#Miles Hoffman

[soft-persephone]

Stumptown Rewatch

I rewatched Stumptown! Mourning the loss of our four season minimum timeless classic and the loss of one of the hottest characters Jake Johnson has ever played. (But all the main cast was hotif we’re being honest. The big three if you will!)

The episode where Hoffman and Gray fight the whole time? Giggling and twirling my hair around my finger. Angry Jake just does it for me. As soon as he frowns or makes that one face, I’m gone. Don’t talk to me, don’t touch me, don’t nothing. I’m with him now.

His hair? Immaculate. I’ve paid vivid detail the the slightly different swoops or gel patterns to an unhealthy extent. Because when are we ever going to get that again? He keeps making jokes about going bald. ( which by the way is not a deal breaker for me. I love him)

Also, Jake Johnson is not the only reason I love this show. Just a very small part actually. I just tend to get carried away when I start talking about Jake Johnson.

The show has such good writing. It has that old mid 2000s magic, or 2010’s if you will, feeling where lots of people get obsessed, it has a big fandom, and it ends up with a lot of seasons. Every box that can be checked is checked, except it got canceled due to COVID or whatever reason they go with.

Grey is Nick Miller, if he was smart. . . And a criminal, but that’s in the past! He has a bar now and son like figure through Ansel. (That’s his MF’n son and you can’t tell me it isn’t.)

I love Dex and her dynamic with everyone. Her little brother is just so charming and a joy to see on screen. Every minor character is just as fun as the main cast. The world and the process of being a private investigator is so fun! Like each random case is just as interesting as the characters relationships with one another.

The finale??

Ben finally being put to rest. Dex opening a new arc of finding out who she is without the grief, shame, and despair. Then the cliffhanger where ‘so and so’ pops up out of the blue??

Gray’s dad still being a piece of shit and leaving him in a compromised position. He showed up and acted like he wanted to meet his son. The whole time he was doing dirt and shit behind his back and then hauls ass in probably the most turmoil moment in Gray’s life. Almost losing his new and “real” family.

Hoffman’s good cop bad cop struggle. While not the most interesting arc compared to the other two but, this whole time he’s known as the cop friend. We don’t know who he is without his badge and maybe he doesn’t either. While I don’t believe he would walk away from it forever, it does bring up interesting questions in terms of what is he going to be doing while he’s not a cop? Is going to be Dex’s full time sidekick?

And we might never know the resolution or answers to any of these questions and dispositions. I might have to go read the comic.

Stumptown you will be forever missed!

Thank you for reading if you made it this far!!

[k-wame]

lol two queens in the shade room

[mr-paxton]

MIDNIGHT COWBOY

[denimbex1986]

'Is Tom Ripley gay? For nearly 70 years, the answer has bedeviled readers of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story of a diffident but ambitious young man who slides into and then brutally ends the life of a wealthy American expatriate, as well as the four sequels she produced fitfully over the following 36 years. It has challenged the directors — French, British, German, Italian, Canadian, American — who have tried to bring Ripley to the screen, including in the latest adaptation by Steven Zaillian, now on Netflix. And it appears even to have flummoxed Ripley’s creator, a lesbian with a complicated relationship to queer sexuality. In a 1988 interview, shortly before she undertook writing the final installment of the series, Ripley Under Water, Highsmith seemed determined to dismiss the possibility. “I don’t think Ripley is gay,” she said — “adamantly,” in the characterization of her interviewer. “He appreciates good looks in other men, that’s true. But he’s married in later books. I’m not saying he’s very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.”

