Uncanny Killers: Doubling and Duplicity in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train

Sarah Post, Lancaster University

tmrPatricia Highsmith’s novels Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) submerge the reader into the noir thriller’s duplicitous world of crime, a world where the sense of fear and anxiety is intensified through the uncanny figure of the double. According to Sigmund Freud:

[T]he ‘double’ was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, [...] and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. [...] Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death. (Freud 1934b: p.387)

The Talented Mr. Ripley sees its protagonist Tom embark on a trip to Italy to bring Dickie Greenleaf back to his father in America, but rather than returning Dickie, he kills him and then adopts his identity. In Strangers on a Train, Bruno and Guy have a chance meeting where Bruno casually mentions his plan for the perfect murder: ‘We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on the train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis!’ (Highsmith 1999a, p.30). Bruno then proceeds to kill Guy’s wife, and blackmails the latter into fulfilling his part of a deal that he did not realise he had entered into. Whilst Tom physically embodies both characters (himself and Dickie), Guy begins to mirror Dickie’s behaviour, and so the figures of the double are conceived. Furthermore, it shall become apparent that the idea of the double reflects greater social fears of duplicity, and enables Highsmith to perform a social critique of America and its misconceived Dream. This essay will focus largely on Highsmith’s novels, yet when valuable to do so, reference shall be made to Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers on a Train (1951) and to Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).

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The figure of the Other is used to create a binary opposition for the Self: in defining the Self through what it is not, it keeps it safe. This prerogative is evident in The Talented Mr. Ripley, as Tom struggles to identify the man who is following him at the opening of the novel:

He certainly wasn’t a pervert [...], though now his tortured brain groped and produced the actual word, as if the word could protect him, because he would rather the man be a pervert than a policeman. To a pervert he could simply say, “No, thank you,” and smile and walk away. (Highsmith 1999b: p.6)

By denouncing a pervert as something that Tom can happily reject, something Other, he distinguishes himself from it, thereby protecting his own (somewhat dubious) sexual identity. Yet the sense of fear engendered by this Other is made apparent in Strangers on a Train: ‘There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush’; the pair are ‘mortal enemies’ (Highsmith 1999a: p.228). Lee Horsley comments on why this tendency to dwell on the fearful other occurs:

There is no doubt that focussing on the psychopathology of a character can become an indulgence of horrified fascination at the sheer nastiness of the aberrant personality, combined with a reassuring sense that normative values and conventional lives are free from these evils. (Horsley 2001: p.104)

By casting the Other as abnormal, it suggests that the rest of us, the ‘normal’ ones, are safe. Not so. The Self/Other hierarchy is unstable and as Hegel states, ‘it includes its own other within it’ (Hegel 2004: p.648); rather than the two entities being independent, one element is repressed, and will return. When he re-assesses his relationship with Bruno, Guy realises the uncanny truth: ‘Each was what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self, what he thought he hated but perhaps in reality loved’ (Highsmith 1999: p.163). This illustrates that it is not possible to ‘cast off’ the (criminal) Other; in trying to do so by assuming each others’ guilt, Guy and Bruno become inextricably linked in a process of slow (d)evolution whereby they begin to resemble each other.

J.M. Tyree notices the use of the name Fanshaw to keep Dickie’s clothing in storage under in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Whilst it is unsure whether Highsmith intentionally chose the name to make a reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first, suppressed novel, Tyree makes a good case for it, suggesting that:

Fanshaw(e) represents the threat of a previous existence that might resurface at any time, like the sunken boat that holds the corpse of Dickie Greenleaf. [...] Fanshawe or Fanshaw is also obviously a source of shame founded on the denial of a crime. [...] Hawthorne’s stubborn denial of his authorship of Fanshawe is a strange little literary murder, an attempt to snuff out part of himself. (Tyree 2003: para.23-4)

This could merely be Highsmith’s way of poking fun, as unlike Hawthorne, Tom Ripley gets away with his act of repression and through his creative criminality is able to benefit from his double life. Yet this interpretation would be telling in itself, as ‘For Highsmith, evil exists, and exists inside us all, irrespective of whether we recognise it within ourselves or not’ (Peters 2003: p.189). By refusing to draw a neat line between the Self and the Other, Highsmith makes it clear that anyone has the potential for evil, as is echoed by Bruno’s refrain, ‘Any kind of person can murder’ (Highsmith 1999: p.26). Genre fiction is often used to neatly differentiate between different ‘types’ that the reader can expect to come across: in the noir thriller, the reader would expect the criminal ‘type’. Yet what is not so generic is the deconstruction of the boundary that comfortably separates the reader from the criminal Other that Highsmith performs.

