Gray Narcissus

The most important closet in Netflix's Ripley is a room of one's own.

My first encounter with The Talented Mr. Ripley was via the 1999 Anthony Minghella film, which was shown to me over a Skype stream by my ex. At the time, we were in what I can only refer to as a very 2010s long-distance lesbian relationship. Emotionally toxic, fraught with blowout fights and posturing on our respective tumblr blogs, our only real common ground was media like the The Talented Mr. Ripley, Reservoir Dogs, and NBC's Hannibal: a menu of homoerotic narratives centered not on explicit gay content, but on how acts of repression beget violence.

Eventually we broke up, with almost the same explosiveness that occurs when Jude Law's Dickie Greenleaf tries to ditch Matt Damon's version of Tom Ripley in the 1999 film. I got our shared Talented Mr.Ripley-themed tumblr blog in the split. Several years later, my ex wrote to me and apologized for his bad behavior, and announced that he'd transitioned, signing the letter with a new name.

I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise. I'd spent the pandemic yo-yo-ing around my own gender crisis, after all. My fiancée, a much more loving, caring, and butcher dyke than my ex ever was, was not threatened by my experiments with gender expression the way my other partners had been. After a decade or so of trying to worm my way in to gay narratives, I realized that if I was to make any sense of myself, my art, and my relationships, I had to deal with the effete elephant in the room: the latent desire I'd had since childhood to do and be many of the things a gay man is, while also not actually being a man (trans or otherwise).

This, I promise, is relevant. I don't go down autobiographical paths lightly, and don't really enjoy talking about identity or my past relationships. I frame my feelings about Ripley, Netflix's new adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, against the stormy backdrop of my own gender yearnings because, I’d argue, the source material makes no sense without a base knowledge that this is something dykes experience. I’d also argue that Ripley is such a good adaptation because this element is translated from page to screen for the first time.

In the same way that there are two Tom Ripleys and two Dickie Greenleafs, there are often two Patricia Highsmiths, and the years between different adaptations of her work have stunted the conversation and allowed them to be separate entities for much too long. There's the Patricia Highsmith who wrote The Price of Salt, the complicated and sometimes cruel lesbian romance which spawned the glittering Cate Blanchett-led adaptation Carol from Todd Haynes in 2015. At the time there was buzz on the dyke internet about how Highsmith was one of those unapologetic femme-chasers, not butch but certainly with a manly mean streak. Phylis Nagy, who penned the screenplay for Carol, even went so far as to say that Highsmith's dislike of women was "her formative psychological trait," one "she carried...with her throughout her life, that she really didn't like women."

Highsmith in the 70s; Dickie and Tom in 1999

It follows that adaptations of Highsmith’s lesbian novel would spark conversations about Highsmith as a lesbian author. But then there's also the Patricia Highsmith who wrote crime thrillers and who invented Tom Ripley, a character whose adaptation counterparts are so bombastically of the male homoerotic variety (have you seen Alain Delon in Purple Noon?) that Highsmith as author fades into the background. It's rare that I see Tom, or any of the characters in The Talented Mr.Ripley, discussed through the lens of lesbian authorship, let alone lesbian desire.

This is a shame. While I appreciate (as a writer) the extent to which Highsmith is sometimes un-authored in conversations about Tom Ripley–who doesn't want their characters to grow up to be bigger than them?–there are veins to be tapped here, fruitful ones, and ones which I think allow the real genius and timeliness of Ripley to shine through. Because the show does shine. Ripley is simultaneously one of the boldest and subtlest adaptations of a queer novel I've ever seen, and one of the ways it achieves this is by refusing to be an adaptation that is about gay men in the closet. Instead, true to its source material, it's a story about a gay man who doesn't particularly like gay men, written by a lesbian who didn't particularly like lesbians.

