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Notes -
Saltburn as a Critique of Privilege Discourse
Full of spoilers, just don’t read it if you plan to watch the movie later.
Saltburn is an excellent film in the Sex-Thriller Dark Academia vibe genre. Interestingly, for a movie where the protagonist engages in incest-adjacent homoerotic sex, fucks a grave, and hangs a lot of dong, it’s a deeply conservative movie in message. In my mind the philosophy of the film isn’t in Ollie’s speech about the rich “having no natural predators” and thus being vulnerable to attack by an upper middle class striver like Ollie. Rather, I think Farley’s monologue to Ollie earlier in the film, at the birthday party, when he tells Ollie:
The film is largely about celebrity and privilege discourses. Celebrity culture is of course most vicious in the British tabloids. Think of the life and death and afterlife of Princess Diana: made miserable and made immortal by gossip columnists, given power and forced to endure public ridicule, driven to death by the paparazzi only to become the subject of award winning books and films and prestige television decades after her death. We had to have her, desired her, wanted to be her, and we hated her and were jealous of her and felt she didn’t deserve what she had, and our hate and our adoration killed her, suffocated her, and once we’d driven her to death we fuck the grave, we masturbate over her remains, we always want to comb over the ashes again and again and make another retelling of Diana’s story. The same with Marilyn Monroe, with Brittney Spears, with Aaron Hernandez, with Mac Miller. We want to tear them down, we drive them to insanity, to death, and then we are left with the memories. We create these powerful celebrities, we worship them, we destroy them, and after they are destroyed we talk and talk and talk about them because they were the interesting thing. Philadelphia sports media worshipped Nick Sirrianni and Jalen Hurts when they were lucky, and they couldn’t wait to sharpen their knives to tear them down once they got unlucky. One of the most primitive urges, anthropologists theorize that the first kings were sacrificial, that the power of the king was in his extinguishment, as a scapegoat or as a victim.
Privilege discourse is the same. Ollie play-acts as impoverished, but he is upper middle class. Uses the mythology of struggle, uses a critique of his own class, as ammunition to get the attention of the true aristocrats. Ollie is a freshman at Oxford, from an upper middle class family, he has every opportunity to build himself a good life*. But as much as he attributes his success to his willingness to put in work, Ollie does all this to avoid working. He doesn’t want to build, he wants to be handed things, because he perceives other people having been handed things. He struggles not against oppression or misery, but against anyone anywhere having it better than him. Privilege discourse is all about the upper middle class, the college educated, critiquing those a little better off than they are. It is rooted not in oppression but in jealousy. The Marxist doesn’t seek to critique the rich for their existence, but for the oppression of the poor. Privilege discourse was built around critiquing the easy lives of the perceived favored races, rather than complaining about the oppression of the disfavored races. It’s not coincidence that it appeared as actual brutal repression started to slack, particularly for the ivory tower academics who wrote these papers. The shift from a dynamic of escaping a misery that one was forced into, to a dynamic of criticism, of jealousy of the perceived easy lives of others, has been the fuel for so much of the culture war. In a nod to Hlynka, the flavor of the discourse is visible in the Grievance Politics wings of both Tribes. So much of Red-Pill adjacent discourse is oriented around this idea that women live better lives than they deserve, not active bad things happening to men.
College students know the dynamic: the law school WoC Collective has ten members and nine of them are dating white guys. So much of racial discourse is bound up in [weird]( sexual tension. Even moreso among the queers, they want to destroy the straights even as they just after them. People who allow their lives to be consumed by hostility and jealousy, they want the target of their hatred, they want to be them, they can’t live without them. This extends to the phenomenon, in so many post-colonial countries, of National Liberation Parties that never move past their revolution. Revolutionary leaders, and their heirs, continue to dominate government decades after their putative victories. They dance, naked, in their conquered mansions; but they have nothing to give their people but reliving their golden summer of revolution. The populists demand entrance into the commanding heights of culture controlled by their enemies, but they can build nothing once they are there. The revolutionaries, the barbarians, can’t build, they are culturally sterile. They lust after those happier than they, they dream of tearing them down to earth, of taking away their unearned privileges. But hatred is all they have. They can’t build anything after they capture the world they lusted over, they can only dream of their victories in the culture war.
