If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture has reached its final, perfect form. We made a good effort with cave paintings, epic poetry, theatre, literature and the rest of them, but the apex of culture is the bingeable, episodic rabbit-hole Netflix documentary about a sociopathic liar.
Maybe we love con artists because they’re the only people still selling something new
There have been so many of these now that it’s difficult to tell them apart. There was the one about the man who matched with women on dating websites by pretending to be the playboy scion to an Israeli diamond fortune – but who was really just spending the money he’d conned out of his previous girlfriend. There was the one about the man who pilfered millions with the line that he was some kind of special operative who spent his life fighting evil forces; in fact he was a gambler, and the black cars that came to pick him up had been sent by the casinos. Then there were the fake German heiress, the fake music festival and something involving a tiger. All featured bright colours and ominous music. There were contrived little cliffhangers at the end of every episode. And they all featured the magic combo of money, desire, and deceit.
People love these stories. We want to hear about some warming, charming, gregarious creature with a heart like an icicle, predating on other human beings, manipulating their feelings, getting rich. We like it when they succeed, when they get to lead the high life: the fast cars and models and celebrity friends. It’s wish fulfilment. You too could inhabit this wonderful world of laughter and leisure. You too could turn your fantasies into fact by sheer force of will, if you just believed in it enough. Maybe we’re just fascinated by the hollow people. This goes back a long way. Despite essentially founding western philosophy on his broadly well-thought-out decisions, Socrates was obsessed by Alcibiades, a cruel and beautiful youth. Unlike the Tinder Swindler, Alcibiades didn’t just toy with a few random women; he seduced Athens, Sparta, and Persia in turn, and then Athens again. He was a 21st-century scammer born several thousand years before his time.
I have another interpretation, though. Maybe we love con artists because they’re the only people still selling something new. They’re the only people willing to make up a fresh story.
The latest big offering from Netflix is yet another adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley, a novel written by Patricia Highsmith in 1955 which is still being lazily excavated almost 70 years later. Highsmith’s Ripley is another cruel and beautiful youth. A liar, a yearner, and a fantasist who finds himself unexpectedly inhabiting the world of rich American layabouts in Italy. He leeches off them until his charm runs dry and the creepy desperation underneath starts to show, at which point he decides to cling on to his new lifestyle by any means necessary – including murder. It’s a story for our time: before there was Anthony Strangis or Elizabeth Holmes, the type was set by Tom Ripley. But it’s been done! René Clément adapted the story in 1960, Anthony Minghella in 1999. Do we really need to hear it again?
There are differences, of course. Clément and Minghella both flooded their versions with so many bright Mediterranean blues and browns you can practically taste the sea salt and olive oil. The Netflix version is all in muted, noirish black-and-white. Instead of handsome, open-faced Alain Delon or Matt Damon, this one has Ripley played by a really bafflingly miscast Andrew Scott. Ripley’s life is supposed to swirl around seduction: first he’s seduced by the sea and the sun, and then he seduces everyone else into the world he builds himself. But Scott is a sour-faced brooder. He permanently looks like he’s just bitten into a lemon. He is also plainly 20 years too old for the role. This grim archipelago in north-western Europe is stamped on his face, and everything about him seems miserable and menacing, even if he tries his best to put on an American accent. His smile is a lizard’s slit, predatory. It’s hard to imagine any fun-loving bachelors inviting him to stay at their villa.
But the whole show is like this: grey, gloomy, and utterly joyless. It’s almost impressive how utterly devoid of humour the exercise is. How ponderously it drags. Every conversation sounds stilted; every sky is overcast; every gorgeous Italian city is full of rain, cracking plaster, reflections in puddles, shabby overcoats, hissing cigarettes, and mould. It’s not too different from the shabby New York that Ripley has left behind, which makes you wonder why he even bothered.
Still, Ripley does manage to seduce. Specifically, it seems to have seduced the television critics, who have all declared it a masterpiece. Just like its title character, it’s pretending to be something it’s not. This is another mass-produced Netflix binge-watch product about a sociopathic liar, but it’s dressed up in enough monochrome miserabilism that it passes, on first glance, for a work of art. That’s what the black-and-white is for: it’s not there because it makes the show cinematically better, but as a big loud signal that it is to be taken seriously. Except that just like with the title character, when you peel back the flashy outer layer, you’ll find there’s nothing of substance underneath.
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