For both parties, the desire for a certain type of man comes primarily from a desire for what that man has and is able to be. As Tom's crimes unwind, we that see what drives him is not sex. Surely, he could be having that if he wanted. And he’s not lovesick for a moneyed, womanizing expat like Dickie Greenleaf. If anything, he seems to resent Dickie, and Andrew Scott’s version of Tom is spurred by a desire to live out his own tastes unquestioned, to be smarter and freer than everyone around him, an inheritance he feels entitled to simply because of who he is. In Tom's fantasy, he takes Dickie's place but does him one better: there is no girlfriend keeping him at home, his interest in art is no longer a hobby but a genuine connection, and there are no questions asked about who he has dealings with. In other words, Ripley is not so much about the closet as it is about a room of one’s own, one which can be left at any time, but which one choses to occupy and furnish with stolen property instead.

To me, this is recognizable as a fantasy I and many of my cohort have felt and lived, perhaps even more frequently than it is a gay (cis) male fantasy, if the arbitrary binary can be permitted. Call this cohort any number of names: transmasculine-genderfluid people, nonbinary dykes, they/them femmes, or give us the hallowed title of dykefags if you think we've earned it. Whatever we’re called, one thing I’ve found in my discussions with others is that we have an affinity for the art of disguise. Our choice to remain in flux lends us certain proclivities: furniture for our chosen room we’d like to buy, so to speak.

To be clear, before I continue, plenty of transmasculine people have exactly fuck-all to do with lesbianism and will politely tell you so if you imply otherwise. If you’re trying to take guesses on who’s who, don't assume one way or the other, because you'll probably be wrong.

But for many of us who do fall into this nebulous dyke-but-kinda-trans category, the fantasy of breaking into a specific echelon of fussy, homosocial masculinity, and outsmarting everyone in it while holding onto our totally illegible lesbian desires, is a potent one. Within this fantasy, the fear of discovery and rejection are the same, but not on the basis of sexuality. There's no moment where we, in this fantasy, actually fuck a man. If we're outed, it will be a grade on our social performance alone, on matters of affect and taste–a taste for a world which we believe to be be superior, but whose rules of engagement have been pre-decided for us. They’re rules that we have to play by in order to break in and impress the right men, and which we’ll always be a bit resentful for having to follow.

The motif of the paisley purple bathrobe, which Tom selects in New York and which Dickie laughs off, is emblematic of this feeling of secretive entitlement; Tom’s stubborn inability to let the item go (to let Dickie’s taste win) and the way it eventually "outs" him only underscores the extent to which Ripley is about how, when our desire to have nice things that aren’t ours gets the best of us, the resulting rejection can be crushing.

In a traditional closet narrative, desire is truth, one's desires are punished for being what they are, and to suppress this desire is to harm one's self by lying. It’s narrative that usually ends with leaving the rejecting host body, not trying to burrow yourself deeper into it.

Indeed, in most coming-out stories, to remain behind in disguise is considered losing the game of life. But for Tom, and legions of dykes who see their gender identity as in flux, disguise is the lifestyle. What Tom's character experiences is much more like the desire to pass than it is the desire to live openly. But it's not passing the way trans people hope to pass: as themselves, out in the public world. It's a much more greedy, sometimes ugly desire, a desire to have more than you're entitled to, to not be accepted as you actually are or want to be but to be more than that. It’s a desire to beat an entire gender category at its own game.

Eliot Sumner as Freddie Miles

For this reason, perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of Ripley is the casting of nonbinary actor Eliot Sumner in the role of Freddie Miles. This casting is deliciously meta: in the show, Freddie is everything Tom wants to be but can't, and is also everything Tom hates. Clearly openly queer from the moment he steps onscreen, Freddie’s social position as a wealthy expatriate enables Dickie to give his proclivities a pass. Tom, on the other hand, comes under scrutiny, not for his latent homosexuality, but for the way he dares to let it slip while also being a shifty, un-moneyed intruder. And it's Freddie who eventually outs him entirely for the latter, leading to his death at Tom's hands.

