Believe it or not

"For Ripley," writes K-punk, "only the big Other exists."



The only question is, what precisely does it want?

Between the invisible man Ripley of the The Talented Mr. Ripley, and the man-of-wealth-and-taste Ripley who emerges in the later books, Ripley undergoes a definite alteration in his libidinal economy. Initially, he had appeared as dominated by a generic anxiety, oscillating between existential and status-related poles. However, when Ripley joins the leisure class, this existential element more-or-less drops away, becoming replaced by a new feeling: boredom.

As K-punk puts it, comparing Ripley to Brian Ferry:

Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop’s equivalent of The Talented Mr Ripley. The clothes, the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly. The roots still show, and the painful drama of becoming something you are not still carries an existential charge. Stranded and the subsequent albums, meanwhile, are the equivalent of the later novels; here, success is assumed, and the threats to the tasteful but banal idyll come from ennui, a certain unease with contentment, and - most ominous of all - the danger of the past returning. The vapid bucolia of Roxy's Avalon - recorded when Ferry was himself married to an heiress and living on a country estate – would be the perfect soundtrack to Ripley puttering around in...Belle Ombre, with his wife, Heloise.

Between status-anxiety and boredom, the two sides of the Big Other, the former in a sense the Left deviation, and the latter the Right one, from the splitting in the centre which amounts to the subject itself. It is this splitting which is ultimately the the cause of the existential anxiety which serves - in a displaced form - for the fundamental motive force of Ripley. In respect to it, his basic psychic strategy consists of transmigrating it into the sign-language of status, so as to master it.

But this strategy ultimately fails - by it, Ripley manages to acquire only the material trappings of success; success itself eludes him. K-punk nominates Avalon, equally Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads could serve as the Belle Ombre soundtrack here, "And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife/And you may ask yourself - well, how did I get here?"

In the case of Ripley, in fact we already know this, as K-punk points out, "by killing Dickie, Tom ‘earns’ his place in the unproductive leisure class... The difference between Tom the common thief and con artist and Tom the member of the leisured elite is a successful act of violence."

But how successful really was this act anyway? "'What Tom does fear is unmasking; not merely the unmasking of himself as Dickie or even the unmasking of himself as a killer but the unmasking of his lack of a real self and therefore his self-perceived inadequacy in the face of others - there is no appreciable difference between fear of discovery for his tax scam or for his murders. His main fear is that of socially not quite making the grade."

Two questions emerge here. First, who is grading, and precisely what is being graded? Second, why does this tribunal still remain sitting subsequent to Ripley's succesful entrance into the leisure class?

In fact, the key concept here is perhaps better expressed not as existential anxiety, but rather performance anxiety. The very special delirium of Ripley is that, effectively, he is being judged by the big Other on precisely how well he performs the part of Ripley. Either, the big Other states, the scenography is not glamorous enough - as is the case for the status-anxious Talented Mr. Ripley, or else, there is not enough action - the dilemma that plauges the ennui-filled later Ripley.

The major point here is two-fold. First, Ripley can never ultimately win, even as he equally cannot really lose, since there is no ultimate criteria that the judging big Other really depends upon. Rather, it only just enjoys passing judgement, and hence will tend to employ - like a perfect Deleuzian - whatever material is ready-to-hand, and fit for the circumstances. In this way, Ripley's problem is actually not that he does not possess a real self, but rather the opposite one, that his self is much too real, it has made real by the ceaseless dissociated scrutiny he himself has placed it under. This leads on to the second point: Ripley's problem is ultimately all our problem. What better expression could there be of ceaseless externalized judgement of your very ability to be yourself, than our modern risk society, in which enjoyment itself has become a duty, and you can be anything you like, and indeed, will have have to be, so long as it pays.