Jealousy is the core of privilege discourse, and of celebrity worship, and jealousy is ultimately sterile, it does not produce but only destroys. Farley’s prophecy to Ollie comes true darkly, not with Ollie being banished from Saltburn and living a middle class life where he still dreams of his hand job on a hay bale, instead with Ollie taking control of Saltburn and gaining nothing from it. His life will always be devoted to that one golden summer he was at Saltburn with Felix, no matter what else comes of it. That summer with Felix becomes the peak of his life, by his jealous obsession and efforts to destroy and steal it. At the end of the film he dances naked through the halls of Saltburn, is that nearly as satisfying as his one golden big boy summer? Ollie can’t produce the experience of Saltburn, he can only murder it, and then masturbate over its grave. This was the experience of the barbarians who conquered Rome: they could destroy Rome, but they could not reproduce it. Most of the Germans and Goths and Vandals who destroyed the Western Roman Empire first sought entry to Rome, sought to become part of the empire, to enjoy the wealth and grandeur that was Rome. They destroyed Rome, but they couldn’t live in it, because they couldn’t reproduce the institutions that built it and ran it. Cavafy writes:
...
The barbarians are a solution for the civilized, but so was Rome a solution to the barbarians. The existence of the barbarians in Cavafy gives the possibility for the people to see an apocolypse , to give up on working on their problems, to stop legislating, to just wait for the worst. But Rome was a solution to the Barbarians, it organized their society, it gave them something to strive for, to organize themselves towards, to pillage. The destruction of the Western Roman Empire wasn’t the glory of the conquering barbarians, it was their degeneration, their slow downfall into a morass of chaos.
The left thinks systemically and the right thinks individually or on a personal level. Concepts like 'privilege' tend to fall apart when applied on an individual basis because people on an individual level are much more complex and nuanced than some B level student's take on theories that they don't understand. On the other hand you cannot scale what an individual can achieve to a systemic level analysis of society as a whole, so whilst some people can achieve great things, it cannot account for the structural element that skews the 'playing field'.
Calling it jealousy creates a straw man argument in my opinion, because much of the left-wing side that you likely don't hear about rests on very different arguments. Only a fraction of a fraction of even the most progressive people are what could be described as hardcore 'intersectionalists'. One of the most significant differences between a democracy and a dictatorship is that a democracy is accountable to a wider range of stakeholders, so their personal and economic interests must be taken into consideration and that overall leads to a more prosperous society. Wealth inequality and power concentration damanges democracy, so by extension it makes society as a whole less prosperous even if certain individuals in that society can become incredibly wealthy within it.
Not really. Everyone thinks systemically about other people and individually about themselves/their immediate friends. The right thinks systemically when it comes to HBD, the left thinks individually. The left thinks systemically about privilege, the right thinks individually about privilege. If you define "the right" as people who think individually, you are drawing a line that excludes a lot of people who both self-define as "right wing" and would be identified as such by a vast majority of people.
I apologize if my argument seemed to be talking about "the left" in a complete sense, I was focused on the people who make privilege arguments. Who are a tiny section of people. Who I do think exist largely in a state of jealousy.
HBD is such a niche concept that I would hazard a guess that fewer than 1/100 self-identified right wing people would even know what the initialization means.
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This movie creeped me out.
