The Talented Mr Ripley's Icebox
The series, not the movie. But maybe the movie and the book a little too.
The object of our study is the infamous Icebox in the series, not the movie.
I clear it for once: this post contains spoilers for the series, so if you haven’t seen it and plan to do, do not proceed any further.
I loved the series, atmosphere, and characters' rendering as much as I loathed the movie.
Otherwise,
SU, SU; SU…
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If you want to read a brilliant piece about the series, dead over to The Supersonic:
You can also read a compelling piece on Last Call:
If you want a more gastronomic take, hop to Nancy Campbell's.
The fridge, appropriately called the “icebox,” is a central protagonist of the book, the movie, and the series. It’s also a symbol and a thesis. However, its importance and connection to one of the three main characters of the tale varied greatly.
If, in the movie, the icebox is a coveted piece of Greenleaf’s narrative, in the series, more appropriately, it becomes the silent and instead Cold War battlefield between Ripley and Marge, one of his two identified enemies.
Such an innocuous piece of electronic domestic furniture is the centrepiece of a human drama. Such an immobile electronic device destined to silently accompany our households is instead DEAFENING.
Let’s look at it through the eyes of the protagonists.
Tom
With a generous sum provided by Dickie's father, Tom is the driver behind the purchase of an ice box to ensure that Dickie's beverages would remain refreshingly cold - in the series. In the movie, the icebox purchase is impulsed by Marge and sneered upon by Tom - who describes it as the first step into becoming a boring, bourgeoise couple doing boring stuff instead.
Tom made a batch of martinis and arranged the glasses and a plate of canapes on a tray in the living room. When he heard the doorknocker, he went to the door and swung it open.
Marge
The movie depicts Paltrow’s Marge as a too-bourgeoise socialite who plays the typical Italian tourist slash homesteading, lemon-growing housewife (with a trust, most likely), a bit à la Minchilli. The series, however, paints Marge as the ever-vacationing expat, the living abroad writer with high hopes (and little talent, at least according to Tom).
This Marge is very much relatable - especially for someone like me who is a writer living abroad, in a tiny but charging flat, living an idyllic life in a place that is a bit outside the regular tourist routes.
“A major difference in the dynamic between Marge and Dickie in the novel is that they are not engaged. They aren't even in an established relationship in the book, drastically changing their chemistry. In the novel, Tom describes Marge as someone who Dickie is disinterested in, although that's certainly not the case in the series.” via Screenrant.
Dickie
In the 1999 movie, a poorly cast Greenleaf bursts into an “I could fuck this icebox; I love it so much” line.
Our Greenleaf - the series one - would not be so gross nor so much of the epicurean playboy and bon-vivant extraordinaire the movie portrays. He is more of an aloof, spoiled child who has decided never to decide his life other than living easily. Even Patricia Highsmith paints him as a careless, breezy being.
A bit like Tonio Kroeger’s friend, loved for his blue eyes: “But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the bright-spirited living ones, the happy, amiable, and commonplace.”
We, too, like Tom, stare “at Dickie’s blue eyes that were still frowning, the sun-bleached eyebrows white and the eyes themselves shining and empty, nothing but little pieces of blue jelly with a black dot in them, meaningless, without relation to him. 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 had looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror”.
Tom, asking himself why would Dickie ever go back to the Stats and accept his fate, a life made of working in his lucrative paternal enterprises, asks, “Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to-five jobs? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn't as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way”.
The Icebox
The other protagonist. No, I do not mean Freddie - that comes later.
I mean the Icebox. I loved how the series and the movie use the icebox in almost juxtaposed ways.
In the film, it is Tom insists that Marge and Dickie get an icebox to fuel their hedonism, their freedom, and their lifestyle. It is them who want to purchase the icebox - with Dickie`s trust money, of course.
In the series, and much more akin to the natural development of this story, Marge insists on the icebox to ease their carefree life—not having to shop at the market every day for groceries.
In this context, Tom takes it up against her and her bourgeoise desire for quotidian and mediocrity, exemplified by owning an icebox. A carefree bachelor does not own an icebox! He warns Dickie, the ever-escaping and freedom-seeking Dickie, that she is trying to trap him into a dull, banal life of groceries and everyday duties with that icebox.
Freddie
Dickie's friend, the ambiguous Freddie, is the first to be suspicious and mock Ripley in front of everyone: "You stay in Dickie's House, you eat Dickies food, you wear Dickies clothes, and his father picks up the bill”.
We dislike his sleazy ways - the movie Freddie is just a piped boisterous prick, but the subtle arrogance that comes from generational wealth and prime education that the series Freddie can convey is prime screen time. We love and hate Freddie, and we love to hate him.
For one split second, we do understand Ripley until we realise that the monster is lurking inside everyone.
Even inside us.
The Food
“The climb up the hill to Dickie’s house didn’t seem half so long as before. Delicious smells of roasting chicken drifted out on the terrace……….’I’m waiting for the darn artichokes to get done. You know that front hole. It’ll barely make anything come to a boil.'” we learn via FoodinBooks
“I just realised today’s Sunday,” Dickie said. “Marge went to church. You’d better come up and have lunch with us. We always have chicken on Sunday. You know it’s an old American custom, chicken on Sunday.” we learn via The Guardian.
Based on Dickie’s preference for chicken and the story’s central location in southern Italy, I would go all out and opt for Sami Tamimi’s splendid Moroccan Chicken with lemons.
I think Marge and Dickie may have opted for Jamie Olivier’s lemon roast chicken, but perhaps their in-house help would have felt closer to the Palestinian struggles these days. I mean, fiction for fiction, we can politicize our food a bit, especially when it means giving space to spices and flavours.
However, the series leaves no space for food. Imagine how amazing the cinematography has to be in conveying every bit of Dolce Vita without alluding even once to fettuccini or espresso.
The series is powered on cigarettes, alcohol - especially Martinis, wine and beers, sex and violence. Sex is always there, lingering like a smell in every room. Never displayed - the closest we get is Ripley’s dressing of Dickie’s clothes.
Violence, instead, is front centre and right about everywhere there is an ashtray involved.
Of course, the book makes more use of food as a prop to tell us more about Ripley, for example, when “He remembered that right after that, he had stolen a loaf of bread from a delicatessen counter and had taken it home and devoured it, feeling that the world owed a loaf of bread to him, and more.”
The Drinks
Martinis, of course. Cinema Sips suggests to us a Marge’s limoncello Martini. After all we are all “gripped by its bergamot-infused nostalgia” as Gentscafe claims. Coffee, cigarettes, Martinis.
Go and sneak us through the rivers
Flood is rising up on your knees
Oh, please
Come out and haunt me
I know you want me
Come out and haunt me