Highsmith’s Ripley is in a way disconnected from the reality of flesh, disgusted at the Real of life, of its cycle of generation and corruption. Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, provides an adequate characterization of Ripley: “All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life.” Insofar as such coldness characterizes a certain radical lesbian stance, one is tempted to claim that, rather than being a closet gay, the paradox of Ripley is that he is a male lesbian. This disengaged coldness that persists…beneath all possible shifting identities gets somehow lost in the film. The true enigma of Ripley is why he persists in this shuddering coldness, retaining a psychotic disengagement from any passionate human attachment, even after he reaches his goal and recreates himself as the respectable art-dealer living in the rich Paris suburb.

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