Something about how beautiful the people were, and how needlessly Oliver killed them. It didn't feel like the movie wanted me to especially sympathize with Oliver, but it didn't feel like the movie ruled it out either. There were a few instances where it almost seemed as though the movie wanted to make sure the rich English nobles were not sympathetic. I noticed this most when Farley got into an argument with Felix, and nailed him for not bothering to know the names of his valets. Until this point Felix had been pretty admirable and blameless, so I'm not sure what "point" the scene had except to mar Felix with the audience. (Felix also says some clumsy things about race in this scene, which I thought were inoffensive but suspect were meant to convey latent racism.) And so Oliver gradually kills them all, and it seems like a tragedy, but the logic of the movie doesn't treat it tragically. The family sits around in a red room eating supper with stiff upper lips trying not to acknowledge the death of the heir, and it was more dark than comedy.
Oliver is a deeply malevolent force. He kills all those people. He robs a family of their only two children, and sexually desecrates both. It's hard to imagine a more evil act. And it's all almost passed over, as though Oliver's feelings and motivations are more interesting. But a lot of his motivation strikes me as petty rationalizing. He... resented them? But as the ending makes clear he targeted them from the very beginning. In that sense, Oliver isn't a character with motivations, he's a force of nature, he was set loose on the story with this motivation because he was born that way. Every other explanation falls apart.
I also think at least about 30 minutes could have been cut out of this movie. Watching it, at first I was nodding along to the logic, it was a classic looking-in story. Oliver was Nick Carraway, entering this privileged world of the noble elite, with no real important characterization or skill of his own. There's a logic to these kinds of stories. The first scene that told me something was wrong was when Oliver talks with Lady Elspeth about the expulsion of Pamela. Oliver suggests to Lady Elspeth that Pamela might have been lying all along. Hang on, wait a second, Oliver has competence, he's meddling in Saltburn, something is happening here. After that, it became rather obvious to me that Oliver was slowly conquering the place, and so most of the twists didn't really surprise me.
I think the movie could have ended about 30 minutes earlier than it did. The scene in the red room after Felix's death was more or less the right moment. Felix is dead, Oliver is still hanging around, Farley has just been taken out (again), and Lady Elspeth insists that Oliver must stay on. That line of hers makes the rest of the movie a foregone conclusion: he kills the rest of them so he can usurp Saltburn for himself. Nothing that follows is surprising, then, it's all gratuitous. So the movie limps along until the shock (surprise!) twist that Oliver did it all. Which was obvious. The only "surprise" was that he planned it all along, even from the moment he caught Felix with a flat tire. Which wasn't really necessary.
Saltburn reminded me immensely of Barbie. Supposedly, the director, Emerald Fennell, is a protege of or collaborator with Greta Gerwig. This makes a sort of pleasant sense to me, because I thought Barbie and Saltburn shared a few distinguishing features. Both movies start in a happy comedic genre and transition to a serious dramatic genre. Both movies borrow so much from comedy and tragedy that they effectively escape their genres altogether. Both movies have a sort of lurking political bloodlust. Neither one really ends up making a coherent sense. I can't decide if this is a tendency of these two directors as familiars, a burgeoning new style in cinema, a casual series of resemblances, or something important about female creative vision in general that has had less play in Hollywood until recently. I don't think I'm making it up. But if they're really only similar by coincidence, I would ascribe it to this: both movies are very well-executed with excellent design, scripting, and casting, but neither in the end to me made a lot of sense. (They also each could have cut out about 30 minutes, but I would say this of most major movies I've seen in the last 15 years.)
Everyone gave excellent performances and everything looked beautiful.
There a few plot points that didn't make sense to me.
Oliver frames Farley by having sex with him, then stealing his phone to send an email attempting to sell the Palissy plates. How did Oliver know that would work? It's one of those movie plots that sounds fine because it was "supposed" to happen that way. But what if Farley rolls over in the night, looks at his phone, and sees what Oliver's sent? What if the museum doesn't respond, or even notice his email? By the time Oliver wakes up, Farley is already on the way out, so I guess the museum director woke up, decided Farley must be stealing, decided not to try to string Farley along, decided to immediately forward the incriminating email to Sir James, who then immediately decided to call for Farley and send him packing. If I were the mastermind Oliver trying to eliminate the entire family, I would... simply not expect that everything would work so obviously perfectly. Change a single detail and Oliver is screwed.
