critical theory with slavoj zizek: The Talented Mr. Ripley tells the story of Tom Ripley, a broke ambitious young New Yorker, who is approached by the rich magnate Herbert Greenleaf, in his mistaken belief that Tom has been at Princeton with his son Dickie. Dickie is off idling in Italy, and Greenleaf pays Tom to go to Italy and bring his son back and to his sense, to take the rightful place in the family business. However, once in Europe, Tom gets more and more fascinated not only by Dickie himself, but also by the polished, easy-going, socially acceptable upper-class life that Dickie inhabits. All the talk about Tom’s homosexuality is here misplaced: Dickie is for Tom not the object of his desire, but the ideal desiring subject, the transferential subject “supposed to know /how to desire/.”