How to Plot Twist with The Talented Mr. Ripley

I will not lie to you.

The reason why I watched The talented Mr. Ripley was far from pleasure. Actually, it was a mixture of research for writing and homework for university.

Seeing my precious Italy so carelessly displayed, like it was some sort of place frozen fifty years in the past, a dangerous paradise with absolutely no technology, I frowned.

Quite soon, however, I understood that making the viewer fall in love with the romantic country with no ambulances - where apparently there “are no homosexuals” and being a single mom was equal to be heretic – was quite not the intention of the movie.

(From now on, I will speak of the movie including spoilers. So, if you waited this long, like I did, before watching it, go watch it, and then come back.)

I was baffled. Not many things surprise me, I have to admit. But before my eyes, a terrible, miraculously brave thing was happening.

Movie had enough balls to show Ripley kill the person he loved, and why? For a series of reasons easily disguised as bad temper.

But let’s take a step back. Ripley is portrayed as weak, naïve, a young boy with no other talent than trying to be someone else, with whom we empathize because we both feel like a loser sometimes, but we also can’t really trust.

And when Ripley finds Dickie – tanned, cocky, rich Dickie – he thinks, for the first time, he has come to existence. When Dickie looks at him, he feels real, present, in the world, even loved, maybe, for brief moments.

He falls in love with him not like “you fall asleep” ( from The fault in our stars) but, rather, like you roll down a hill full of thorny bushes, absolutely drunk, only aware that in a few painful meters you will meet the sea.

Ripley is completely sure that most times Dickie is just joking, when he says ugly things about him to him. But that day on the boat in Sanremo (the city of the famous music festival, pronounced /sahn-reh-moh/) something sounds different. Dickie tells him, for the first time, the thing we’ve all been thinking for the whole movie: sometimes, Ripley can be too weird, too close, a too sticky sentimental boy. And from Dickie’s perspective, a very boring one.

Ripley attacks the man he is infatuated with because he feels harassed by his words, and then because he is scared that he will actually get killed.

Now, let’s take another step back. I am not here to discuss feelings. I am here to discuss storytelling.

Frame: Ripley on a boat hitting his lover. Ripley hugging his body while said boat rolls. Ripley sinking Dickie’s corpse.

There is a very important thing that I have learnt here: Movie was absolutely not Call me by your name 0.9. It was a murder story, an identity story with the same courage Game of Thrones had in killing off characters. Movie did not have feelings, and Movie was terribly, terribly looking just like Ripley.

Moral of the whole story?

Right when you think this is going to have a happy ending, Ripley kills off the love of his life while crying “I’m sorry, I love you”.

The scene was so powerful Movie decided to let us live and didn’t show us, but we heard it in voiceover.

So, what do we learn from this?

There are two ways to be very bad with your characters’ lives.

1) Many of them die and come back one TOO MANY times, annoying Supernatural viewers like me;

2) When the plot is starting to stall, like a plane, you cut off a head.

But there is a nicer way to do this.

Take Ripley. The story was the killing. The killing was part of Ripley. That thing couldn’t have been replaced with an abandon, a betrayal, or a character disappearing. Dickie had to die. Peter had to die.

The same thing goes with Game of Thrones. It is medieval wars we’re talking about, how would it even be possible that absolutely none of the main characters die? George R.R. Martin takes character after character off the board to make the game more interesting rather than building a story on super-strong never-dying fighters or incredible comebacks.

Also, as a bonus, he builds a very good or a very bad growth arc around the character that’s going to die, for two reasons. The first, because of course anybody can die, not only the bad guy you hate; the second, because when they die you either feel relieved (except for Jeoffrey, he is bastard) or you spend the next five days zoning out and thinking about all the good things that character deserved.

Off to writing now. I have a few characters to kill off.