Furthermore, Highsmith illustrates the devastating effects that repression can have as it results in splitting and duplicity within an individual. Tom Ripley has violent outbursts that represent the turn of his repressed sexual desires. When describing the scene of Dickie’s murder, Tom claims, ‘he could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard, and nobody could have seen him at this distance’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.90). The easy transfer between a kiss and a kill indicates the similar space that they occupy in Tom’s subconscious. In Minghella’s adaptation, the homosexual sub-plot is brought explicitly to the surface, and the same scene even more closely resembles the easy transfer from sex to violence, and back again, as Tom repeatedly thrusts a suspiciously phallic oar into Dickie’s supine body, reaches a deadly climax, and then lies down next to him in an image of post-coital bliss. Tom is so anxious to obliterate signs of his sexual desire that he will kill for it, and the killing allows an exit for pent-up rage and frustration. Highsmith’s novel portrays a protagonist that if homosexually inclined, is nevertheless very much in denial: ‘Tom laughed at the phrase “sexual deviation”. Where was the sex? Where was the deviation? He looked at Freddy and said low and bitterly: “Freddie Miles, you’re a victim of your own dirty mind”’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.127). Rather than living with his duality, this chilling scene indicates the extent that Tom will go to in order to silence those who would reveal that which he means to keep hidden.

Yet for Highsmith’s characters the splitting sensation is a cause for celebration; as her eccentric protagonist admits, ‘[b]eing Tom Ripley had one compensation, at least: it relieved his mind of guilt for the stupid, unnecessary murder of Freddie Miles’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.166): Tom feels that acts done under the guise of Dickie Greenleaf are no longer his concern, as if Dickie were an entirely separate person with his own motives and agenda. Similarly Guy intimates that:

The curious thing was that he felt no guilt, and it seemed to him now that the fact Bruno’s will had motivated him was the explanation. But what was this thing, guilt, that he had felt more after Miriam’s death than now? (Highsmith 1999a: p.143)

In a strange act of splitting he does not take responsibility for his own actions, only for his motives, illustrating the potentially comforting effects of externalising the Other. Yet this misallocation of guilt creates such a divide that the two halves of his life no longer seem to hold together, and from this point on his identity fragments and deteriorates: ‘He felt rather like two people, one of whom could create and feel harmony with God when he created, and the other who could murder’ (Highsmith 1999a: p.185). Clearly such an incongruity of character(s) cannot be sustained for long, and one side must win out; in this case, the repressed, criminal side takes over. Guy consents to murder Bruno’s father and then views the subsequent decline of his work that becomes a torment, a guilty pleasure that he does not feel that he deserves and thus tries to repress, taking on more and more uninspiring jobs. Highsmith portrays the danger of externalising the Other, as whilst it may initially convenience a relief from guilt, the relief is temporary and unsustainable.

The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, proposed three main stages in the early development of the psyche, the second of which is the Imaginary, during which the individual passes through the ‘mirror stage’ (be the mirror a literal or a figurative one) and the self is understood to be an illusory ‘other’. Acts of misrecognition mean that the child sees an image or ‘specula’ and believes that they are seeing themselves (Bradley 2006). Mirrors are dispersed widely throughout Highsmith’s novels, and frequently symbolise the acts of misrecognition undertaken by the characters. During Minghella’s adaptation, Tom looks into the train window, and in the reflection he sees his face merge with that of Dickie, to make one new and complete face. This serves as an early warning that Tom recognises himself in both characters, and also that he is as other to himself as Dickie is; the blurred boundary between their two faces is a visual signifier of Tom’s inability to distinguish correctly between Self and Other. Guy takes misrecognition to a new extent – rather than seeing the figure in the mirror as an image of himself, he sees it as entirely other: ‘[h]e wanted to throw his fist at the chin in the mirror’ (Highsmith 1999a: p.127); rather than misrecognising himself as other, he fails to recognise himself at all in the image that he projects. Discussed in Fiona Peters’ article, A. Zupancic makes an interesting observation regarding the role of the Imaginary stage:

Zupancic argues that evil structurally constitutes a void that can never be fully represented. [...] In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, she argues that evil and the Imaginary are linked in that evil has no image while: ‘the Imaginary register is in itself a response to the lack of the Image. (Peters 2003: p.202-3)

Yet in Highsmith’s novels, the void does come to be represented. This is evident during a telling instance when Guy looks into a mirror: ‘he saw himself glance at his sunburnt face, and it struck him that his eyes looked dishonest and furtive. Bruno had done it’ (Highsmith 1999a: p.92). He looks into a mirror and sees evil in his own ‘dishonest and furtive’ eyes, yet immediately translates this as an image of Bruno’s culpability. Bruno has become the physical embodiment of Guy’s will and vice versa and this trend is expressed symbolically in the acts of misrecognition that occur.

