 12, 1999, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.
Chris Pizzello/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Chris Pizzello/AP
Anthony Minghella, far left, director of the film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” poses with cast members, from left, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman at the premiere of the film on Dec. 12, 1999, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles.
Chris Pizzello/AP
Despite all that history, the pedigreed new Netflix production successfully forges its own haunting vision of Ripley. Written and directed by Steve Zaillian (screenwriter of Schindler’s List and The Irishman), Ripley (mostly) benefits from having more space to breathe than the film – and from Andrew Scott’s unflinching performance.
Leaving the Hot Priest of Fleabag fame behind, Scott gives a harder, colder interpretation of the title role. Though significantly older than Highsmith’s 25-year-old antihero, the 47-year-old BAFTA winner Scott (All of Us Strangers, Sherlock) fully embodies the brooding and seething Ripley. Rather than charming and boyish, Netflix’s Tom Ripley is visibly creased and battered. Instead of Highsmith’s peevish 25-year-old, who notices with pleasure and opportunism physical resemblances with his privileged friend, Ripley and Dickie’s relationship is more clearly grifter and target. Ripley director Zaillan also advances the timeline to 1961, plunging Ripley into a more modern and edgy world.
Scott is well supported by Johnny Flynn (Emma) as a feckless Dickie, and Dakota Fanning, who delivers a mannered and pricklier Marge, the role that Gwyneth Paltrow made famous. If there’s one flaw, it’s that Ripley masters the style and techniques of Hitchcockian noir, without its momentum. This series’ slow deliberate pace and eerie quiet can sometimes feel like a slog.
Still, Ripley‘s performances and striking style elevate the series. Rendered in stark Black and white tones, each shot is as visually arresting as the best still photo. Anthropological and artistic, it’s the opposite of Anthony Minghella’s bright Italian playground presided over by Jude Law as a golden god. This approach transforms even the most ordinary scene —a cat on a bench in a Roman rooming house — into a foreboding tableau. The noirish visuals are the perfect look for this seedier and more cerebral thriller. So too are the peeling paint, decaying edifices, and too many steps on which the camera lingers. All together, the aesthetic looks like something out of an avant-garde European movie like Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête or a painting by Caravaggio. The series significantly expands on what Highsmith wrote about Tom’s relationship with high art, spinning the idea that he had “discovered an interest in paintings” from emulating Dickie into an obsessive identification with a 17th-century Italian painter known for his bloody and brutal canvases, interplay of shadow and light, and for murder. It’s an ingenious representation of Tom’s descent on screen.
With these inspired creative choices, the Anthony Minghella film and the Netflix series stand on their own. But if you have the inclination, the two major screen productions and the novel form a phenomenal triple bill.
A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV.
Lifestyle
Cheddar bay biscuits, cheap margs and memories: Readers share their nostalgia for chain restaurants
Affordable, familiar and reassuring are the features that make American chain restaurants a near-ubiquitous presence throughout the country; it is almost as if they are baked into our roadside culture.
Despite well-documented financial struggles, a tough economy and shifting diet trends, these restaurants withstand time.
This series explores why these places have such strong staying power and how they stay afloat at a time of rapid change.
Read our first three pieces in this series, including how these restaurants leverage nostalgia to attract diners, how they attempt to keep costs affordable, and how social media has changed the advertising game – and become a vital key to restaurants’ success.
America’s chain restaurants are not the most glamorous places to eat. And yet, as we’ve reported, they hold a special place in many Americans’ hearts.
We asked readers what comes to mind when they think of restaurants like Olive Garden, Applebee’s or Texas Roadhouse — and you shared plenty of stories.
Not all of the respondees waxed poetic about the merit of these restaurants. David Horton, 62, from New York, for example, said: “The food is mostly frozen and only has flavor from the incredible amounts of sodium they use.”
But overwhelmingly, responses described vivid childhood memories shared in booths looking excitedly over laminated menus and the type of adolescent rites of passage that seem right at home in the parking lot of a suburban chain restaurant.
There’s a science behind why these sorts of memories have such a hold on us.
The feeling of nostalgia is linked closely to food and smell, and these restaurant chains are often where core memories – like graduation celebrations or first dates – are made.
