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.
Sexy, atmospheric, and tightly plotted, Ripley is the perfect movie to keep you awake into the wee hours of a tryptophan-addled evening. Among its many winning qualities is the sensuous vividness of its period details: Tom Ripley’s crisp oxford shirts, Dickie’s linens and loafers, all the spacious Italian cafes and piazzas—the stuff that makes you yearn to partake in their late-’50s rich-kid bonhomie, even as the story becomes sinister.
Ripley is about one young man’s willingness to do anything to gain access to an elite social world to which he doesn’t really belong, and its costume and set design are viscerally effective in showing you why that world is so intoxicating to him. If you find yourself rooting for Ripley despite his unhinged behavior and repellent personality, perhaps it’s because some part of you wants this life as badly as he does. This chilling implication of the viewer’s own desire is key to the movie’s greatness, and it wouldn’t be possible without obsessive attention to getting every small detail right. Which is why it’s so surprising that they got this one so wrong.
I’m talking about a scene an hour into the movie, just after its first big climax, in which Ripley (Matt Damon) and Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) are commiserating in a gorgeous apartment recently vacated by Dickie (Jude Law). A few well-loved records are still stacked in an alcove near the patio door, with Tutu placed proudly at the front, intended simply as another reminder, in a movie full of them, that Dickie is a jazz fan.
For him, jazz seems to represent something alive and passionate in a world whose stakes and meaning have otherwise been occluded by his immense privilege and nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. The film never directly addresses jazz’s invention by working-class Black musicians, but it’s clear that the appeal for Dickie involves a certain rebellion against his blue-blooded upbringing. (In a telling later scene, we learn that he wouldn’t be caught dead at the opera that most of his peers seem to prefer.) Still, most of the jazz musicians and all of the audience members we see are white. Performances happen at a fancy hotel and a club that the characters view as a den of iniquity but looks more like the kind of place where the greatest danger a patron might encounter is a two-drink minimum.
By the late ’50s, the European cultural establishment had canonized jazz as a legitimate art form, and thus rendered it a relatively safe and acceptable form of rebellion for Dickie. As a badge of status—and everything in Ripley is a badge of status, whether or not it also involves real feeling—jazz casts him as both a rakish adventurer in society’s underbelly and a preening sophisticate with tastes far more developed than those of his friends. As a viewer, I’m never quite sure how seriously to take his fandom, whether I’m supposed to think of him as a deeply invested connoisseur or a dilettante more concerned with this sort of social signaling than the music itself.
The choice of a Miles Davis album to display in his apartment is both obvious and appropriate. He’s the one jazz musician everybody knows, and his work is revered by connoisseurs and dilettantes alike. It doesn’t particularly matter whether the filmmakers considered all of this context or just grabbed something popular. The only problem, of course, is with the choice of a Davis album released roughly three decades after when Ripley is supposed to take place.
I realize I may be in the minority here, but the inclusion of Tutu was enough to break the spell of Ripley’s meticulously ordered setting for me, at least for the duration of the scene in question. Aside from the issue of chronology, there’s also the question of whether Dickie would even like Tutu, if he were somehow able to hear it. His interest in jazz seems relatively conservative. (The late ’50s were a time of amazing upheaval and innovation for the genre; any listener with Dickie’s seemingly unlimited funds and a real interest in finding its beating heart would probably go looking for it in New York, not in any Italian tourist traps.) And while there were plenty of conservative jazz albums released in the ’80s—an era marked in part by the rise of a new traditionalism that rejected the previous decade’s experiments with funk rhythms and electric instruments, seeking to return jazz to some idealized previous era of respectability—Tutu is decidedly not one of them.
Davis, more than any other musician, is responsible for those freaky fusions of the ’70s. As some of his peers backed off from these adventures while America sobered up for the Reagan years, embracing the notion of jazz as a precious museum piece that already seems to be taking hold in Ripley’s time Europe, Davis only got weirder—and more determined to keep the music alive and in conversation with a Black youth culture that was moving toward hip-hop.
Tutu is his best-known album of that complicated era—in part, I think, because the striking black-and-white portrait on the cover gives it an old-fashioned, dignified air, which might also help to explain how it ended up in Ripley. Maybe they just mixed it up with 1959’s Kind of Blue, a precisely period-appropriate masterpiece adorned with a similarly dramatic close-up. Tutu looks like it’s going to sound like that, but actually sounds more like the soundtrack to a low-budget cyberpunk noir about a private detective who does oodles of cocaine, tries and fails to seduce his clients, and slaps the bass in a strung-out Prince cover band on the weekends. It is funky, in a rigidly mechanical sort of way. Though Davis plays stylishly, and the production has all manner of electronic bells and whistles, you often feel like there’s something substantial and unnameable missing at the center, something that would help these disparate parts cohere into something more than cigarette-smoke outlines.
There is a famous, possibly apocryphal quote from Davis about the importance of the notes you don’t play. Whether or not he really said it, it’s a good rubric for understanding his music, which often gets its point across through poetic understatement. The weird hollowness of Tutu seems to me like a new expression of the same basic idea, updated to reflect the shiny corporatism, Cold War paranoia, technological alienation, and urban blight of the ’80s. In contrast to the ensemble collaboration of Davis’ most celebrated work, this album is a product of relative isolation, his trumpet a lonely protagonist navigating uncanny backing tracks composed entirely by bassist and producer Marcus Miller. If you wanted to get really cosmic-brained about it, you could argue that wealthy and amoral Ivy Leaguers of about Dickie’s age were partially responsible for the era’s estrangement and despair—an atmosphere that Tutu so eerily conjures. Reagan’s cabinet was full of them.
With the advent of vaporwave and the wider reclamation of once-reviled ’80s sounds, Tutu sounds better than ever in 2024. Messy, original, and proudly unconcerned with authenticity or good taste, it’s the kind of thing a hipster wannabe like Dickie Greenleaf would probably hate. Which is as good a reason as any to give it a listen.
UPDATE: On Bluesky, Jason Guthartz and colinmce point out that Don Cherry's Complete Communion (1966) and the Lester Young compilation Pres/The Complete Savoy Recordings (1976) make appearances in the Ripley Netflix show. Starting to think they're doing this on purpose...