There's a sort of rollercoaster logic a lot of films operate on, where scenes follow each other in a way that makes sense, but only as long as you don't step back and consider the entire ride. Why does Farley come back the first time, but not a second time after Elspeth dies? Wouldn't Oliver killing Elspeth be incriminating? Isn't it lucky that nobody investigated Felix's body and found poison? In the logic of film, you're not really supposed to ask these questions, and they don't matter while you're watching the movie. But these are sloppy mistakes that matter in the end, when we try to sit back and ask what it was all about. Because if the plot doesn't make sense, then the movie is really about the visceral horror of watching Oliver dismember and destroy this noble family. In which case, the plot is actually getting in the movie's way.
I think Saltburn was very well-made, but I didn't like it. I think it suffers from a serious structural flaw as a consequence of faking a start as a romance or social comedy before switching to (essentially) a vampire movie. This makes it hard for me to parse the deeper "meaning" of the film, because, ultimately, the film is in several places at once.
Interesting. I thought the scene was meant to convey the hollowness of the character's appeals to morality. Farley doesn't really care about the valets, he uses the servant issue and the race issue cynically to try to get money out of Felix.
I agree with you that the film could have been thirty minutes shorter, and that the plot relies on significant "just-so" contrivances (I found marrying the mother particularly eye-rolling). It definitely prioritized uncomfortably long set pieces. I joked with my wife that the censored cable version of it will be better, because the "fucking the grave" scene would cut before the pants are off, the bathtub scene will imply what is happening rather than committing to minutes of it, the final scene will cut at the row of rocks. The film relies on holding uncomfortable scenes for so long that a range of emotions run through the audience, from disbelief to disgust to humor. I felt that the crossing of genres was one of its strengths, carrying a movie that would have been too boring and one note if it had been a straight vampire film.
I also disagree with the theory that Ollie conquered Saltburn, Saltburn conquered Ollie. It's the labyrinth, most clearly in the hedge maze, but over and over it is repeated that "People get lost in Saltburn." Ollie gets lost in Saltburn. He isn't happy at the end, having conquered, he is lost, he is insane, he is miserable. He has foreclosed the rest of his life, sacrificed it to that one summer he will only ever live in the memories of. What does he do with the rest of his life?
I only meant that the movie starts with Oliver as the passive Nick Carraway observer archetype, but a third of the way through he transitions into something different.
Thinking about this some more though, I think you'd be right thematically, except for the plot of the movie. Saltburn definitely conquers Oliver spiritually in the sense you describe. But the twist at the end makes clear that Oliver more or less planned it all out, from before he even saw Saltburn. So I don't think the movie makes sense on its own terms.
There's also the scene where he eats out a bloody Venetia on her period. Although, again, I thought these scenes weren't uncomfortable, just gratuitous. I've encounter more disturbing sexual scenes on 4chan. So they didn't especially phase me. The shot I thought was most disturbing was when he removes Elspeth's intubation.
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"jealousy is the core of privilege discourse..."
Interesting. This seems at odds with the analysis of someone like Wesley Yang, that privilege discourse is a rhetorical weapon of the strong, a clever and perhaps counterintuitive domination of the weak. The "successor ideology," or the new way the upper class advances itself.
So, a jealous upper class?
It's just elite theory. Pareto described revolutions etc. as non governing elites replacing the governing elites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_theory
In these circles, you are more likely to think of it as the Middle replacing the High, using the language of Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. But the principle is universal - most elites that fall (other than due to foreign invasion) are replaced by a pre-existing counter-elite.
I don't think that analysing the woke memeplex in terms of elite theory is particularly helpful - doing so commits you to silly ideas like "undergraduate activists are the elite and well-connected billionaires are the counter-elite" on the right or "senior career government officials are a counter-elite" on the left.
