The Talented Mr. Davis
What a funny, Miles Davis-related production error in ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ tells us about jazz, class, and—maybe, just maybe—America itself.
In the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, Dickie Greenleaf, a jazz head living in the 1950s, owns a copy of Miles Davis’ Tutu, which was released in 1986. I noticed this impossible truth while rewatching the movie on cable in a hotel room around midnight on the Friday after Thanksgiving. As a fan of both the movie and the album, I got a kick out of the mix-up, and thought about texting a screenshot to friends or posting it to Twitter and leaving it at that. But something about it kept nagging at me. It wasn’t just the timeline error: The collision of their two sensibilities—Ripley’s sunlit glamour and false conviviality barely masking sociopathic self-interest; Tutu’s forbidding coldness and nocturnal solitude nearly obscuring deep humanity—was particularly surreal, almost like an intentional joke.
Some Googling revealed that I am not the first person to notice this mistake. There are some stray tweets and Reddit posts, an entry in the “Goofs” section on iMDB. But that nagging feeling, along with the ongoing Ripley renaissance—the Netflix show, the much-discussed similarities to Saltburn—convinced me that a deeper consideration was warranted.
