The title of The American Friend refers to Tom Ripley, the amoral con-man created by Patricia Highsmith and played in this adaptation by Dennis Hopper. But the American friend is also America itself, a palpable presence in the post-war Europe surveyed in Wim Wenders’ film. The first characters we meet in Hamburg are not Germans but two Yanks. One is Derwatt, a clever forger played by the great Nicholas Ray, who looks oddly at home in the ramshackle squalor of his character’s dismal flat. Ray (along with Samuel Fuller, seen later in the film as a crime boss), can be seen as a warped autocritique, an artist now reduced to copying others and hiding away in Europe, the last place where he can vie for respect and maybe a paycheck.
The other man is Ripley, who drums up interest in the painter’s fakes to flip for massive profit at auctions. If Ray cynically parodies the refuge that meaningful American culture must take in Europe to gain credibility, Hopper is the shark-eyed embodiment of that culture’s venal shade, its distorted self that proliferates in a post-war global economy weak enough to be rebuilt in one nation’s image. Tellingly, Ripley does not live in much luxury for a man who grifts private collectors for thousands. He inhabits a modest hotel room with spare belongings to make easier his detached state and his need for quick getaways. Hopper specialized in playing volcanic sociopaths, but Ripley offers him a character who subsumes that sociopathy under a veneer of ingratiating, used-car salesman charm.
Well, “charm” may be the wrong word. Ripley puts no mirth or ease into his interactions and instead maintains inertia through constant deceit and manipulation, a greased palm smearing the hands of all of Hamburg. The re-cemented upper class is only too happy to shell out for the status symbols that Ripley peddles, but he meets resistance in the form of the perceptive frame-maker Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz), who voices his doubts about the paintings’ veracity. Though no one pays attention to Jonathan, Ripley makes it his mission to completely destroy the man as a lesson to no one in particular. At this stage, Ripley’s vague metaphorical application fully coalesces around Jonathan’s equally symbolic representation of the average German who can’t help but notice how many outside influences have started to dictate their culture.
The plot of the remainder of the film, in which Ripley arranges to slowly draw Jonathan into murder plots to crush his spirit and frame him, is convoluted yet compelling, punctuated by several sequences (mostly involving trains and train stations) that are thrilling in their economy and tension. But the meat of the drama belongs not to Jonathan’s scenes of coerced work but the codependent relationship that forms between him and the art dealer he always suspects. The film mines much from the subtly homoerotic overtones of Jonathan’s increasing reliance on Ripley, but Ripley equally finds he needs him, albeit in a more detached and uncaring fashion. Jonathan, Ripley’s biggest skeptic, becomes his most fervent ally, and in their relationship Wenders teases certain overtures about the tortured bond between the United States and Germany. In fact, Jonathan’s status as Ripley’s unexpected muscle could stand in for Germany becoming a central force in NATO, an organization originally formed, in part, to make sure the country never rebuilt its military strength.
Despite Wenders’ natural inclination toward semiotics and the importance he places on each image for its communicative properties, it’s easy to miss these intimations. Instead of pushing the forthright political slant of other New German Cinema filmmakers, Wenders subsumes this under the muted, intuitive performances of his actors. Ganz has several of the mumbling voiceover ruminations that recur in the director’s work, but for the most part Ganz expresses his inner doubts sufficiently through the nervous smiles and genuine attempts at amicability with Ripley, who matches the German’s cautious optimism with empty laughs and invasive body language. Still, there is a feeling of connection here, and if Jonathan is emblematic of a generation taught to roll over to its victors, the film’s ambivalence suggests still pressing concerns with the nation’s own recent past and to what extent the German identity even should remain untouched and unchanged.
Beneath the political applications, however, are deeper considerations for the overall aesthetic impact of American culture on postwar Europe, even on the film itself. As a fencer for an American ex-pat’s forgeries of continental masterpieces, Ripley evokes the film’s warped incorporation of noir, a genre effectively invented in Germany by the early cinema expressionists before being popularized in Hollywood. Wenders brings noir back to its homeland, but he can’t help but appropriate the changed, Americanized version. As such the chiaroscuro interior compositions and angular city shots feel less like a continuation of a nation’s proud cinematic legacy than a pop-culture riff. Wenders’ signature—the gulf of muted longing and displacement—can be found in The American Friend, but buried within its surface-level quasi-romance between con-man and mark is a larger confusion and despair over the German identity itself, influenced broadly by the political forces that shaped the country’s postwar reconstruction, as well as the pop culture that those forces left behind to completely terraform the place into their image.
