GROSS DISTRACTION - Ripley: how to be shallow
A random special additional emergency supplementary edition of GROSS
(skip ahead to the Ripley bit if you want)
Substandard emails
To begin with, a bit of quality control. I want to tell you that the final draft of these posts is always better than the first one. But you, as a subscriber, never see the improved draft because I make the edits after I’ve sent it out. So what you’ve signed up for is basically Steve not quite at the top of his game. People who read this stuff in the app or online get the good stuff. Please be assured that I’m looking for a way to remedy this but it’s tricky (no refunds, though).
This is what’s unique and frustrating about this newsletter business (and what connects it, I guess, with the antique disciplines of print). There’s no easy way around it either because the stuff that goes into the final version hasn’t occurred to me when I click ‘send’. Maybe this is just a lack of discipline. I suppose I could sit on the first draft for a bit longer but I honestly don’t think that would work. Sending the thing out seems to have some kind of trigger function that causes me to think of something else.
Anyway, if you feel like it, compare and contrast the Sergeant York post I sent out the other day with the updated version. It’s much better organised and has somewhere between one and one-and-a-half completely new ideas in it. Obviously, if you’re busy, just sit tight and I’ll send you another one next week - and it’s 1942, so it’s only bloody Bambi.
And now, Ripley
The other thing I wanted to talk about in this random special additional emergency supplementary edition of GROSS is Netflix snoozer Ripley and, to be specific, the fact that it’s in black-and-white. I’m not going to write a long essay (I’m busy, right?) so here are some bullet-points. Feel free to copy-and-paste these into your Powerpoint about the embourgeoisification of the already-bourgeois.
Shooting in black-and-white in 2024 can mean many things but, let’s face it, what it usually means is “we need some 1950s glamour here and we thought that dialing down the colour in post might provide it.” And we should be honest enough to acknowledge that it has to some degree worked. Ripley has all the Cinecittà vibes.
Once you acknowledge the artifice here it’s an immensely frustrating decision. The series was, of course, shot in colour. So, on a hard drive at the production company there is a colour version of Ripley. They just didn’t release it. They released a beautifully-graded black-and-white print instead of a beautifully-graded colour print. It’s all on the hard drive, guys.
The Italian locations are part of the problem. When you shoot in a place that your audience knows (or just suspects) has beautiful or significant colour in it (even if it’s muted because it’s Winter) but then throw away the colour, you are doing a crime. You are robbing the punter. And you are diminishing your art. Put the colour back, you idiots.
And really, it’s worse than a crime. It’s shallow. Leaving out the colour is meant to add something of course, like any creative decision. The director says “It really is a kind of noir story, sort of the narrative version, or the novelistic version of film noir, and that means shoot in black-and-white.” See what I mean? This is not art. This is shallow reasoning. A weak justification for throwing away a whole dimension of experience for the audience. I’ve read half a dozen explanations of this, including one from the Oscar-winning cinematographer. None are convincing.
The most interesting thing about Tom Ripley is that he’s a petit-bourgeois (the second-most interesting thing is that he’s a serial-killer). Highsmith said “I consider him a rather civilised person who kills when he absolutely has to.” He’s a man of uncertain status who longs for a place in the Atlantic aristocracy to which Dickie and the others belong but knows he can never achieve it. This black-and-white affectation reduces Highsmith’s rich, complicated scenario of fragility, class, liberty and perfect amorality to an irritating parody of film-noir. Dumping the colour does not make you Nicholas Ray (or Federico Fellini for that matter). It can bring nothing to this story. It’s the creative equivalent of one of Ripley’s forged cheques. It’s bogus and, er, likely to bounce.
I want to say: I love black-and-white. I spend half my spare time watching black-and-white movies for this project. I quite often put a roll of HP5 through an old Nikon. And I want to acknowledge that it’s sometimes a good idea, even in the age of 24-bit HDR and Red Cameras and all that. Am I being unfair to this Ripley? A bit of a pedant? Possibly. Frances Ha is in black-and-white and the mood that’s created enhances the awkwardness and melancholy of the project. Jarmusch used to do it just because it was cool. And it was (but Roma was also in black-and-white and that was also pointless).