Chelsea Reid is an associate professor at the College of Charleston who studies nostalgia. And she’s no more immune to nostalgic feelings than anyone else even though she has a better understanding of the chemistry behind the feeling.
“Even just saying Red Lobster, I can kind of picture the table and the things that we would do and the things we’d order, and my mom getting extra biscuits to take home,” she said.
A Red Lobster restaurant is seen in Fairview Heights, Ill., in 2005.
James A. Finley/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
James A. Finley/AP
Her nearest Red Lobster closed down, but a local farmers’ market sells a scone reminiscent of Red Lobster’s famed Cheddar Bay Biscuits – a scent she says immediately transports her back to those childhood family outings to the seafood chain.
“I can see my mom wrapping these up in a napkin and putting them in her purse for when we would be like, ‘hey, we’re hungry,’ and she pulls out a purse biscuit.”
Full disclosure: Your intrepid reporters are not without sentimentality. Before launching this project, when it was just a kernel of an idea, we talked frequently about the role these restaurants played in our own lives.
Jaclyn: I distinctly remember cramming into a booth at my local Chili’s in my hometown, Cromwell, Ct., for most birthday dinners until the age of 13 or so.
I’d be surrounded by my mom, dad and brother, and I got to pick whatever I wanted. Except I always chose the same thing: Chicken crispers with a side of fries, topping the night off with the molten lava chocolate cake we’d share as a family.
I can picture it so clearly, down to the booth we’d sit in. Now, my family is spread out. But my love for Chili’s runs deep, and I still get warm and fuzzy when I think about it.
These days, I’m in my 30s, and I need to worry about my health and getting in 10,000 steps a day. So, no, I don’t regularly go to Chili’s now.
But when I do? Those chicken crispers I had as a kid are still on the menu, and yes, I’m likely to order them today (even if on my adult tastebuds, the salt content quickly turns my mouth into the Sahara Desert).
And it’s not to celebrate my birthday. It’s because one of my best friends is telling me she’s getting a divorce over cheap, and sugary, margaritas.
Alana: When the pandemic struck in 2020 and much of the country went into lockdown, there I was mostly alone in my one bedroom apartment, staring at the walls.
After what seemed like a lifetime, I was finally able to expand my tiny COVID bubble.
One of my first “dining out” experiences during that time was in the parking lot of the Hyattsville, Md., Olive Garden where my friend and I sat in absolute glee to be reunited – not just with one another, but also the chain’s staple soup (zuppa toscana for me, please), salad and breadsticks (you can have all the breadsticks if I can have your share of the salad tomatoes).
Since then, that friend and many others have moved away – too far to meet up for a sit-down over a (mostly) hot meal at a reasonably priced restaurant in a city not famed for being cheap.
I recently revisited the Hyattsville Olive Garden for this story. And even though my life is now different, my friends have moved away, and the world has shifted, there it was, exactly the same.
And I liked it.
Many readers said that these restaurants were the type of place a family who could rarely afford to eat outside a home could treat themselves on rare occasions.
Like Julie Philip, 51, from Dunlap, Ill., who wrote: “Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, Red Lobster was an Easter tradition. We would dress up, go to church, then drive close to an hour to Red Lobster.”
She continued, “It was one of only a few days a year that we could afford to eat at a ‘fancy restaurant.’ I remember my parents remarking that they had to spend $35 for our family of four. I no longer consider Red Lobster a ‘fancy restaurant,’ but as an adult, my family and I often still eat there at Easter. I remind my kids that we are keeping up a family tradition and I tell them stories of my childhood while eating.”
The original Applebee’s restaurant was called T.J. Applebee’s Rx for Edibles & Elixirs and it opened in Decatur, Ga., in 1980.
Applebee’s
hide caption
toggle caption
Applebee’s
For Sarah Duggan, an Applebee’s parking lot evokes a key memory from young adulthood.
Duggan, 32, from North Tonawanda, N.Y., wrote that every time she sees an Applebee’s, she remembers the time her friend, in an act of teenage rebellion, got her belly button pierced in the parking lot of a Long Island Applebee’s — inside the trunk of the piercer’s “salvage-title PT Cruiser.”
Duggan held the flashlight.
