Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

To con someone is to seduce him. If one's persona gives pleasure to others, especially if it flatters their self-estimates, an unwitting complicity will drive their assumptions in the deceptor's direction. Perhaps the pleasure of being seduced relies on a willing suspension of disbelief not entirely unlike that sexual economy in which men pay women for “sincere” compliments. Perhaps the mistake of Anthony Minghella's 1999 The Talented Mr Ripley is that its allegiance to “truth” ultimately jilts its viewers. Ripley, the film's protagonist, is willing to kill for upward mobility. Twice before, Ripley has gone on killing sprees: first, in the 1955 source novel, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley; second, in René Clément's 1960 filmic adaptation Purple Noon . The present chapter, which is concerned with talented passing, focuses primarily on these two earlier texts. In Minghella's more recent film, passing becomes a tortured process. Homosexuality is rendered through a combination of pre-Stonewall discourse on gender inversion and post-Stonewall discourse on “the closet.” The closet figures as a dominant motif in the film both visually via shots of doors, for example, and verbally via Ripley's references to secrets in the basement of his self. Thus Minghella delivers a post-gay-liberation Ripley who suffers deeply from his inauthentic pose. Homosexual “character” is updated ... log in or subscribe to read full text