'Ripley' Recap, Episode 7: 'Macabre Entertainment'

Emotion drained from Tom Ripley’s face when he bludgeoned Dickie Greenleaf with an oar and Freddie Miles with his new glass ashtray, but he’s been clearly nervous ever since we first met him. In the first episode of Ripley, as Tom jumped through a series of hoops to get away with his George McAlpin grift, he kept looking over his shoulder, suspicious of what went on behind his back. In Atrani, the stairs and the water all made him uneasy; now that he has killed two men, policemen, no matter how (un)interested in his movements, make him fidgety. Even though staying in Rome, where Inspector Ravini is all in his business, would be less than ideal, it’s questionable whether it’s in his best interest to disappear to Palermo as if he were running from the investigation. But at least there, he can try to resume some of the normalcy of his Dickie Greenleaf life: He goes back to reading the papers at cafés and hunting for Caravaggios.

In Rome, Inspector Ravini is carrying bravely on. He leaves a cryptic message for Dickie at the Hotel Palma in Palermo, saying he’d been looking for him but not to call back; in the meantime, he makes his humble way up the stairs to Marge’s house in Atrani. The facts of the investigation are piling up with what seems, at first, like red herrings. A man called Enzo looks the inspector up to tell him he’d seen two men — Tom and an already-dead Freddie — struggling into a car late at night in his neighborhood, and though at first, he hadn’t thought much of it, with news of the murder he figured he might’ve seen something important. But Enzo, who was walking his dog, also named Enzo, doesn’t remember much of anything, and the inspector’s patience is running short. (Between having said bye to Lucio, the cat in Tom’s building in Rome, and twisting his nose at the original Greenleaf abstract hanging on Marge’s wall, the inspector has completely won my heart.)

Marge has been conducting her own little investigation from Atrani. Matteo at the post office tells her that an urgent letter had arrived for Dickie from the bank but that he hasn’t claimed it, nor has he given a forwarding address. Questioned by Inspector Ravini (who is completely out of breath) in Atrani and later in Rome, Marge doesn’t mince words about her impression of the missing Tom Ripley: He is the “kind of person who takes advantage of other people” and of Dickie especially, not to mention that lying is “his profession,” and she wouldn’t be surprised if he had something to do with Freddie’s death. When the inspector raises an eyebrow at the fact that Dickie and Marge are apparently a couple living in separate cities, Marge explains they’re both taking time to work on their art … and anyway, she did see Tom Ripley in Rome, with her own two eyes. I do feel sort of badly for Marge again; her dishes are piling in the sink, and she’s obviously still holding onto a hope that Dickie has just temporarily lost his mind, and soon this will all blow over. After she gives him a pretty good “please, you don’t know how hard this is for me” look, the inspector tells her where she can reach Dickie in Palermo.

For his part, Tom is relentless in his campaign to clear his name with everyone involved in Dickie’s life (except, really, for Marge, whom he hates with the burning fire of a thousand suns). To the Greenleafs, he writes that, overwhelmed by the way the investigation was treating him as a suspect, he has chosen to spend some time away from Rome, and that the only consolation he’s gotten in these “dark days” has come from the heroic Tom Ripley. Soaking in the bathtub, Tom is visited by Marge and Dickie, interlocutors in his rehearsal of the narrative he’ll have to advance. I wrote earlier, recapping episode five, that Tom had been living in a suspended state of one-man showmanship, performing, writing, and directing a play to which he was the only spectator. But how might the nature of his performance shift as his impersonation deepens?

Let’s imagine what might’ve happened if everything had worked out according to Tom’s plan. He would’ve never “had” to kill Freddie, Marge would’ve successfully been given the boot, and Mr. Greenleaf and his wife would’ve been content to interact with their only son solely through correspondence forevermore (Tom’s worst idea in this whole thing, I think). In that scenario, Tom’s performance of Dickie would’ve mostly existed for his own purpose: Since Dickie would’ve necessarily had to be cut off from his life as it had been until now, his new life, personality, connections, emotions, and tastes would’ve been Tom’s to invent. In the novel, Patricia Highsmith gives Tom-as-Dickie a brief moment of social blossoming before the inspector catches up with him. He is invited to parties and asked to mingle with the wealthy expatriate community. But Tom knows that’d be too risky, so he fantasizes about a life somewhere Dickie wasn’t known. Only in that scenario could he have shared his Dickie with others, finally completing the transformation that, for now, he’s had to control with a conscious hand. Other famous doubles of fiction, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Tyler Durden and Fight Club’s unnamed narrator, share a measure of unconsciousness: The big reveal is that these people are one and the same. Achieving that state of sameness is part of Tom’s ambition, but to get there, he has to hold Dickie at arm’s length. In order to be Dickie, he must know how to control him, puppeteer him according to his purpose, which is what he’s getting at with all the letter writing and the perspective-correcting.

