The last post was about Ripley, the showtime and netflix series we can say was ‘freely adapted’ from the oft-filmed Highsmith novel. I noted in that post that the protagonist’s name Ripley evokes Rip-Off (a locution that may be later than the novel, although the term Rip has a long, related, slang history, and the etymological dictionary tells me ‘Rip was prison slang for "to steal" since 1904,’) but we should also list, for the sake of thoroughness, [Jack the] Ripper, and R.I.P.
These three evocations — Rip, Jack the Ripper, R. I. P. — conveniently for my purposes, purely contingently, belong to the different registers in which a literary text traditionally operates, a text with a symbolic product, and which good sub-literary fiction strives to produce, and which genre pulp more often, in spite of itself, achieves.
Rip — The theme of theft and fraud, as a lever into contemporary, modern(ist) social critique, manners and moeurs musings, and literary (and potentially cinematic) self-referentiality. Works up found material about the mode of production, the political arrangements, the state of class struggle/mobility, the dynamic status quo.
Jack the Ripper — longer term social critique with an angle into pathological psychology, the possibly pathological psychology of public fascination, and potentially the moral, theological question of evil. Works up found material about ancien regime hangovers, class power in the abstract, privilege, sexuality, and lends itself to allegory.
R.I.P. — the big cosmic themes and questions, also, at the far end the other way, a tunnel into the conventions of literature.
All these registers are bound, braided, tangled, mutually impacting, of course.
The netflix Ripley show is the perfect example of the murder of these processes, their suffocation, their draining, leaving a husk, like an action figure, a souvenir of a trip to an ersatz experience of literature, that you are to play with. Or stim with. A thing, a prosthesis of a sort, to be consumed as nothing but characterization. Your mediation to yourself. Like the worst kind of books for toddlers. You are to consume it as posing the questions do you like Ripley? Is he your friend? How do you feel about Ripley’s choices?
If the memory of literature lingers, it is to be fiddled with cynically, childishly, superficially.
(It’s flopping on Netflix. They went too far with the unsatisfying masturbatory consumerism, the reduction to stimming. TV is watched for relationships, for ersatz sociality.)
Ok more shortly.