Wokeness is used by elites against counter-elites, counter-elites against elites, to settle personal scores among elites or counter-elites, and sometimes by randos for social media klout. I see wokism as left-wing McCarthyism - it began life as an overzealous solution to a very real problem, was allowed to metastasize because it was a useful weapon against right-wingers, and is now mostly used to settle intra-left personal beefs. The question of why the pro-establishment right took out McCarthy with the Army-McCarthy hearings but the pro-establishment left hasn't done anything about the excesses of woke-stupid (which is hurting them and they know it) is unclear to me - even at the level of can't vs won't.
I'd have read it as: the bureaucratic (managerial) complex and the pipeline of activists coming to them are the elite, said billionaires and other youthful activists, budding lawyers etc. are the counter elite. The problems occur when considering democratic transitions of power, different rungs of elites in their respective areas stacked on top of each other until you have country and court elites. But I believe the basic lens works well for privilege discourse etc. as Pongalh was talking about.
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Yes. An upper class that uses a complex theology of privilege to obfuscate. A world of the top 10% jealous of the 1%. The Atlantic and the NYT Sunday Magazine aren't working class organs, the grievance studies departments churning this shit out aren't at community colleges. The people forming these views are factually upper class, -ish, but they're jealous of those who have it even better and want to tear them down.
Ollie, within the film, is well-off, a freshman at Oxford. He isn't as rich or as popular as Felix and Farleigh, but he is so immensely well off with a great future ahead of him. But once he sees someone who has it better, it attracts and incites him, he has to have it, his own lot in life seems terrible by comparison.
Privilege discourse is driven by students who get into great universities, like they were told to, and find that everything isn't handed to them.
Correct.
You're allowed to be professionally aggrieved as long as you aren't one of those deplorable types.
"I think, maybe, I was mistreated in my amazing Tech and VC jobs"
"Oh, you poor thing!"
"Drunk chick threw a chair at me at Waffle House"
"Please acknowledge your white privilege. Also, you're fired forever."
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Are Davos people jealous? Are they the 1% or the 10%?
I'm probing as I'm curious how this reconfigures political understanding. So, a right-populism that hates the top 10% virtue-signallers - but only superficially for class-based reasons, as it's really cultural and psychological - and is joined by the top 1% the loser top 10% are jealous of. Which raises the question, why are the top 1% not also virtue signalers? Do you really stop seeing successor ideology antics at that strata?
One of the flaws of our culture, oft noted, is the lack of self confidence of the elites. One of the ways this manifests is that no one claims elite status, everyone is jealous and oppressed. No one is the Blonde Beast, everyone is the nebbish loser who doesn't fit in.
Not just the 1% but the 1, Elon Musk is jealous, perceives others as getting things he deserves, as having unfairly easy lives. Throughout the tippy top upper classes: Trump, Ackman, Adelson. Nowhere do we find the easy self assurance of the aristocrat. We find grievance.
Our culture is in disarray because the trads are rebellious and the rebellious are defending tradition.
It's not a lack of self-confidence so much as an overabundance of confidence. Our "elites" are not intelligent people. They're idiots, and that there is the problem.
such comments are against rules of themotte. and what exactly do you mean by 'intelligent' here?
I mean ability to process new information and adapt to changing circumstances/scenarios.
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Davos is quite a bit narrower than the 1%, they virtue signal all the time, and the right hates them.
Davos is a combination of whoever happens to be in power at the time (typically elected) and people who want to sell them things (bankers, consultants, lobbyists, think tanks, assorted corporates).
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I think almost the opposite tends to be more true; middle-class guilt is much more powerful than middle-class jealousy. Hence why, though people like Disraeli and Sadler fancied that the aristocracy were better guardians of the poor, it was the barrister Lloyd George and the thoroughly bourgeois Attlee who created the foundations of the modern welfare state. This is really why Oliver disguises himself as poor; because the latent Methodism present in every middle-class Briton tells him that his (unearned) station is actually shameful, and the only acceptable circumstance in which to accept aristocratic largesse is poverty.