Such acts of misrecognition mean that there are no normative relationships available to the characters, as the boundary between Self and Other has become so blurred as to become unrecognisable:

You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he would have seen if he looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror. (Highsmith 1999b: p.78)

This instance reminds one of another famous mirror stage, that of Narcissus: when Tom looks into the eyes of another, all he sees reflected is himself, indicating his entrapment within a solipsistic world where if there is no boundary between Self and Other, then all can be conceived of as Self, rendering ‘relationship’ a redundant term.

In classic noir the close, yet adversarial bond will normally be most explicitly embodied in the relationship between the criminal and the detective, yet Bran Nicol describes the figure of the ‘detective-as-stalker’ (Nicol 2006: p.96), thereby explaining a mutation into the stalker characteristics that we find in Highsmith’s characters – stalkers that are more threatening, as unlike the detectives, they do not represent a possible return to social order. The link between the detective and the stalker is made explicit in Strangers on a Train as whilst Bruno is frustrated by the sense that his father’s private detective is always on his tail, he in turn stalks Guy, for less conservative ends. Tom and Guy share a sense of constantly being followed: whilst Tom claims ‘[i]f there was any sensation he hated it was that of being followed, by anybody. And lately he had it all the time’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.12), Guy expresses the inevitability of his strange double’s presence: ‘[o]f course Bruno was there’ (Highsmith 1999a: p.131): they are stalked by their own doubles, in Tom’s case by a sense of his own guilt, and in Guy’s case by his stalker-double Bruno. Nicol articulates the special case of the relationship between the stalker and victim:

It is an irony typical of stalking that what is produced by the original failure for a normal relationship to develop is a relationship of a more intense kind between stalker and victim, as the person who is stalked is unable to escape the stalker. The two become yoked together in a mirrored pattern of behaviour, both preoccupied, in different ways and for different reasons, with each other. (Nicol 2006: p.31)

The collision and eventual mirroring of actions and personalities is foreshadowed from the very opening of Hitchcock’s adaptation, as the characters of Guy and Bruno are de-personalised from the outset. There are no distinguishing facial shots, instead the camera cross-cuts between images of each of them from the waist down in shots that mirror each other precisely, other than details of the clothing that the two characters wear. Furthermore, Nicol notes that ‘[a]nalysts have pointed out that what makes stalking extraordinary is, paradoxically, its relation to ordinariness, the fact that it “may often consist of no more than the targeted repetition of an ostensibly ordinary or routine behaviour”’ (Nicol 2006: p.55). This is a further illustration of the porous boundary between Self and Other: as the reader stalks the characters through the book, they can see themselves reflected, ‘[f]or as much as the stalker represents a menacing Other, a dangerous threat to normal life, he or she is also uncomfortably close to us’ (Nicol 2006: p.57). The stalker is a dangerous figure as they bring to light the instability of our own identities, and the near-stalking tendencies of some of our own actions, be it an obsessive love or merely voyeuristically reading a book or newspaper (as Bruno has first been doing to find out about Guy Haines in both the novel and the film). In both novels the detective is made redundant, as in The Talented Mr. Ripley he makes a brief appearance and a wrong conclusion, and in Strangers on a Train his work is superfluous, as Bruno is already dead and Guy’s confession and punishment have been effected through the oppressive nature of his own insurmountable guilt. The redundancy of the detective makes way for the stalker, and makes the reader aware of the darker side of voyeurism.