The question isn’t a minor one. Ripley’s killing of Dickie Greenleaf — the most complicated, and because it’s so murkily motivated, the most deeply rattling of the many murders the character eventually commits — has always felt intertwined with his sexuality. Does Tom kill Dickie because he wants to be Dickie, because he wants what Dickie has, because he loves Dickie, because he knows what Dickie thinks of him, or because he can’t bear the fact that Dickie doesn’t love him? Ordinarily, I’m not a big fan of completely ignoring authorial intent, and I’m inclined to let novelists have the last word on factual information about their own creations. But Highsmith, a cantankerous alcoholic misanthrope who was long past her best days when she made that statement, may have forgotten, or wanted to disown, her own initial portrait of Tom Ripley, which is — especially considering the time in which it was written — perfumed with unmistakable implication.

Consider the case that Highsmith puts forward in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Tom, a single man, lives a hand-to-mouth existence in New York with a male roommate who is, ahem, a window dresser. Before that, he lived with an older man with some money and a controlling streak, a sugar daddy he contemptuously describes as “an old maid”; Tom still has the key to his apartment. Most of his social circle — the names he tosses around when introducing himself to Dickie — are gay men. The aunt who raised him, he bitterly recalls, once said of him, “Sissy! He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!” Tom, who compulsively rehearses his public interactions and just as compulsively relives his public humiliations, recalls a particularly stinging moment when he was shamed by a friend for a practiced line he liked to use repeatedly at parties: “I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving them both up.” It has “always been good for a laugh, the way he delivered it,” he thinks, while admitting to himself that “there was a lot of truth in it.” Fortunately, Tom has another go-to party trick. Still nurturing vague fantasies of becoming an actor, he knows how to delight a small room with a set of monologues he’s contrived. All of his signature characters are, by the way, women.

This was an extremely specific set of ornamentations for a male character in 1955, a time when homosexuality was beginning to show up with some frequency in novels but almost always as a central problem, menace, or tragedy rather than an incidental characteristic. And it culminates in a gruesome scene that Zaillian’s Ripley replicates to the last detail in the second of its eight episodes: The moment when Dickie, the louche playboy whose luxe permanent-vacation life in the Italian coastal town of Atrani with his girlfriend, Marge, has been infiltrated by Tom, discovers Tom alone in his bedroom, imitating him while dressed in his clothes. It is, in both Highsmith’s and Zaillian’s tellings, as mortifying for Tom as being caught in drag, because essentially it is drag but drag without exaggeration or wit, drag that is simply suffused with a desire either to become or to possess the object of one’s envy and adoration. It repulses Dickie, who takes it as a sexual threat and warns Tom, “I’m not queer,” then adds, lashingly, “Marge thinks you are.” In the novel, Tom reacts by going pale. He hotly denies it but not before feeling faint. “Nobody had ever said it outright to him,” Highsmith writes, “not in this way.” Not a single gay reader in the mid-1950s would have failed to recognize this as the dread of being found out, quickly disguised as the indignity of being misunderstood.

And it seemed to frighten Highsmith herself. In the second novel, Ripley Under Ground, published 15 years later, she backed away from her conception of Tom, leaping several years forward and turning him into a soigné country gentleman living a placid, idyllic life in France with an oblivious wife. None of the sequels approach the cold, challenging terror of the first novel — a challenge that has been met in different ways, each appropriate to their era, by the three filmmakers who have taken on The Talented Mr. Ripley. Zaillian’s ice-cold, diamond-hard Ripley just happens to be the first to deliver a full and uncompromising depiction of one of the most unnerving characters in American crime fiction.

The first Ripley adaptation, René Clément’s French-language drama Purple Noon, is much beloved for its sun-saturated atmosphere of endless indolence and for the tone of alienated ennui that anticipated much of the decade to come; the movie was also a showcase for its Ripley, the preposterously sexy, maddeningly aloof Alain Delon. And therein lies the problem: A Ripley who is preposterously sexy is not a Ripley who has ever had to deal with soul-deep humiliation, and a Ripley who is maddeningly aloof is not going to be able to worm his way into anyone’s life. Purple Noon is not especially willing (or able — it was released in 1960) to explore Ripley’s possible homosexuality. Though the movie itself suggests that no man or woman could fail to find him alluring, what we get with Delon is, in a way, a less complex character type, a gorgeous and magnetic smooth criminal who, as if even France had to succumb to the hoariest dictates of the Hollywood Production Code, gets the punishment due to him by the closing credits. It’s delectable daylit noir, but nothing unsettling lingers.

Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, released in 1999, is far better; it couldn’t be more different from the current Ripley, but it’s a legitimate reading that proves that Highsmith’s novel is complex and elastic enough to accommodate wildly varying interpretations. A committed Matt Damon makes a startlingly fine Tom Ripley, ingratiating and appealing but always just slightly inept or needy or wrong; Jude Law — peak Jude Law — is such an effortless golden boy that he manages the necessary task of making Damon’s Tom seem a bit dim and dull; and acting-era Gwyneth Paltrow is a spirited and touchingly vulnerable Marge.

Minghella grapples with Tom’s sexual orientation in an intelligently progressive-circa-1999 way; he assumes that Highsmith would have made Tom overtly gay if the culture of 1955 had allowed it, and he runs all the way with the idea. He gives us a Tom Ripley who is clearly, if not in love with Dickie, wildly destabilized by his attraction to him. And in a giant departure from the novel, he elevates a character Highsmith had barely developed, Peter Smith-Kingsley (played by Jack Davenport) into a major one, a man with whom we’re given to understand that Ripley, with two murders behind him and now embarking on a comfortable and well-funded European life, has fallen in love. It doesn’t end well for either of them. A heartsick Tom eventually kills Peter, too, rather than risk discovery — it’s his third murder, one more than in the novel — and we’re meant to take this as the tragedy of his life: That, having come into the one identity that could have made him truly happy (gay man), he will always have to subsume it to the identity he chose in order to get there (murderer). This is nowhere that Highsmith ever would have gone — and that’s fine, since all of these movies are not transcriptions but interpretations. It’s as if Minghella, wandering around inside the palace of the novel, decided to open doors Highsmith had left closed to see what might be behind them. The result is the most touching and sympathetic of Ripleys — and, as a result, far from the most frightening.

Zaillian is not especially interested in courting our sympathy. Working with the magnificent cinematographer Robert Elswit, who makes every black-and-white shot a stunning, tense, precise duel between light and shadow, he turns coastal Italy not into an azure utopia but into a daunting vertical maze, alternately paradise, purgatory, and inferno, in which Tom Ripley is forever struggling; no matter where he turns, he always seems to be at the bottom of yet another flight of stairs.

It’s part of the genius of this Ripley — and a measure of how deeply Zaillian has absorbed the book — that the biggest departures he makes from Highsmith somehow manage to bring his work closer to her scariest implications. There are a number of minor changes, but I want to talk about the big ones, the most striking of which is the aging of both Tom and Dickie. In the novel, they’re both clearly in their 20s — Tom is a young striver patching together an existence as a minor scam artist who steals mail and impersonates a collection agent, bilking guileless suckers out of just enough odd sums for him to get by, and Dickie is a rich man’s son whose father worries that he has extended his post-college jaunt to Europe well past its sowing-wild-oats expiration date. Those plot points all remain in place in the miniseries, but Andrew Scott, who plays Ripley, is 47, and Johnny Flynn, who plays Dickie, is 41; onscreen, they register, respectively, as about 40 and 35.

This changes everything we think we know about the characters from the first moments of episode one. As we watch Ripley in New York, dourly plying his miserable, penny-ante con from a tiny, barren shoe-box apartment that barely has room for a bed as wide as a prison cot (this is not a place to which Ripley has ever brought guests), we learn a lot: This Ripley is not a struggler but a loser. He’s been at this a very long time, and this is as far as he’s gotten. We can see, in an early scene set in a bank, that he’s wearily familiar with almost getting caught. If he ever had dreams, he probably buried them years earlier. And Dickie, as a golden boy, is pretty tarnished himself — he isn’t a wild young man but an already-past-his-prime disappointment, a dilettante living off of Daddy’s money while dabbling in painting (he’s not good at it) and stringing along a girlfriend who’s stuck on him but probably, in her heart, knows he isn’t likely to amount to much.