She wrote, “I can’t picture those sorts of college kid shenanigans happening in the parking lot of a regular Long Island diner or other independent restaurant, but it seems right that it was at Applebee’s.”
She continued, “It makes me think about how nobody, from riotous camp counselors to your spouse’s grandparents, looks or feels out of place at a chain restaurant.”
NASCAR’s Gregg Biffle
Jet Turns Into Ball Of Flames …
Shocking Video Shows
Published
Brevin Renwick
Horrifying new video shows the precise moment a plane carrying NASCAR driver Greg Biffle and his family crashed and exploded in flames Thursday, killing everyone on board.
Security footage captured the corporate jet turning into a ball of fire as it crash-landed near a runway at Statesville Regional Airport in North Carolina. The aircraft was scheduled to fly to Florida, but not long after takeoff, it turned back to the airport before crashing.
As you can see from the clip, the plane was reduced to what looks like a burning oil slick with black smoke rising into the sky. All seven people on the plane died, including Biffle, his wife, Cristina and two children — Emma, 14, and Ryder, 5.
PEOPLE reported minutes before impact, Cristina sent her mom a chilling text, stating, “We’re in trouble.”
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the cause of the crash.
President Donald Trump stands in the presidential box as he visits the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C, on March 17, 2025.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will now have a new name — the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the news on social media Thursday, saying that the board of the center voted unanimously for the change, “Because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.”
Shortly after the announcement, Ohio Democrat Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member of the board, refuted the claim that it was a unanimous vote. “Each time I tried to speak, I was muted,” she said in a video posted to social media. “Participants were not allowed to voice their concern.”
When asked about the call, Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations at the Kennedy Center, sent a statement reiterating the vote was unanimous: “The new Trump Kennedy Center reflects the unequivocal bipartisan support for America’s cultural center for generations to come.”
Other Democrats in Congress who are ex-officio members of the Kennedy Center Board, including Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries issued a statement stating that the president is renaming the institution “without legal authority.”
“Federal law established the Center as a memorial to President Kennedy and prohibits changing its name without Congressional action,” the statement reads.
Earlier this year, Trump installed himself as the chairman of the center, firing former president Deborah Rutter and ousting the previous board chair David Rubenstein, along with board members appointed by President Biden. He then appointed a new board, including second lady Usha Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and more.
Trump hinted at the name change earlier this month, when he took questions before becoming the first president to host the Kennedy Center Honors. He deferred to the board when asked directly about changing the name but said “we are saving the Kennedy Center.”
The president was mostly hands off with the Kennedy Center during his first term, as most presidents have been. But he’s taking a special interest in it in his second term, touring the center and promising to weed out programming he doesn’t approve of. His “One Big Beautiful Bill” included $257 million for the building’s repairs and maintenance.
Originally, it was called The National Cultural Center. In 1964, two months after President Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation authorizing funds to build what would become the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Opinion: You get what you pay for — and Alaska is paying too little
Three Arizona Standouts Against Bellarmine
Arkansas runaway youth numbers rising, what does that mean? | Make It Make Sense
Two Republicans lead race to be next California governor—New poll
Several Colorado highways temporarily closed due to high winds
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
Takeaways from an eventful 2025 election cycle
Judge tosses Trump-linked lawsuit targeting Chief Justice Roberts, dealing setback to Trump allies
Who was Osman Hadi; why is Bangladesh on fire over his death?
Putin tells news conference that Kremlin’s military goals will be achieved in Ukraine
Video: Trump Mocks Obama, Biden in His Presidential ‘Walk of Fame’
-
Iowa5 days agoAddy Brown motivated to step up in Audi Crooks’ absence vs. UNI
-
Iowa6 days agoHow much snow did Iowa get? See Iowa’s latest snowfall totals
-
Maine3 days agoElementary-aged student killed in school bus crash in southern Maine
-
Maryland5 days agoFrigid temperatures to start the week in Maryland
-
Technology1 week agoThe Game Awards are losing their luster
-
South Dakota5 days agoNature: Snow in South Dakota
-
Nebraska1 week agoNebraska lands commitment from DL Jayden Travers adding to early Top 5 recruiting class
-
Sports1 week agoPro Football Hall of Famer Troy Aikman critiques NIL landscape, transfer rules and Lane Kiffin’s LSU move