The figure of the stalker reflects a wider concern regarding a sense of powerlessness. If a victim can begin to mirror the patterns of a stalker, then how much personal control and jurisdiction can they really be said to have? Bruno dictates to Guy ‘[y]ou’re going to kill my father’, ‘I want you and I’ve got you! Okay!’ [My emphasis] (Highsmith 1999a: pp.111, 117). Guy no longer has his own autonomy, he is metaphorically owned by his double, and is impotent to make his own decisions. Robert J. Corber’s analysis of Hitchcock’s film exposes the hierarchy within this double:

In shot after shot, Guy’s actions mimic Bruno’s thereby reducing him to Bruno’s double. [...] Close-ups of his face as he listens in horror to Bruno’s description of Miriam’s death alternate with close-ups of Bruno talking excitedly. The shot/reverse shot structure of this sequence makes Guy and Bruno seem virtually interchangeable: Guy too belongs behind bars. (Corber 1999: pp.113-4)

This illustrates that the doubles are not mutually interdependent, but that the passive Guy’s actions are dictated by the active Bruno; he has symbolically submitted himself to the Other.

A final illustration of duplicitous characters is to be found in the performative nature that identity exhibits in the two novels. As Tom Ripley teaches: ‘[i]f you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.165). Christopher Lasch suggests that Tom’s view is not far removed from reality:

A number of historical currents have converged in our time to produce not merely in artists but in ordinary men and women an escalating cycle of self-consciousness – a sense of the self as a performer under the constant scrutiny of friends and strangers. (Lasch 1991: p.90)

Many of the critics and social figures that Lasch engages with were Highsmith’s contemporaries, and whilst in a post-Butler era his is not a particularly revolutionary observation, it is notable that his work was first published in 1979, and was already noting a changing social trend, which is of interest in itself. Tom Ripley acts because he knows that he must convey a unified and coherent character of Dickie Greenleaf, yet again this is shown to be closely linked to a society that Erving Goffman comments on in a book published just 4 years after The Talented Mr. Ripley:

As human beings we are presumably creatures of variable impulse with moods and energies that vary from one moment to the next. As characters put on for an audience, however, we must not be subject to ups and downs. [...] A certain bureaucratization of the spirit is expected so that we can be relied upon to give a performance at every appointed time. (Geoffman 1959: p.56)

The idea that to be someone is to go through the motions dethrones an essentialism humanist idea that we have a stable identity. Yet if this is the case, Tom’s status as an actor is not far removed from our own, he merely uses it for different ends. Again, we are forced to identify with the criminal. Furthermore, Tom’s inability to stop acting reinforces the idea that a duplicitous nature leads to a loss of autonomous control: ‘He knew [...] that he had a hangover because he had intended to pretend that he had been drinking a great deal with Freddie. And now when there was no need of it, he was still pretending, uncontrollably’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.132). Yet if we are all ‘pretending, uncontrollably’, then what differentiates Tom from the rest of us? That is a question that Highsmith refuses to answer, as she posits character as something that can be quickly exchanged, and that, like a perfect performance, requires practice:

It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley’s voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his ears was exactly the same as he remembered it. (Highsmith 1999b: pp.105-6)

Viewed like this, character closely resembles a suit of clothing, something to be put on or taken off at will: ‘[h]e hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, [...] hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.164). Expressing character in such a way makes it something artificial, something duplicitous by its very nature, something that has the potential to hide whatever is underneath. Furthermore, the sincerity of choosing the wrong ‘outfit’ is reflected in Tom’s fatal flaw: ‘If he only hadn’t put on Dickie’s clothes that day – ’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.236). Life’s major decisions (whether to kill/ adopt another personality etc.) are reduced to something as apparently arbitrary or insignificant as choosing an outfit to wear, thus taking the role of the artificial far more seriously than may previously have been thought necessary. The potential power of the artificial is reinforced during Tom’s depression with his own inferior status as he confides to Peter in the film that he thought it would be ‘better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody’, intimating the potential of the artificial to be superior to the real.

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Through Highsmith’s portrayal of individual characters it is apparent that she will not allow the reader to distance themselves from their (potentially criminal) Other, and this becomes even more apparent in the consideration of the noir thriller as social critique. Returning to the idea of the uncanny (no pun intended), Freud suggests that some things can be less uncanny in fiction than they would be in reality, as:

The story-teller has this license among many others, that he can select his world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases. We accept his ruling in every case. (Freud 1934b: p.404)

However, Highsmith roots her novels firmly in the real world, ensuring the sense of the uncanny is retained and that the fear of duplicity is felt as it should be. In both The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Highsmith exposes the flip-side of the American Dream, as the underground world of the noir thriller replicates society’s dark double, indicating the duplicitous nature of the social system itself.

