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BBC Radio 4, 28 February 2009
This fascinating documentary broadcast to accompany the BBC's adaptation of the complete
Ripley cycle of five novels, looked at author Patricia Highsmith's life and how she viewed her most famous (infamous?) fictional
creation. Through a combination of archive interviews, readings from her work by Ian Hart (radio's Ripley) and contributions
from her biographer as well as other scholars, we learned that Highsmith did not perceive Ripley as a murderer. Rather he
represented her alter ego; an imaginative projection of her desire to experience life's dark side. Highsmith never tried to explain
Ripley's behaviour: what we do know is that it was inspired by an unnamed event in his childhood, which gave him the fear
of being perpetually pursued. That pursuer was not someone real, but more to do with Ripley's dark side; his feelings of guilt
and paranoia. His desire to assume the identities of those he kills represents an attempt to escape such feelings.
We also learned that Ripley was specifically a creation of the 1950s, a time when
America experienced similar paranoia as a result of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. He is an everyperson trying ot escape from
the darkest recesses of his soul, just like those who sought at that time to escape the perceived 'enemy' of communism. Highsmith
herself resembled her fictional creation; she left the United States during this period, and spent the rest of her life as
a rootless migrant desperately searching for something while perpetually endeavouring to escape her past. Highsmith remained
an outsider, a wanderer - both physical and emotional - using her novels to work out her own feelings of guilt. Even though
Ripley remains resolutely masculine in terms of manners and deportmen, he speaks to everyone regardless of gender. The director
of this fascinating documentary was Eren Riley.
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