Making Tom older also allows Zaillian to mount a persuasive argument about his sexuality that hews closely to Highsmith’s vision (if not to her subsequent denial). If the Ripley of 1999 was gay, the Ripley of 2024 is something else: queer, in both the newest and the oldest senses of the word. Scott’s impeccable performance finds a thousand shades of moon-faced blankness in Ripley’s sociopathy, and Elswit’s endlessly inventive lighting of his minimal expressions, his small, ambivalent mouth and high, smooth forehead, often makes him look slightly uncanny, like a Daniel Clowes or Charles Burns drawing. Scott’s Ripley is a man who has to practice every vocal intonation, every smile or quizzical look, every interaction. If he ever had any sexual desire, he seems to have doused it long ago. “Is he queer? I don’t know,” Marge writes in a letter to Dickie (actually to Tom, now impersonating his murder victim). “I don’t think he’s normal enough to have any kind of sex life.” This, too, is from the novel, almost word for word, and Zaillian uses it as a north star. The Ripley he and Scott give us is indeed queer — he’s off, amiss, not quite right, and Marge knows it. (In the novel, she adds, “All right, he may not be queer [meaning gay]. He’s just a nothing, which is worse.”) Ripley’s possible asexuality — or more accurately, his revulsion at any kind of expressed sexuality — makes his killing of Dickie even more horrific because it robs us of lust as a possible explanation. This is the first adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley I’ve seen in which even Ripley may not know why he murders Dickie.

When I heard that Zaillian (who both wrote and directed all of the episodes) was working on a Ripley adaptation, I wondered if he might replace sexual identity, the great unequalizer of 1999, with economic inequity, a more of-the-moment choice. Minghella’s version played with the idea; every person and object and room and vista Damon’s Ripley encountered was so lush and beautiful and gleaming that it became, in some scenes, the story of a man driven mad by having his nose pressed up against the glass that separated him from a world of privilege (and from the people in that world who were openly contemptuous of his gaucheries). Zaillian doesn’t do that — a lucky thing, since the heavily Ripley-influenced film Saltburn played with those very tropes recently and effectively. Whether intentional or not, one side effect of his decision to shoot Ripley in black and white is that it slightly tamps down any temptation to turn Italy into an occasion for wealth porn and in turn to make Tom an eat-the-rich surrogate. This Italy looks gorgeous in its own way, but it’s also a world in which even the most beautiful treasures appear threatened by encroaching dampness or decay or rot. Zaillian gives us a Ripley who wants Dickie’s life of money and nice things and art (though what he’s thinking when he stares at all those Caravaggios is anybody’s guess). But he resists the temptation to make Dickie and Marge disdainful about Tom’s poverty, or mean to the servants, or anything that might make his killing more palatable. This Tom is not a class warrior any more than he’s a victim of the closet or anything else that would make him more explicable in contemporary terms. He’s his own thing — a universe of one.

Anyway, sexuality gives any Ripley adapter more to toy with than money does, and the way Zaillian uses it also plays effectively into another of his intuitive leaps — his decision to present Dickie’s friend and Tom’s instant nemesis Freddie Miles not as an obnoxious loudmouth pest (in Minghella’s movie, he was played superbly by a loutish Philip Seymour Hoffman) but as a frosty, sexually ambiguous, gender-fluid-before-it-was-a-term threat to Tom’s stability, excellently portrayed by Eliot Sumner (Sting’s kid), a nonbinary actor who brings perceptive to-the-manor-born disdain to Freddie’s interactions with Tom. They loathe each other on sight: Freddie instantly clocks Tom as a pathetic poser and possible closet case, and Tom, seeing in Freddie a man who seems to wear androgyny with entitlement and no self-consciousness, registers him as a danger, someone who can see too much, too clearly. This leads, of course, to murder and to a grisly flourish in the scene in which Tom, attempting to get rid of Freddie’s body, walks his upright corpse, his bloodied head hidden under a hat, along a street at night, pretending he’s holding up a drunken friend. When someone approaches, Tom, needing to make his possible alibi work, turns away, slamming his own body into Freddie’s up against a wall and kissing him passionately on the lips. That’s not in Highsmith’s novel, but I imagine it would have gotten at least a dry smile out of her; in Ripley’s eight hours, this necrophiliac interlude is Tom’s sole sexual interaction.

No adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley would work without a couple of macabre jokes like that, and Zaillian serves up some zesty ones, including an appearance by John Malkovich, the reigning king/queen of sexual ambiguity (and himself a past Ripley, in 2002’s Ripley’s Game), nodding to Tom’s future by playing a character who doesn’t show up until book two. He also gives us a witty final twist that suggests that Ripley may not even make it to that sequel, one that reminds us how fragile and easily upended his whole scheme has been. Because Ripley, in this conception, is no mastermind; Zaillian’s most daring and thoughtful move may have been the excision of the word “talented” from the title. In the course of the show, we see him toy with being an editor, a writer (all those letters!), a painter, an art appreciator, and a wealthy man, often convincingly — but always as an impersonation. He gives us a Tom who is fiercely determined but so drained of human affect when he’s not being watched that we come to realize that his only real skill is a knack for concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. What we watch him get away with may be the first thing in his life he’s really good at (and the last moment of the show suggests that really good may not be good enough). This is not a Tom with a brilliant plan but a Tom who just barely gets away with it, a Tom who can never relax.

Tom’s sexuality is ultimately an enigma that Zaillian chooses to leave unsolved — as it remains at the end of the novel. Highsmith’s decision to turn Tom into a roguish heterosexual with a taste for art fraud before the start of the second novel has never felt entirely persuasive, and it’s clearly a resolution in which Zaillian couldn’t be less interested. Toward the end of Ripley, Tom is asked by a detective to describe the kind of man Dickie was. He transforms Dickie’s suspicion about his queerness into a new narrative, telling the private investigator that Dickie was in love with him: “I told him I found him pathetic and that I wanted nothing more to do with him.” But it’s the crushing verdict he delivers just before that line that will stay with me, a moment in which Tom, almost in a reverie, might well be describing himself: “Everything about him was an act. He knew he was supremely untalented.” In the end, Scott and Zaillian give us a Ripley for an era in which evil is so often meted out by human automatons with even tempers and bland self-justification: He is methodical, ordinary, mild, and terrifying.'

[philhoffman]

A LATE QUARTET (2012)

[assterixs]

!!!Emergency Commissions!!!

Hi there!! im normally not one to post my art on here or push my commissions super hard, but im currently trying to move cross country and am struggling to save. Im a trans man trying to get out of a not great place in florida to move in with my partner. Please please please dm me if youre at all interested, or if you want to donate, anything helps and is incredibly appreciated!! reblogs are also greatly appreciated!

Ill draw pretty much anything fandom-wise, self-ships, nsfw (im new to it though so im gonna say case by case basis for it), gore, on the other hand, i cant do furry or anthro, no like. crimes (zoo, incest, etc)

v3nmo: @asterixs

c4sh 4pp: $asterixs

PP: @asstericks

[lyledebeast]

One of the only good things about being middle aged is rewatching films you loved 20+ years ago that have held up.  Damn, I had good taste in my early 20s!

Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of those films for me.  It’s been well over ten years since I’ve seen it. I remember remembering it while writing a dissertation chapter about queer murderers about thirteen years ago, but I watched it today because I was in a Philip Seymour Hoffman mood.  I thought there was more of him in this, and now I realize that’s because his few scenes are so memorable.  The scene he shares with Matt Damon leading up to Tom murdering Freddie is my favorite not only from this movie but from his entire filmography.  His bitchiness, his fabulousness, his complete contempt for this man who has been able to easily fool every single other character in the film, at least at first.  