I think the class system has changed since Disraeli’s day, there were peculiarities to the Victorian titles economy that even the Edwardians commented upon mockingly.
Part of the film’s subtext is about Fennell’s own ambiguity about her own class and its relationship to ideas of what it means to be middle class. There’s a funny interview where she says something like “I don’t see how the daughter of the ‘king of bling’ [her father’s tabloid-anointed nickname because of his jewelry business] could be really, really posh”. And of course posh people don’t ever really call themselves posh, they call themselves smart or chins or just ‘people like us’.
So there’s a lot of resentment in parts of the upper middle class, maybe lower gentry for people who unironically and unashamedly adopt the trappings of middle-middle class British life. People who actually say “pardon” instead of “what” and all the other u-and-non-u stuff. This then becomes the most embarrassing possible thing.
It’s not a coincidence that the decor of the villain’s comfortable middle class parents’ home is a florid pastiche of the Dursleys’ home in Harry Potter, played completely straight. In real life that’s not what the home of the class of people look like (certainly not in 2007, Rowling might get a pass because Harry Potter is set in the early ‘90s with some anachronisms like the millennium bridge), but in the film it’s a particular kind of gauche horror.
That, in practice, it was actually Lloyd George and Attlee who created the welfare state isn't surprising; it was always the bourgeois classes (both provincial and urban) who were most in tune with the need for something to stave off the radical left. That's probably a small part of the reason why they were successful at doing so in Germany and Britain but not in Russia, where there were fewer of them and they were less powerful.
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As Dave Chappelle put it (speaking about white women): "you were in on the heist, you just didn't like your cut".
When a "privileged" person is overthrown in elite spaces, it's rarely by the weak. It's by "the weak": people in the same space or close enough who want power and use the few levers they have to beat their rivals/tormentors.
They are advancing their interests, but that often involves punching up (allegedly) rather than down.
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You've understood some of it, but not the context. Saltburn is actually just the latest entry in the long tradition of English upper-class snobbery towards the upper-middle class.
Like Evelyn Waugh and Julian Fellowes (who write stories with similar messages, if less sexy in style), Emerald Fennell is from the bottom of the English upper class. Her father is a semi-famous jewelry designer who went to Eton, but who was born into a merely gentry army family in colonial Egypt. Her parents set her up with children of her father's higher profile clients as friends, and at Oxford:
In essence, she was the least wealthy and least noble of the upper class set at the time. This always breeds the harshest resentment towards those in the class just below you (the actual upper-middle class, people with money but no name, no title and no estate, ie. arguably Emerald herself and certainly her children had her father had not done his best to elevate his daughter's station in life).
An earl or a duke, to say nothing of a member of the actual royal family, has no need to denigrate the upper middle class because their position is secure. A marquis, after all, can marry a prostitute and she's still lady so-and-so, marchioness whatever and her son is still the heir to the title. This is to some extent why neither Harry or William married their own kind; even their uncle's wife, the Countess Spencer, is a Canadian charity worker. But to someone on the precarious fringe of the peerage, someone who speaks the right way, runs in the right circles, went to the right schools but who lacks significant wealth, title or lineage, guarding one's privilege against the next rung down is critical.
Saltburn is about snobbery. Ollie hides that he's upper middle class not primarily because it will get him more sympathy in the American sense that the wealthy Felix will feel sorry for his poor friend. He hides that he's upper middle class because to be upper middle class is the worst possible thing you can be in the presence of 'old' money, because it's to be present in the same spaces as them as both an ignorant and uncouth annoyance and a reminder of a changing world. The English upper classes have a long history of liking the working class as relatively noble, deferential salt-of-the-earth type people (see downstairs in Downton Abbey), but disliking the middle as money-grubbing shysters. Ollie's betrayal is in claiming to the former while actually being the latter.
