The Talented Mr. Ripley · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There is a nightclub in Naples where Dickie sits in behind the drums and the band kicks into "Tu Vuò Fà l'Americano," and Tom — sweating, thrilled, a little sick with it — gets pulled up to the microphone to sing. The joke of the song is at a young Neapolitan's expense: a kid who wants to act American, who's borrowed the clothes and the slang and the swagger and thinks they make him someone. Tom, an American faking his way into money he's only borrowed, sings the words. The mimicry runs three layers deep and nobody on screen seems to catch it but us. That one number is the whole film, and it's also the cleanest way into a strand of Deleuze that most viewers love this movie without ever being handed: the powers of the false.

Deleuze built most of his account of cinema on what he half-jokingly called the truthful man — the assumption that the image is evidence, that the camera, whatever its characters do, does not lie. The neorealists honored that contract; so does the courtroom and the documentary. The powers of the false break it. Not lying inside a true world — a liar still believes in a truth he's hiding — but truth itself made undecidable, and a character who makes the real instead of discovering it. Deleuze had a name for that character. He called him le faussaire, the forger. Patricia Highsmith invented him in 1955; Anthony Minghella gives him a face.

Watch what Tom actually does. He learns Dickie's signature, then his voice on the telephone, then the careless tilt of his hand on a page. He doesn't impersonate one man; he becomes a series — Tom-as-Tom, Tom-as-Dickie, and finally Tom-as-Tom-grieving-the-Dickie-he-killed. Deleuze insisted the forger never exists alone: he lives only in a chain of forgeries, an identity that keeps shifting and never settles into a true self underneath. The dossier names the props exactly — "signatures, rings, typewriters" as "the visual grammar of a self under construction." That is the forger's toolkit, and the film treats it with the patience of a procedural. (Deleuze died in 1995 and never saw this film; he drew the forger from Welles, from Mr. Arkadin and F for Fake. The concept is applied here, not canonical — but it fits Ripley better than it fits almost anything Deleuze did write about.)

Now look at how Minghella photographs a forger. John Seale's camera, the dossier notes, is "attentive to surfaces and reflections," a motif that "literalizes Ripley's doubling and his perpetual self-surveillance." This is the crystal-image — Deleuze's hyalosign. In a crystal you can no longer separate the actual thing from its virtual double; the object and its reflection trade places and you stop being able to say which is real. Tom lives in mirrors, behind glass, at the edge of frames watching Dickie and Marge before he's ready to be seen. The film is assembled out of these crystals, and each one asks the question the plot is too polite to ask aloud: which of these men is the original?

The answer arrives, terribly, on the boat at San Remo. Murch cuts the killing with a clumsy, panicked realism — no action-movie fluency, just two men and an oar and how hard it actually is to end someone. After that, something Deleuze called crystalline description takes over. Tom's impersonation had been a description of Dickie: the voice, the hand, the gestures, assembled piece by piece. With Dickie dead, the description has nothing left to copy — so it replaces its object outright. The forgery outlives the man. The image stands in for the thing and then quietly erases it. That is the concept in its purest form, and the film stages it as grief: Tom mourning a person he is also, by now, wearing.

And the world he's broken into was already rotting. Dickie's golden, careless wealth — the bleached coast, the sun on white linen, paradise "fully sold before it is corrupted" — is an aristocratic order decomposing from inside, what Deleuze called crystal-decomposition. Seale tightens the palette as the idyll curdles; Venice and Rome go wintry and grey; Tom gets boxed by architecture and doorways. The crystal cracks toward winter.

Here the film's lineage matters, because it's a deliberate set of choices and not an inheritance. René Clément's Plein Soleil (1960) gave Minghella the sun-drenched surface and the criminal's-eye identification — then punished Tom at the end. Minghella withholds that punishment, and in withholding it keeps the forger ascendant; the false is allowed to win. Strangers on a Train founded the Highsmith grammar of the charming amoral man who pulls a passive double into his crime. L'Avventura lent the languid island drift and the disappearance that never resolves. The Conformist welded ravishing image to moral dread and made repressed queer desire into spectacle. The Servant is the class-envy chamber piece where mirrors track one identity dissolving into another. And Murch — who built the dread-from-the-margins of Apocalypse Now out of stretched diegetic sound — does it again, easing us from coastal openness into the close, echoing interiors of the lie.

What the film did, finally, was smuggle Deleuze's least comfortable idea into an Oscar-season prestige package: it made the forger sympathetic, bound us to his point of view, and let the forgery hold. We spend the last act hoping he gets away with it. That hope is the powers of the false, working on you in the dark. Watch it again and count the reflective surfaces — then catch yourself rooting for the reflection over the man.