Outside of the show's narrative, Sumner's quiet presence as a transmasculine actor playing a cis gay character feels like a nod to the fantasies of passing, closeting, and breaking-in that pervade Ripley. But it’s not a fantasy: unlike the dozens of other filmed instances where a transmasculine or nonbinary person plays a man, the rug is never pulled out from under us. Sumner as Freddie simply is what he says he is. He passes, passes through, and then, with an ashtray to the head, passes on. Like Freddie Miles himself, Sumner makes it look like the easiest thing in the world, a confident and talented actor doing their job. So why are the rest of us twisting ourselves into knots? To Tom and the viewers, the message of Freddie’s character is still clear: You, too, could have this, but you love the lie too much.

It's an uncomfortable idea, and therefore a vital one, to raise in the era of increasing scrutiny about trans and gender-nonconforming people. Because, while we'd rather take an oar to the head than admit it to the conservatives, some of us do find a thrill in duplicitousness, in lies, games, cheating, passing not to pass but just for the love of the game, in outsmarting everyone just because you want to prove you're smarter than them. It’s a matter of asserting that you don’t just want a seat at the table, but that the people who set it in the first place had terrible, terrible taste. A matter of wanting to be something, but not because you desire it–that’s a kick in the knees to a lot of established models for thinking about gay and trans narratives. One of the most compelling scenes in the novel, which was a lightbulb moment for my own identity when I first read it, is a chapter where Tom finds himself at a party which is clearly attended by the queer underworld: a web of affinities and knowing glances bound together mostly by sex, but also by other illegal activities. Tom, for his part, detests almost all of the partygoers.

The lightbulb came at this inversion of what was and wasn’t a matter of repression. The 1999 Minghella adaptation would have viewers believe that the only thing standing between Tom and queer happiness is society, that his crimes are ancillary to his uncontrollable desires. Ripley inverts this to make it accurate to the novel: Tom is very much in control of his queer desires. It's his desire to be a criminal which is uncontrollable, compulsive, almost inherent to his identity. Could Tom Ripley ever settle down with a nice boy somewhere in the underworld of New York? Yes, if he wanted to. Could he stop stealing, lying, defrauding, changing his face? Doubtful.

It's not an exclusively lesbian or trans narrative, of course. But what is the dyke-who-wants-to-be-a-fag story, if not one of someone who wants to live in disguise, for all the world a gay man, without actually desiring their specific brand of gay sex? That's certainly Tom's story, and I think, while it's not explicitly Patricia Highsmith's story, her complex relationship to men and her often-antagonistic relationship to women and lesbianism created fertile ground for Tom's morality and sexuality, which, for the first time, are accurately told in this adaptation in shades of gray.

We're so often told that queer media needs morally gray characters, but I think we rarely know what to do with them when we get them. And, in real life, social media's tendency to turn all discussions into black and white issues with winners and losers has made queer happiness a competition, where being unlabeled and being closeted are often assumed to be the same thing. It's a pendulum swing, of course, between what's needed for organizing ourselves and what exists in the margins between collective action. But I've found our current swing to be a bit stifling, and I enjoy moments of fresh air that breeze through works of art like Ripley. That’s really the message: after years of introspection and at my peak of queer happiness, I'm still more like Tom than Freddie.

There's a moment in the show where Dickie, hours before his death, identifies a group of bodybuilders Tom has just applauded on the beach as "daffodils." Tom takes offense, but not because he sees himself as affiliated with them. Instead, he's flummoxed that Dickie would ever let a little thing like sexuality get in the way of aesthetics. The daffodil, also known as the Narcissus flower, has long been a symbol of gay sexuality, of the desire for the reflection, for one who is like me. Symbols work because one thing represents the other, yet Tom splits the whole metaphor open: he's a narcissist, and maybe a daffodil, but what he actually sees in his reflection is anyone's guess. If the events of Ripley are any indicator, it's one secret that Tom will take, gleefully, to the grave.