The Talented Mr. Ripley
Stop making sense.
When Richard and I met, 17 years ago, we started writing together, and I developed a taste for having a project at the beginning of a relationship. Most mornings in Hudson, we write for about 30 minutes and read the pieces aloud to each other. After I started writing with Richard, I had stuff to play with, and my voice became happier. The voice wanted to tell you things it loved and also reflect the fun it was having telling you anything.
Everything I’ve published since has started with the practice. Today’s stack is two recent “writes” I posted on Facebook and fiddled with a bit more. Last week, the stack introduced a new feature for paid subscribers called “Flashpoint Fridays.” Going forward, I’ll be sending out prompts on Fridays and inviting readers to post a paragraph from their “writes” on the CHAT platform of Substack. In the first round, people wrote lively and adventurous pieces—many thanks to everyone who jumped in.
Today, I wanted to show you what I do with prompts and how they feed my writing over all. I like to try things out on Facebook because I’ve developed a readership there of very smart people, and I learn if a piece has taken them or if they don’t want to touch it. It’s extremely helpful to gather this kind of feedback you could never get before social media. Readers on Facebook and here as well are never wrong. If a piece sings, they hear it. If it clicks, I try to figure out why. The things I do are always experiments, and it remains a crap shoot to put your writing in the world.
Yesterday on Facebook, a reader made a comment that so nails what I’m trying to do, I can’t resist sharing it, although it’s pretty much self-praise, which Richard’s grandmother Lucy said was “no recommendation.” The reader is referring to what I wrote about the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley—I’ll shortly post here:
“What a strange and lovely piece you’ve offered us here. It’s one of those rare reviews where I was less concerned with your continued take on a thing (this being a wonderful film I haven’t seen in years) and more interested by the prospect of how you might next twist any ordinary sentence into something unexpectedly beguiling, funny even, leaving me to feel like I’ve just experienced a new way of considering.”
I wrote back, wow, you’ve perfectly articulated what I’m trying to do. The “writes” aren’t reviews of the thing I’m thinking about. The thing I’m looking at becomes a prompt for showing how thought might look in action. I’m calling attention not to my thoughts so much as to how thought, itself, might look with a sort of guided freedom.
When I write in this really quick way, I’m trying hard not to take into account people who want to shape your language to quiet their anxieties. I’m trying to hear a thought and then think where this thought might go next. Sometimes, it’s to what looks like a non sequitor and that I think of as a “jump cut.” Then, it’s my job to weave it back into the piece that’s growing, moment by moment, to find a context for it. The “jump cut” becomes the next prompt.
There’s no pre-writing in this kind of composing. You just go, with whatever skills you’ve developed so far. How can I make the associative mind a public contemplation that produces joy? That’s the task I set for myself. Also, I rewrite everything, realizing there’s a weirder or funnier way to say X or Y. I rewrite, trying to sustain the feeling of, I just had this thought now, while I’m talking to you.
The next Zoom Conversation on writing craft and reading literature.
Last Saturday’s Zoom conversation was very fun for me and Richard. We are loving the community of readers, writers, and thinkers who are sending ahead questions about writing and reading literature and are forming a community we invite you all to join. The next Zoom Conversation is on Saturday, February 24 from 3 to 4pm EST. If you would like to attend and receive a link, please RSVP here: lauriestone@substack.com. You will need to email me, so I have your email address and can keep you in the loop. If you are a paid subscriber and would like a recorded video of the Zoom Conversation, write to me: lauriestone@substack.com
In addition to “Flashpoint Fridays” and the Zoom Conversations, paid subscribers at either the monthly or annual level receive access to the entire archive of stack posts I think of, collectively, as an unfolding art project.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
I don’t know why I wanted to watch this movie again. Maybe because of the setting in Italy in the 1950s. Maybe because of Matt Damon’s mouth. The way his lips, in a sudden smile, curl back over his white, slightly protruding teeth, only a second later to snap back, with a downward curve, into an apology for having moved. The lips of a man are the way he eats the world, or pretends not to exist, or curtains his face from its emotions. Matt is abashed, and it’s what I like about his lips, that tightness women often adopt who want to look butch. On Matt the lips aren’t butch, they are unsteady, and they draw you to feel for him and take his side against the hive of rich people he enters as Tom Ripley.
I wanted to watch the movie because almost everyone is unlikeable, not quite everyone, but certainly the central characters, Dickie Greenleaf and Freddie Miles, who are careless and superior with a “Gatsby” wash and are played with so much oily self-importance by Jude Law and Philip Seymour-Hoffman, you could make focaccia just by standing near them. We want Matt to kill them and anyone else he can get his hands on in their class.
It’s the playful genius of Patricia Highsmith to invent a world of mid-century playboys and strivers, in which we’re drawn most sympathetically to the homicidal sociopath. At least Tom Ripley wants something he has to work for rather than expects to have handed to him. He must invent his schemes and study hard to pull them off. He takes nothing for granted because he has nothing to give him a leg up in the world, except his cunning and ability to take outlandish risks. At the start of the film, before he works his first con, he’s an attendant in the men’s room at the Lyceum Theater. On the darkened stage, after everyone has left, he sits at the Steinway, practicing Bach’s “Italian Concerto.”