An excavation of the darker side of society brings forth the return of the socially repressed and primarily, the novels and films deal with the contemporaneous social fear of the homosexual. Corber describes ‘the cold-war construction of “the homosexual” as a national-security risk’ (Corber 1999: p.103), and both of the texts deal with this issue, playing on the fears of the homosexual. Alex Tuss suggests:

That Tom employs self-demeaning language such as ‘pervert’ and ‘queer’ demonstrates the palpable desire on his part to fit logically into the social context of the 1950s. The conformist attitude displays itself in the ease with which Tom knows he can dismiss a ‘pervert’ and the vehemence with which he stresses to Dickie that he is not a ‘queer’. (Tuss 2004: p.96)

However, it is possible to read the text in other ways – although there are hints as to Tom’s homosexual desire for Dickie, it is never actually made explicit in Highsmith’s novel, although she does admittedly drop hints. Thus arguably, Tom’s language is not even necessarily ‘self-demeaning’, it may be that he is not homosexual or it may be that he is able to tell himself such a good story about his sexuality, as about other things, that he believes it himself. Yet Minghella’s late adaptation of the film returns the repressed homosexual narrative through the introduction of the character Peter Smith-Kingsley, who occupied only a few lines in the novel, with no sexual reference or undertone, yet is introduced as Tom’s lover in the latter half of the film.

By contrast, Hitchcock’s adaptation repeats the act of repressing any possible homosexual desire through the Oedipal plot-structure. Corber states:

For according to Freudian theory, the male spectator’s identification with the hero of the classical text involves the repression of a potentially destabilising homosexual object cathexis. The culturally sanctioned prohibition of homosexuality requires the male spectator to abandon his object relation to the hero. To compensate for this loss, he incorporates the hero into his ego: He does not desire the hero; he is the hero. (Corber 1999: p.102)

In the film, contrary to the novel, the ‘hero,’ Guy, manages to evade the ‘dangerous’ homosexual and social order is restored through this narrative framework. The seriousness of the need to repress homosexuality is noted in Corber’s subsequent analysis:

The film’s setting in the nation’s capital casts the homosexual subplot in a wholly new light. The encounter between the strangers on the train has a political resonance lacking in the novel, for it narrativizes the “homosexual menace” as defined by contemporary judicial discourse. (Corber 1999: p.110)

This accurately mirrors a time when to be revealed as a homosexual was to be treated as a criminal and to risk losing one’s job.

A Marxist reading of The Talented Mr. Ripley would also see the return of the oppressed lower classes as they wreak their revenge. Through killing Dickie and adopting his persona, he is able to ensure financial stability that he has been unable to achieve before, illustrating fears of the ‘third-class mooch’ transgressing class boundaries and upsetting a social system based on hierarchies.

Furthermore, women are viewed as socially repressed figures that try to make themselves heard, and threaten the homosocial bonds that work in the favour of patriarchy. Eve Sedgwick describes the significance of the love triangle:

[I]n any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: [...] the bonds of ‘rivalry’ and ‘love,’ differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent. (Sedgwick 1985: p.21)

Strange love triangles are evident in both of the texts, where the bond between the two men hardly equates to rivalry over the woman and the element of desire is most tangible between the two men. Indeed, the idea of a classic love triangle is parodied in Minghella’s film, as Tom pretends to have been secretly attracted to Marge throughout, yet this is a suggestion too ridiculous for even Tom, the expert liar, to pull off. As Heidi Hartmann states, ‘relations between men [...] have a material base, and [...] though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women’ (Hartmann 1981: p.14). At the end of Minghella’s film, Marge’s female intuition is quieted and patriarchy is reinstated on a material basis: Tom is paid to keep quiet about his ‘knowledge’ regarding Dickie’s assumed misdemeanours. Chris Straayer argues that (in the novel):

It was only his desire for Greenleaf that ever interrupted Tom’s heterosexual attitude and cracked his facade. By killing Greenleaf, he eliminated that vulnerability. Now, he has Greenleaf. And he has Greenleaf’s heterosexuality. Together they form his ideal homosocial couple, two heterosexual men (with the woman excluded). (Straayer 2001: p.126)

Thus women are seen as the threat to patriarchy that must be removed in order to restore social order.