Freddie is able to look past Tom’s performance to what is true about him: his taste.  Even though this is a story about a queer criminal and his (mostly) queer victims, as an unfortunately large number of 90s movies were, it is also a study in queer knowledge and, as this scene particularly shows, queer reading.  We see Freddie engaging in his own performance when he first appears, jumping out of his little red convertible and loudly asking “Don’t you want to fuck every woman you see just once?”  Here, he picks apart Tom’s performance--his clothes, his hair, his decor--with a contemptuous sneer and a limp wrist.  He has nothing to hide here, and neither does Tom; it’s very satisfying to see him wrongfooted for once. The only thing Freddie doesn’t correctly read about him is his propensity for violence.

The rest of film is magnificent too. All of the performances by phenomenal actors (who all look like teenagers from 2023′s perspective.  Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow are particularly unrecognizable).  The camera work, particularly Minghella’s use of mirror image to reflect Tom’s fragmented identity.  Spectacular.  I’ll be rewatching this again soon!

[sjweminem]

i fly to socal TOMORROWWWWW and i'm very excited to indulge my long-time tradition of drinking like 5 mimosas any time i'm on an airplane i don't care that my flight is at like 9 in the fucking morning WE DRINKIN AND DRAWING!!!!

[gaysonlyocean]

For ashstone do you think any of the characters had avoidable fates? Like, could any of them do an action or even inaction to prevent whatever trouble(trauma) they could have gotten.

oh a lot of them

sasha could have reached out for help, elaine could have told people about how bad it was getting at home, adele could have talked to people long before she even got on the bus, gabriel could have put his foot down on odettes obsession, odette could have let ets parents go and let go of the grief, madeleine could have told someone sooner, lenore could have told someone before it happened, bernard could have stopped trying to give maddie the benefit of the doubt, maddie could have actually looked at her actions and realised she was hurting everyone she cared about, reuben could have stopped enabling sasha

but i do wanna say the cases of what happened to all of them that for them all they didnt See other choices

adele was in a episode, she had just needed to get out and away from everything, she had no idea she would end up on the mountain, and she had no idea that odette was so obsessed with revenge

sasha felt betrayed by his friends and couldnt put this on his parents as he cares for them and theyre too sick, he had already resigned to not getting off the mountain when he realised, he was going to go on a self destructive spiral no matter what, it just got worse when he met sasha

madeleines family are very tight knit and theres been high expectations for em and eir siblings for as long as ey can remember, ey learnt young that asking for help didnt end well and this was so big that ey didnt even consider it

gabriel cares about odette as if et was his own child but he knows he cant replace ets parents, so he let et spiral and drift away because he was too afraid of overstepping, and that led to much much worse things than he could have ever known

and many more

[mannytoodope]

Buck:Don't look at me like that. Don't. That's not fair.Don't you have a favorite doll or something?Why don't we get one of your dolls and put your dad's pajamas on him?No. Your brother! What about your brother?How about the dog? You know the dog.You can't. You just can't. It's a new law. That's it. It's in the books.You don't want to sleep with me.

[bob-the-movie-man-film-reviews]

Rudderless (2014): Grieving to a beat.

Manoj Mistry reviews "Rudderless" (2014). A tale of working through grief with music starring Billy Crudup. 4/5.

