‘The exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two epidermises’: gestures of touch in Gattaca (1997), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and The Piano (1993)

Abstract

Touch in film can communicate the success or failure of desire. The social contact of two epidermises – as defined by Chamfort in 1796 – is often mediate or indirect. Theorised by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the caress is the inverse of the haptic grasp. In this essay I look at two versions of the caressive gesture, found in Jane Campion’s The Piano, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley. In no case is this simply the action of sexual desire, though it may also be that. In each of the films, these gestures are born not so much out of the wish to have as the wish to be. In The Piano, the non-haptic caress turns over, using the back of the hand to touch the other – the husband, the child, the piano, the sea – and this is part of the release of the protagonist Ada from the autistic ‘egg’ in which she is initially enclosed. In Gattaca and The Talented Mr Ripley, the desire to be the more successful other is expressed in two related ways: by the touch of the face on a garment and in the visible blending of two faces into one.