Yet beyond merely bringing to light the elements that 1950s society would rather remained hidden (homosexuals, the poor and women), Highsmith exposes the potentially terrifying foundations on which the American Dream itself stands. Primarily, the ideal of the ‘self-made man’, whereby anybody can climb the social ladder and create themselves anew reaches its logical conclusions through Tom’s social climbing through the murder of his best friend: ‘This was the real annihilation of his past and of himself, Tom Ripley, who was made up of that past, and his rebirth as a completely new person’ (Highsmith 1999b: p.110). As Kenneth Payne evaluates: ‘he will eventually transform himself not through any grand effort at self-realization but through bloody crime – by battering his friend to death, dumping his corpse, and stealing his identity. Ripley’s slate will be anything but clean’ (Payne 2002: p.34). This murderous means of social climbing exposes the ideals of the American Dream as truly resting on a social-Darwinist concept of the survival of the fittest. Furthermore, this model, by analogy, sees any form of self re-creation as murder, as figuratively killing a former identity. David Cochran argues that Highsmith uses this as a subtle critique: ‘[i]n placing Tom in an international setting and depicting the American success story as based on a completely amoral worldview, which easily rationalizes cold-blooded murder, Highsmith challenged the Cold War paradigm that pronounced America’s fitness to dominate the world’ (Cochran 2000: p.120). As the American ideology is critiqued and proven fallible, so too is the country dethroned and the social hierarchy deconstructed.

The American Dream was first born in the European imagination as ‘[t]his place that was not Europe but rather its opposite existed first as a glimmering, an image and an interpretative prospect born from the faith and fantasy of European minds’ (Ruland 1992: p.4-5). Immediately one can see that America is defined by its Other, by what it is not. The irony is that when Tom Ripley sets out on his expatriate voyage to Europe, he echoes similar sentiments:

He was starting a new life. [...] He felt as he imagined immigrants must feel when they left everything behind them in some foreign country, left their friends and relations and their past mistakes, and sailed for America. A clean slate! (Highsmith 1999b: p.31).

The expatriate journey is in itself an implicit critique of the American Dream: it has failed, and one must go elsewhere to find that utopia and to start afresh with a ‘clean slate’. Europe has become a foil for America, as Tom must go there, returning to the ‘old world’ in order to live out his America Dream.

Similarly, in Strangers on a Train, the motif of the journey is deconstructed. The train should symbolise energy and progression, but it only serves to contrast with the dull stagnation and sense of entrapment that the protagonists live with daily. The disillusionment engendered by a disappointing journey is illustrated by Bruno:

He had believed Quebec full of castles that he would be allowed to explore, but there had not been one castle, not even time to look for any, because his paternal grandmother had been dying, which was the only reason they had come anyway, and since then he had never placed any confidence in the journey. (Highsmith 1999a: p.62)

Rather than life and energy, the journey is identified with death. The illusory hope offered by the journey is bleakly encapsulated in the image of the merry-go-round as ‘a forest of nickel-plated poles crammed with zebras, horses, giraffes, bulls, and camels all plunging down or upward, some with necks arched out over the platform, frozen in leaps and gallops as if they waited desperately for riders’ (Highsmith 1999a: p.69). The contorted, frozen, metal animals form a grim parody of life, whilst the circular motion mimics the pretence of progression: one thinks one is moving, but the only way is up or down (the social ladder) or round and round in circles in a position of perpetual entrapment: this is the real journey motif in the American society that Highsmith critiques. The Hitchcock film makes explicit the grotesque contrast between ideal and reality by cross-cutting between images of the train and images of the merry-go round at the end of the film, before Bruno dies, crushed literally and symbolically by the merry-go-round. Horsley reflects on such a sense of entrapment, noting that ‘[i]ll-equipped for such a world, [the victim protagonist] feels trapped and doomed, filled with so many misgivings that life seems an intolerable prison’ (Horsley 2001: p,69).

Finally, Highsmith depicts a society when the criminals cannot be distinguished from anyone else. As well as illustrating the potential for evil in anyone, this critiques a society that demands conformity. As Horsley states, ‘[i]n these narratives, however, the focus is less on the determining force of adverse economic circumstances than on society’s demands for conformity’ (Horsley 2001: p.103). This desire for conformity is ultimately what drives the need for repression for all that is ‘abnormal’, leading to the split and duplicitous nature of society and its inhabitants. Highsmith engages with the conventions of the dark underground world of the noir thriller in order to show that this is not some distant, exciting, other world that we can escape into in a novel and then safely retreat from. This is society, and like her characters, it embodies its own dark double within it.

Copyright © 2009 Sarah Post

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