As this article says:
In Britain, the most important thing is to know one's place. Getting rich is fine, at least some of the time. But social climbing is never acceptable and a perennial source of mockery for anyone caught attempting it.
What about children who are born into the climb? Like John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell), the writer whose father was a working class swindler who put John into a posh school and made sure he would have upper crust speech and mannerisms?
Well, of course it still happens. Everyone was an arriviste at some point. But I think the general thing is that you fake it convincingly for long enough that people stop doubting your children, at which point you made it. Le Carre was firmly middle class, his maternal uncle was an MP; his father was downwardly mobile, he and his siblings largely made it into the comfortable middle/upper middle class. None were upper, though.
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From the same article:
I always felt sorry for the dursleys. Aside from their comically overdone mistreatment of Harry, they seem like average, even impressive* people whose God hates them and has cursed them to be ugly, stupid and humiliated on-camera.
*Vernon owns a drill company which seems to be doing well, Dudley wins boxing championships.
I agree, although in the Dursleys case it’s more Rowling’s resentment for her own class and the life she might have led had she not become poor by pursuing writing in London and instead become a suburban housewife.
You're taking it too seriously. It started off as a kid's book, with Harry being a retelling of Cinderella, in part. Of course the Dursleys are comic villains, they're the Stepmother and Ugly Stepsisters stand-in. Not just the Dursleys, think of their ghastly friends. When the books became A Phenomenon, then people started looking for Deeper Meaning (which I don't think was ever there) and J.K. did give a bit more depth to the characters (Dudley is growing out of being a bully, Petunia has genuine grievances as well as jealousy of her sister).
But looking for class critiques in the characters of the Wicked Stepfamily is like looking for the same in the pantomime versions (e.g. around the 9 minute mark here)
Everything in Britain is about class. You could try to write something that had nothing to do with it and it would still, inevitably in some sense, be about a particular class or its intersection with another. It would be like writing a story about modern China that had absolutely nothing to do with the CCP or Mao or the post-1948 makeup of Chinese society. You could try, but even in its absence it would be saying something. Everyone born in Britain exists within this system, everyone can clock everyone else, it is inescapable. There are things beyond it, but it still touches them.
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You think? I can't see it myself. Obviously Rowling isn't upper class, but it's the Weasleys' life that's the obvious fantasy. Poor, shabby, but happy and with an old house out in the countryside. I suppose sour grapes are a possibility.
No, I’m not disagreeing with you at all; the Weasleys are the fantasy, the Dursleys are a suffocating hell.
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According to the wiki, he was only a director.
Ah, my mistake :)
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This kind of mindset is so foreign to me that I genuinely can't understand it. What causes this kind of mindset?
In America, people who start out poor and then become so rich that they end up going to the same parties as Presidents and old money families are usually celebrated. The average person here doesn't think less highly of, say, Jay-Z just because he does not come from nobility or family wealth yet lives the same sort of lifestyle as people who do and does not give noble families any visible sort of deference.
Or am I misunderstanding the English conception of class and social climbing?
Remember Trump and "ugh, he eats his steak over-done and with ketchup, so low-class"? There's class structure and class resentment in America as well, it's just not as formalised or set out in a hierarchy like "the royalty, the nobility, the gentry, the middle classes, the working class, the lower class". Think of the Gilded Age snobbery, the Boston Brahmins, there are still the old-money, old-established (for the USA) families and the new, often made their money in tech, billionaires. Bezos may be fantastically rich and perceived as upper-class but that's because he's the West coast elite, and he's still not got quite the cachet of the Gettys, for instance. Bezos is a lot richer than the remaining fortune of Gordon Getty, but it was the Getty grand-daughter who was able to reserve City Hall for her own personal use for her wedding, officated over by Nancy Pelosi, and with Governor Newsom in attendance as a close family friend.
