Comparing notes with a friend from a reunion celebration held at a wealthy family seat. The cascade of inherited wealth to our own generation was all around us: from the watchful staff and non-negotiable rituals, to placements imposed with iron discipline. Aside from the eye-rolling, it produced a host of “Ripley moments” — a mix of revelling in someone else’s luxurious time out of London working life while resenting them having it.
Watching Andrew Scott in his coldly mesmeric performance as Tom Ripley, the timelessly aspirational psychopath, set us thinking that he would fit in perfectly into the 2020s love-hate relationship with the extremely rich. Envy for the (very) High Net Worth life — tinged with a gnawing fury — intensifies at times of economic and social stress. It is probably why the Netflix revival not only feels like an old friend among classy — and class-ridden — noir thrillers, but a show with echoes for our jarring present times as well.
In the late Fifties, when Patricia Highsmith set the first of her convoluted Ripley murder and financial skulduggery stories, the trauma of recent war lingered in the sunny Italian air: a suspicious and divided country (the real-life election of 1958 had the Communist Party as runners up to the endlessly factional Christian Democrats). Continental Europe’s — and Britain’s — politics feel queasily closer now to instability and the shattering of centrist consensus than at any time since.
The capital has twin habits of embracing a very rich subset, while also grumbling about the impacts they have
The themes of glassy superficiality in Highsmith’s story fits spookily well with the curated reality of modern social media: what fun Tom would have had as a sock-puppet troll, instead of the more laborious Italian post to convey his identity fraud. Marge and Dickie would surely have had private Instagram accounts, with approved followers only to keep track of who was at whose ski gatherings, and dine at members-only Oswald’s. Their Gen Z equivalents would be in new-season Corteiz streetwear and at the more selective bit of Camden’s Koko.
The mesmeric slyness of the Ripley-Greenleaf intrigue is Tom’s desire to become one of the careless rich he despises. That chimes for me with London’s twin habits of embracing of a super-wealthy subset, while at the same time grumbling about their impacts. There’s a bit of Ripley-ism in a lot of us wanting this both ways.
You can glimpse in Rachel Reeves’s desire to promise an investment haven which will (by some vague means) secure a return to growth, and pivot to announcing tax raids on non-doms — for a relative small amount of return (assuming the £2.6 billion is ever really captured: there is a high degree of Ripley-esque accounting in a speculative pledges of this sort with a big number attached).
It is also there in the unease of Rishi Sunak who cannot ever quite settle on an answer to the “why are you so rich?” question, without sounding shifty or petulant. It’s there in the Conservative Party inability to decide whether to vaunt its closeness to wealth as a success story — or join rougher culture wars against elites and soft southerners.
The gap between super-rich and ordinary folk Ripley addresses by means of impersonation and murder was big in the Fifties. In that sense, not much has changed: today’s sense that aspiration has become a too narrow path, closed off by circumstance to all but the especially lucky, driven or cunning.
The undercurrents bubble through a revival of what a shrewd article on the millennial-focused Vox website calls “striver gothic”. These are dark tales, in which the chancer infiltrates a rarified upper-class world and slips into a different skin, with a corpse or several as the result. It bequeaths us Oliver’s dance of death with the ghastly Carlton family in Saltburn (the 2020s heir to class-ridden murder stories from Agatha Christie’s many bodies in libraries) and a modern hat-tip Donna Tartt’s amoral college crew in The Secret History.
Ripley, however, is a cut above the social-climbing, homicidal average: protean enough to bear Matt Damon’s panicky ingenue incarnation as much Scott’s fish-eyed, chillier version or Alain Delon’s full-on Narcissus number in the gayest version of the fatal attraction, Plein Soleil.
His 21st century avatar is still busy, hawking a fake Old Master, deep into digital fraud and until recently rubbed crypto-bro shoulders with Sam Bankman-Fried. Take a stroll through Mayfair and the Ripley prototypes are all around you (mezcal cocktail, updating the Cinzanos). Marge is delayed in a fitting at Hermes in Bond Street. For chills and an extra love-hate twist, just add murder.
