The Great Con: The Talented Mr. Ripley in Literature and Film

Description

This program will not be recorded.

American writer Patricia Highsmith published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955. The story is told from the point of view of Tom Ripley, a man who is young, clever and has a knack for fraud. A case of mistaken identity earns him a ticket abroad to a scenic coastal village in Italy, a far cry from his hardscrabble life in New York City. He soon becomes obsessed with Dickie Greenleaf, heir to a shipbuilding fortune, and embarks on a series of deceitful and sinister acts that beget more of the same. Highsmith's story builds suspense as the reader traverses Tom's physical and psychological journey through an affluent world, too obtuse to recognize the extent to which he is a threat. The Talented Mr. Ripley has been adapted from book to screen multiple times, with the most notable being the 1999 film directed by Anthony Minghella, starring Matt Damon and Jude Law. Such is the influence of the story that it has invited comparison to the 2023 film Saltburn, whose main character commits a similar subterfuge on a wealthy British family over the course of a summer in their country castle. As stories of frauds and scammers endure across popular media, Tom Ripley's forces the reader to examine how far they would go to gain access into a world whose entry requires reinventing oneself to the point of moral collapse. In this course, we will study the Highsmith novel and the 1999 film adaptation. We will close out the course with a discussion of Saltburn, which is indebted to the novel.

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