A review of “Rudderless” (2014): a guest review on One Mann’s Movies by Manoj Mistry. Dr Bob: This is the first time I’ve welcomed a guest reviewer to include an article on this site, but Manoj expressed an interest in writing retrospective reviews for older films. (If anyone else out there would like to write a review – in this standard prescribed format – for submission then please enquire at…

[davedyecom]

CONVERSATIONS WITH JIM RISWOLD

Feb 13, 2024, 12:39 PM (Twitter) Hi Dave, I’m a huge fan of your podcast and your work before that.  I was wondering if you’d be interested in interviewing Jim Riswold? – Kash Sree Feb 13, 2024, 12:52PM. 100%-definitely, absolutely-yes-please Kash. Dx Feb 13, 2024, 12:59 PM (Twitter) I know you have a lot of the greats on your podcast and I honestly believe that Jim is one of them, though not as…

[absolutcineyteatro]

Midnight Cowboy (USA, 1969)

[denimbex1986]

'There is a scene towards the beginning of Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, The Talented Mr Ripley, when Jude Law’s character, Dickie Greenleaf, asks Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley what his talent is – to which literature’s most famous fraud replies with: “Forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody”. Yet there is another talent of Tom’s that is essential in his ability to deceive those around him into thinking that he is one of them – and that’s his sartorial savoir-faire.

Fashion is of vital importance to Tom, in both the novel by Patricia Highsmith and subsequent adaptations, including that 1999 film, but also 1960’s French New Wave retelling, Purple Noon, and the upcoming black-and-white Netflix version, Ripley, starring Andrew Scott in the titular role. The style of the 1999 movie – Jude Law’s polo shirts, white trousers and boat shoes, Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-waist bikinis, broderie anglaise tops and peasant skirts – is still referenced by designers today (it won costume designer Ann Roth an Oscar at the time).

And while Matt Damon’s character is certainly au fait with fashion, he’s without the means to access it in the same way that the other characters are: he has one shirt he washes out nightly, a threadbare cord jacket Dickie offers to replace, and one pair of dress shoes that he has to wear to the beach. In many ways, the film is at pains to emphasise that, though Tom is good at what he does, he’s not quite good enough – after all, Dickie, Marge (Paltrow) and Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman) all figure him out. Yet it is with fashion that he manages to move in these circles. In fact, it’s how he accesses them in the first place, having borrowed a Princeton jacket for a piano recital when he first encounters Dickie’s father, who mistakes him for a student and pleads with him to fetch home his wayward son.

In the novel, Tom is obsessed with clothing, spending hours touching Dickie’s shirts and jackets or fingering the jewellery on his dressing table, saying that doing so “reminded him he existed”. His spectacles serve as a way to switch between characters – like a villainous Clark Kent and Superman – while his decision to wear Dickie’s monogrammed velvet slippers and signet rings after he has (spoiler alert) murdered him, alerts Marge and Freddie to the fact something isn’t right.

Fashion is often used by literature’s anti-heroes as a significant tool in their arsenal to deceive...

“The way we dress does, to an extent, affect how people see us, but it’s context dependent,” explains Dr Dion Terrelonge, a fashion psychologist. “It’s about alignment and how we fit in with people’s expectations. We like to think we don’t judge others based on what they are wearing, but we do. It’s not a negative judgement, necessarily; it’s about interpreting and categorising. It helps us navigate the world.”

Whether or not you wield that power for good or for evil is the differentiator. “When you wear an item of clothing that you associate with a certain person, lifestyle or behaviour, then you’re far more likely to take on those things,” explains Dr Terrelonge. “When people copy other people’s style, they’re trying to align themselves with them and their lifestyle. It’s walking 100 miles in their shoes. It’s shorthand for, ‘this is the kind of person I am’ – you look the part.”

For conners, it’s “fake it til you make it” or “dress for the job you want” writ large. As Tom famously says in his final speech in the film, “I thought it was better to be a fake somebody, than a real nobody.”'

[philhoffman]

The first look at Cooper in his upcoming film Wildcat, directed by Ethan Hawke!!

[markh0ffmanz]

love to think that the reason why hoffman didn't get invited to mexico is because he'd be useless. john's getting bloodboarded while amanda's having a breakdown and hoffman is 30 miles away on a beach somewhere with sunglasses on, his tits out, and a comically large margarita in his hand. phone on do not disturb