I love the way Highsmith mixes together Tom’s social mimicry, which is sexy to him—the blurring of class lines and all—with his erotic yearnings for men: first Dickie and then toward the end of the film Peter, whom he has to kill grudgingly because, if he doesn’t, a bunch of his lies will be exposed. It’s not like the rich don’t want to destroy him. It’s just that they don’t always know what’s going on around them. They lack the imagination to conceive of a person born without means and manners. Tom has to outhink them, and outrun them, and outcharm them.
The entire movie, your heart is in a twist because you are inside the con from the first moments. You are inside the con, and it feels exciting and deeply uncomfortable because in Highsmith and pretty much in real life, people are morally ambivalent, and it’s hard to find a place to rest that isn’t notched and scraped at.
Perhaps the most unlikely feat of genius in the film—owing to the screenplay and direction by Anthony Minghella—is we come to find Jude Law’s astonishing beauty irritating. He’s such a hapless jerk. No one deserves to be bludgeoned to death with the oar of a boat, well almost no one. In this film, Law is in his Adonis prime. Before Richard bailed on watching the movie with me, I said to him, “Do you think in those days Jude Law had to grip the edge of the vanity when he looked in the mirror, so he wouldn’t faint from seeing himself?”
Richard said, “Tom Ripley’s failure is wanting to copy those people.” I said, “I’m a little like him.” He looked startled and said with that quick, sharp return of his, “You’re nothing like Tom Ripley.” He meant the murderer, I guess, and the person who can pull off a con.
I meant working hard to fit in where you don’t belong. The movie gets right the way Tom touches Dickie’s jewelry and clothes. I was remembering times I looked in the closets of friends, wanting their things, and times I looked in their refrigerators at the leftovers that were growing moldy they’d taken home from expensive restaurants.
Envy is such an interesting emotion because it’s about trespassing, as if the boundaries of class and of other restrictions that are set up to control our circulation are things to be respected and protected, when they are not. It’s why envy is considered a sin where anarchy is punished and resisted. It’s why all sins are like Matt Damon’s mouth, embarrassed by what it turns out we are.
True Detective season 4
I don’t care too much that season four of True Detective (HBO Max) is kinda dull and slow moving. The dialogue isn’t sharp or surprising, although a few special effects involving a “corpsicle” of frozen, naked men, dug out of the Arctic tundra, make you jump. It’s just great to see women, mainly, fill the screen, talking their mainly predictable dialogue to each other. It’s the way they look at each other and listen to each other that’s great. They prefer looking at each other and listening to each to doing much else, and they have this charming, swaggering stomp to their steps, like the male dancers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in the barn-raising sequence, except girls.
The mystery of the frozen men is so complicated and unlikely, you can’t get a handle on it, and I have no real investment in the dead people because they are plot devices and not characters. It turns out this mystery is connected to an earlier case, involving a murdered native woman who went up against the local mine that is contaminating the water. There are lots of women characters in the show, and their dominance makes you warm in the stomach region, even though it’s very cold on screen and very cold where we live.
This morning when we woke up, it was 9 degrees out. I love the cold because, like Covid, it’s a cover for holing up and doing what you like away from responsibilities to others and yourself. I can see why people would want to live in a research lab in Antartica, or in a cave, or in some other kind of capsule that looks to others like an ordeal but to you is a portal to a mental state I summarize as: I’m alone because of no fault of mine, I’m just alone, and it’s bliss.
The actors on the show are doing as well as they can with the so-so plot and dialogue that mainly exchanges back story and information about body parts when you freeze to death. In episode 2, the great Fiona Shaw, who plays a woman haunted by the ghost of her dead lover, sits on a couch and says some interesting things about different kinds of ghosts, and even if she were telling you how to prepare a tunafish salad sandwich, and even without her wry British accent, she kickstarts the show into absorbing engagement that afterward dies like a match in the Arctic wind.
She says there are three kinds of ghosts. The first kind miss you. The second kind have something to tell you that you need to hear. The third kind just want to take you with them. She says something else about life or women or something pithy and wise, but I can’t remember what it is. As I said, Fiona Shaw, sweeping around her the brilliant cunning of her character in Killing Eve elevates a piece of nothing into, What was that memorable thing she just said?
Jodie Foster plays Danvers (remember Mrs. Danvers, the heavy in the gothic film Rebecca?) as chief of police in Ennis, a fictional town with eco-conflicts concerning the mine and a population of native people who feel culturally separate from whites. Kali Reis plays Trooper Evangeline Navarro, who is native and intent on reviving the case of the murdered native woman. For the first two episodes, Jodie and Kali are enemies, and you think, Really? a show in which women’s faces are in almost every shot and the leads have to hate each other? It turns out they will have to partner up because the cases of the frozen men and the murdered woman are linked.
Jodie’s Danvers is sour. She’s annoyed by everyone and everything, and you don’t care. It’s Jodie, with her thin lips twisting this way and that with intelligence the world wants to keep under ice. Reis looks cool with two bead piercings in her cheeks like dimples, and her body is powerful. I was thinking about how in homo sapiens sharp intelligence, like the opposing thumb, is a technology that functions as a strap-on for individuals who are light and little and have to make their way amid larger, stronger predators. You think this with Jodie all the time, a little guy you can pick up and toss against a wall but no one can outsmart.
I’ve made a recording of me reading today’s pieces, in case it would be fun to hear my voice. Please let me know if audio readings appeal to you.
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No one is as beautiful as Jude Law was in that film
Women who don’t look instagrammed That’s the great part