But can he possibly get away with the final transformation, especially as Inspector Ravini becomes convinced that Tom Ripley is missing? Stuff keeps coming up. Now the Wendell Trust Company, in cahoots with the Banca della Repubblica in Naples, has flagged a potential forged signature on Dickie’s January remittance check, and it needs Dickie to come in to validate it. Oh, and just to be safe, it’s notified the police, too. Tom makes it as far as the line inside the bank before he thinks better of it. Instead of following the bank’s instructions, he decides to write a letter stating the obvious: If he’d missed a check, he’d have let them know. Tom’s Dickie is, aptly, disdainful of authority — not only does he fail to present himself at the bank, he changes hotels without notifying Inspector Ravini as agreed. To top it all off, prying tabloid journalists have been following him around ever since the front-page headlines in the papers declared him a murder suspect. Had he been as careful as he was in the days after Dickie’s murder, he would’ve bought the papers and read that Dickie was not only suspected of Freddie’s murder but of Tom Ripley’s too.

The Palermo police get called on to help track Dickie Greenleaf down, and the Sicilians are unhappy about having to do the busywork of finding him in order to pass on the message that Inspector Ravini never got to deliver. The reason he didn’t need Dickie to call back was that he wanted to summon Dickie back to Rome, just as he had Marge (climbing those stairs once was enough). If Dickie fails to present himself to the inspector in Rome, the Sicilian detective tells Tom, there will be consequences. Tom assures him that Dickie will be there tomorrow. It’s funny to imagine a straight line connecting Tom’s impatience toward logistics and the role of bureaucracy in the investigation of his crimes. Everyone is just pissed at the amount of work they have to do, no matter what kind.

As the investigation closes in on him, it doesn’t seem as fortuitous anymore that the inspector is determined to find Tom Ripley. Whereas at first it might’ve seemed like a lucky distraction — they would’ve expanded all of their energies looking for a man that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist anymore — now it has become a problem because Tom needs to prove that Dickie didn’t kill Tom while being both Dickie and Tom at the same time. Checking out of his hotel in Palermo after getting chewed out by the Sicilian detective, Tom asks the desk clerk for upcoming ferry departures. He wants to know when the next ferry is to … Tunis. “I’m okay,” he says out loud, to no one in particular, after securing the schedule. At the harbor terminal, he buys a ticket for Naples. The old cogs in his brain, greased by the mounting pressure, are turning again. From Naples, he takes a train to Rome, where he sneaks into his old building and packs up all his Tom Ripley stuff. To the landlady, he writes a genuinely heartfelt letter saying he’ll have to give up the apartment and thanking her for her kindness.

From Rome, Tom goes to Venice. He puts his head out of the window like a dog as he glides through the canals of the City of Love, and that look of childlike wonder flushes his face again, as if he is just embarking on the most exciting trip of his life. “Macabre Entertainment” does justice to the Ripley spirit: It manages to cover a lot of plot details without losing the specificity and the narrative tension that keep our attention trained on Tom’s perverse logic. By the end of it, I couldn’t help but find myself siding with the bad guy again: Tom Ripley’s psycho tranquility is back, baby! That’s the serene, contented face of a man who has a plan.

• The only laughter that has emerged from Tom Ripley’s lips in days comes from the letter Marge writes to Dickie, all but breaking up with him, in which she finally and definitively calls him gay. Hurting Marge is the one thing that has gone Tom’s way, at least since Freddie Miles came knocking on the door.

• Notice how, every time Tom receives a letter containing bad news, Steven Zaillian has the letter-writer face the camera directly, as if they were speaking to Tom through us, even if they aren’t necessarily significant characters to the story. In “Macabre Entertainment,” we’re spoken to by the bank representatives summoning Dickie to validate his signature. Every time I see a man behind a large desk in Ripley, I think, Here we go …