by Derek Neal
In 1970, Pier Paolo Passolini directed a film titled Notes Towards an African Orestes, which presents footage about his attempt to make a movie based on the Oresteia set in Africa. The movie was never made. In the same way, this article will be about a series of essays, or perhaps a book, that may never be written.
I have an idea to write about artistic representations of Americans in Europe. The introduction, which will lay out the premise of the endeavor, will revolve around an anecdote from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Ripley is, to my mind, the quintessential American. He bears many similarities to that other archetypal American, Jay Gatsby, in that both men believe they can erase history and create new lives for themselves, without realizing that the past is never past. This is the general American mindset, in contrast to the European one, which understands that present possibility is limited by history. Americans in films and novels go to Europe to discover this fact, and the extent to which they recognize this, or fail to recognize it, creates the drama driving the narrative forward.
The scene in Ripley which expresses this is when Tom attempts to read The Ambassadors by Henry James, only to be told that he’s not allowed to take books from the cabin class library, as he’s travelling in first class. Highsmith’s novel takes The Ambassadors and flips it on its head; in both novels, an American goes to Europe to retrieve a wayward citizen who has been “corrupted” by the old world, but in James’ novel, the protagonist achieves self-awareness, whereas in Highsmith’s, Ripley never does. These two paths are the two routes Americans can take in Europe, and this binary would provide a fitting organization for a book on Americans in Europe.
This distinction is refined by James Baldwin in his essay “A Question of Identity,” which separates the “Ripley” American into three types: the tourist, the fully immersed, and the goldbrick. The tourist is the American in Europe with which we are most familiar; perhaps we have also been this person ourselves: the one who wants to fit in as many activities as possible, who documents everything, who treats the place as a personal playground, but who eventually returns home when the reality of Europe intrudes upon its legend. The fully immersed is the person who learns the language, adopts the customs of the locals, presents a façade of cultivated urbanity, but who loses their identity in the process. The goldbrick is similar to the tourist but stays on longer, perhaps never leaving, and is seemingly a sort of drifter and low-level conman, much like Ripley. These three categories could then become three sections for the half of the book that deals with Americans who do not grow or learn from visiting Europe.
Baldwin also provides a clear description for the other half. He writes of a fourth type of American who “from the vantage point of Europe…discovers his own country. And this is a discovery which not only brings to an end the alienation of the American from himself, but which also makes clear to him, for the first time, the extent of his involvement in the life of Europe.” This is the key realization Americans may make in Europe: that we do have a history, that history is in Europe, and that it is necessary to recognize this to begin to understand America and ourselves. A recent film which portrays this is Stillwater, starring Matt Damon. Damon is a “roughneck” from Oklahoma, a manual laborer who is what people outside of America would imagine as a stereotypical American. When he arrives in France, a new acquaintance asks him if he voted for Trump. Damon travels to Marseille to help exonerate his daughter of murder and bring her home. It’s a different twist on the “ambassador” theme. The film, however, is really about Damon’s personal journey, and his adaptation to a world that he doesn’t understand. He is woefully naive, but he also has an earnestness that is endearing. When he returns to America at the end of the film, he says “I don’t hardly recognize it,” because he’s not the person he was when he left.
My book then now has an introduction and four possible sections, but the most important part is missing: the novels and films that will populate each section. The Talented Mr. Ripley clearly needs to be discussed, but the Ripley universe has quite a bit to choose from. There are five novels and at least three film versions that I’m aware of. Two of the movies which must be addressed are Purple Noon, a 1960 French adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, and The American Friend, a 1977 German adaptation of Ripley’s Game. These two films could in fact create their own category, which would be European reinterpretations of American visions of Europe. In Purple Noon, French director Réné Clement reverses the novel’s ending and has Ripley apprehended instead of escaping. Roger Ebert criticized Clement, saying he didn’t have “Highsmith’s iron nerve,” but this is not the case; instead, Clement is telling the film from a European perspective rather than an American one: you can’t escape your past.
The American Friend presents Ripley as goldbrick and dramatizes the drifting and rootless character that Baldwin described. Dennis Hopper, the perfect Ripley, lives in a seemingly abandoned mansion in Hamburg, walks around with a cowboy hat, and records his paranoid thoughts on a tape recorder, then listens to them later. He’s an absolute lunatic, and he represents precisely the figure Baldwin outlines.
So far we’ve mentioned Henry James, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin. Novels from James would likely feature in each section, as he has numerous novels set in Europe. Baldwin, while providing part of our theoretical framework, also has Giovanni’s Room, set in Paris. Some of the characters from this novel could be used to articulate the different types of Americans he describes in his essay. Other authors who would have to be featured are Hemingway with The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald with Tender is the Night. Mark Twain could also be present with Innocents Abroad, perhaps Edith Wharton as well, and maybe Alexis de Tocqueville with Democracy in America to provide more foundation for literary analysis. A recent film that I’d like to include is The American, starring George Clooney, and why not include Roman Holiday as well?
It might also be necessary to branch out of the framework I’ve described here. In addition to the sections I’ve described so far, others could be added. There is also the European view of America, as outlined by authors such as Cesare Pavese and Julien Green, an American citizen who was born in Paris and lived most of his life there. We could cross the Mediterranean to North Africa and include Paul Bowles as well. True stories of American misdeeds, which never fail to capture the European imagination, could be included, too. There is Amanda Knox, and more recently, two American teenagers who were found guilty of murdering a carabinieri, a military policeman, in Italy.
The thesis I’ve outlined could be debated, too. I’ve insisted on the connection between Europe and America and on Americans’ voyage to Europe as a discovery of their past. But what about those who are not the ancestors of Europeans, but the ancestors of Africans? And what about the fact that I’ve completely ignored that America already had a history when Europeans arrived, that of the Native Americans? The novels and films I’ve discussed, for the most part, don’t deal with these facts, and it may be useful to consider why, and to investigate the European-American connection that is so present in 19th and 20th century expatriate literature.