As a famous tortured poet once said, “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.”
She’s right, it is exhausting, especially for those of us who have watched a lot of prestige television in the past couple of decades. Pop culture has given us a lot of great, complicated characters to ponder — our Tony Sopranos, Don Drapers, Walter Whites and Logan Roys — but also might have saddled a generation of viewers with a case of anti-hero fatigue.
A compelling anti-hero places the viewer in a bind. These protagonists are charming and charismatic, but usually flawed in obvious and irreparable ways. Since the stories paint such rich portraits, however, we cheer them on despite, or in some cases because of, the qualities that make them reprehensible.
But we can’t just like them, can we? We have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves serious questions about why we like them. So these days, whenever a big new streaming show gives anti-hero vibes, I wonder, can I just enjoy the series or do I have to do a bunch of introspective work afterward?
The character of Tom Ripley presents an interesting twist on the anti-hero template, because he is explicitly not likable. Not unlikable, exactly, but more so characterized by an absence of likability.
It is difficult to imagine anybody identifying or empathizing with Ripley, and yet the story, based on the 1955 Patricia Highsmith novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” has been adapted for screens at least five times, most famously in the 1997 Anthony Minghella film of the same name and most recently as “Ripley,” an eight-part Netflix series starring Andrew Scott in the title role.
What about the character keeps filmmakers and audiences returning? “Ripley” does not answer this directly, but series creator Steven Zaillian more than justifies his revival of the material. Photographed in sumptuous black-and-white and driven by a darkly compelling lead performance, it is surely among the most exquisite streaming series ever produced.
As in the other versions of this story, “Ripley,” set in the early 1960s, follows a small-time New York hustler who is sent to Italy to convince the layabout son of a wealthy industrialist to come home. That son, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), has been living handsomely off his trust fund in the gorgeous seaside town of Atrani with his girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning).
Tom arrives and is entranced with their leisurely existence. He patiently insinuates himself into Dickie and Marge’s lives, getting close enough to enjoy their largesse but not close enough to reveal what he actually wants, if anything.
Scott, known to peak-TV viewers as the “hot priest” from “Fleabag,” makes his character’s actions compelling while draining them of any discernible motivation. Is he in love with Dickie? Is he just lonely? Is he going to con them, or worse?
It is difficult to discuss the plot in depth without delivering large spoilers, but much of the series involves Tom traveling around Italy, impersonating Dickie and trying to evade authorities once a series of decisions forces him to kill to cover his tracks.
But for all the romance and beauty Zaillian’s camera finds in the streets of Rome, the canals of Venice and the museums of Milan, the contents of his protagonist’s head remain inscrutable. It is never clear what we are supposed to think of him. The viewer experiences anxiety and relief on his behalf, but roots neither for nor against him.
Ripley’s elusiveness makes the character an appealing canvas upon which to project the anxieties of whatever decade produces a new adaptation. In the Tom-Dickie “situationship,” we see a series of all-too-modern binaries: the scammer and the scammed, the identity thief and the catfished, the desperate hanger-on and the influencer.
The emptiness at Tom’s core is a container into which an audience can pour whatever it wants, a reflection of how easy it has become to curate whatever version of ourselves we want the world to see and to create whatever reality we want to experience. Disposing of a body, however, seems to be as difficult as ever.