Ripley: techniques of neutralization, or how a con artist convinces himself he's doing nothing wrong

There's a question that Andrew Scott's series leaves hanging in every black-and-white shot: how can someone lie, forge, take over another person's identity and even kill, and still sleep, eat and admire Italian paintings as if nothing had happened? The easy temptation is to answer «because he's a monster with no conscience». But Ripley (Netflix, 2024), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, is interesting precisely because its protagonist doesn't look like a monster. He looks like an educated man, sensitive to art, almost shy. And that's where the real chill lies.

Before going on, the guiding principle of this house: to explain is not to excuse. Reconstructing the mental mechanism that lets someone do harm doesn't erase a single gram of their responsibility. Tom Ripley chooses, again and again, and each choice has a victim with a name. Understanding how he authorizes himself doesn't absolve him: if anything, it makes him more disturbing, because it reveals that the machinery he uses isn't exotic. It's the same one almost all of us use to break a small rule. He just takes it to the extreme.

// The theorysykes and matza: offenders do have morals

In 1957, sociologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza published an article that turned a comfortable idea on its head: the notion that whoever offends belongs to a «subculture» with values opposed to ours, people who simply believe that stealing is fine. Sykes and Matza observed the opposite. Most offenders share conventional morality: they know that lying is wrong, they feel guilt, they respect (in the abstract) their victims. If they really didn't hold those values, they wouldn't need to justify themselves. And yet they justify themselves all the time.

Their thesis: between the norm one accepts and the offense one commits, a bridge slips in, a set of rationalizations that disable guilt in advance. They aren't excuses one invents afterward, before a judge, to get off. They are permissions one grants oneself beforehand, in order to act without conscience getting in the way. They called them techniques of neutralization, and they described five. Ripley, almost as a narrative act of charity, shows us all of them.

It's worth marking the limits of the theory before getting carried away: neutralization explains how the moral brake is silenced, not why some people cross the line and the vast majority don't. A great many people rationalize every day («everyone does it, after all») without ending up impersonating a dead man. Neutralization is a condition that enables, not a trigger that compels.

// The catalogthe five doors ripley opens one by one

Denial of responsibility. «Circumstances dragged me here; I didn't choose this.» Ripley presents himself as someone pushed by necessity, by a world that denied him what it handed to others from birth. Others' poverty and contempt become an alibi: if life had been fair, he wouldn't have had to do any of this. Matza would call it feeling like a billiard ball, moved by outside forces, never an author.

Denial of injury. «Really, nobody actually gets hurt.» Forging a signature, cashing someone else's check, occupying a house that isn't his: for Ripley these are almost technical gestures, with no blood, no visible victim. Money is abstract; the impersonated identity, an empty role he fills better than its owner. As long as the harm has no face, it carries no weight.

Denial of the victim. «They asked for it; they almost deserved it.» Here the series is brutal in its coldness: the privileged people surrounding Ripley are portrayed (by him) as frivolous, lazy, unworthy of the fortune they squander. If the victim is someone who «doesn't make the most» of what they have, taking it from them becomes almost a moral correction. The wronged party stops being a victim and becomes guilty of their own luck.

Condemnation of the condemners. «Who are you to judge me?» The respectable world that would point at Ripley is, in his eyes, rotten: hypocrites with inherited money, clumsy police, a society that rewards birth over merit. Discrediting whoever judges is an elegant way of not listening to the judgment. And appeal to higher loyalties: loyalty to a private ideal —art, beauty, a life worthy of his sensibility— above common law, which he considers made for others.

// The slipmatza and «drift»: nobody decides to become ripley all at once

Seven years later, in Delinquency and Drift (1964), Matza added a key piece: drift. Almost no one wakes up one day resolved to be a full-time criminal. What there is instead is a swaying, an oscillation between conventional conduct and offense, in which the neutralizations gradually loosen the mooring. One doesn't leap into the void; one slips. Each permission one grants oneself makes the next one easier, and the moral ground, once firm, turns into a slope.

Seen this way, the series is a chronicle of drift. The impersonation doesn't begin as a master plan, but as an improvisation that gets out of hand and that each new lie forces him to prop up with a bigger one. It's the same logic Donald Cressey described in the embezzlers of Other People's Money (1953): trusted employees, with no record, who tell themselves they're only «borrowing» the money, that they'll pay it back, that it isn't stealing. The rationalization goes first; the crime, behind.

Ripley shares DNA with a whole gallery of charming impostors. The Frank Abagnale file and that of Neal Caffrey show con artists who justify themselves with the elegance of the game; Jordan Belfort's, with the alibi of success; and Patrick Bateman's takes the respectable façade to the point of delirium. Against them, it's worth contrasting with psychopathy: not every impostor with no apparent guilt lacks a conscience. Many, like Ripley, have one and neutralize it. And it's also worth recalling Sutherland's differential association: these justifications aren't invented in a vacuum, they're learned from an environment that normalizes them.

Half a century later, Shadd Maruna and Heith Copes reviewed five decades of research on the subject and confirmed something that Ripley dramatizes without meaning to: neutralizations don't only enable the crime, they also help maintain a decent self-image afterward. They are at once the prior permission and the subsequent consolation. That's why the Tom Ripley of the series can look at himself in the Venetian mirror without averting his gaze. He hasn't suspended his morality: he has reorganized it so that he always comes out innocent.