Meanwhile, if I'm being unkind, Bezos' new inamorata is considered somewhat trashy. "Mob wife aesthetic"? Really?
I agree, but it’s different. In America, class is a two-tiered (arguably three-tiered, including the underclass) system. There’s the salt of the earth working class, and there’s the college-educated PMC. There are a few remaining “we’re 1640s, not 1880s darling” elderly WASPs in a handful of New England clubs, but they (and their Southern equivalents) are irrelevant. I grew up wealthy in NYC and I rarely encountered them, as almost all have intermarried with new money of the bourgeois PMC sort. People like Barack Obama and Bill Ackman are the American upper class. There is nobody above them socially. There is no hidden elite tier. Again, there are certainly people who think themselves above them, but they’re not in any real sense.
In America, there’s a clear delineation between old money and new. But that distinction is essentially one generation of wealth. Charles Kushner was a construction worker, son of immigrants. Jared Kushner is a member of the American upper class, his father paid his dues to Harvard, his son speaks and acts in the right way (his association with Trump aside). It is what it is. Trump is unique because Fred Trump only became super rich when Trump was already an adult or certainly a teenager, and because New York real estate in the outer boroughs was and arguably is a uniquely trashy and plebeian business dominated by people with minimal class status. So Trump could be the son of a rich man and go to Wharton and, perhaps almost uniquely, remain kind of a pleb.
But in general, that’s not how American society operates. Emerald Fennell, had she been born an American, would be a clear member of the American upper class. That she isn’t in Britain is the source of her angst, and perhaps of Saltburn.
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People have a lot of respect for at least some self-made people here, especially the working class. The host of the British version of The Apprentice started off as a market seller and became a billionaire or something like that, and he was even made an actual Baron, but he’s still ‘working class’ in a way. Class and wealth don’t mean the same thing, even if they’re still correlated. So you can aspire to be rich and invited to dinners at Buckingham Palace for entrepreneurs or philanthropists or something, but you must never aspire to be the social class above yourself; it’s the latter, not the former, that’s a subject of great mockery - not primarily by people arguably ‘above’ you (although that happens, as in this case), but by your own class, who will mock you for your pretensions.
Of course, it still happens, and today’s snobs are as ever the arrivistes of a century ago.
For example, his crest is a reference to the football club he supports, and some wordplay with his very unaristocratic second name (Sugar). That's probably the way of having heraldry that would get you least mockery in a Cockney pub.
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There’s also the fact that visibly aspiring to be a different class requires you to adopt the mannerisms and life history of the class you’re aping. This almost always looks fake and is inherently kind of nasty because you’re implicitly throwing your family and original social milieu under the bus.
It should be noted that people pretending to be lower class also come in for mockery (see @2rafa’s comments*, anyone with a mockney accent, and all the communist aristos who smoked pipes and pretended to be working class). It’s not just protecting privilege.
*I.e. the bit about Ollie's betrayal being his pretence of working-classness. I don't mean her comments in general.
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I understand the context, but my interpretation isn't ruled by it. The theme is universal. Saltburn is about the British class system at Oxford in the same way that Notes from Underground is about petty Russian bureaucrat life. It evokes themes that stretch back to Plato and Nietzsche and forward further. It calls to mind the death of Princess Diana, the life of Brittany Spears, the way we approach celebrities, we want to fuck them and we want to kill them and after they are gone all we can do is miss them.
A lot of the criticism I saw, in reading articles about the movie after watching it, was this exact species of ressentiment. The critics, the writers, her old classmates, they hate that Emerald Fennel made a movie and people like it. And they don't counter it by making a better piece of art, a more stirring story, they tear it down. She had no right to make it, and people must be told so. They hate her, at best, for getting lucky.
This is good analysis. Ollie feels himself entitled to something better than what he has because he sees that other people have it. He blanches at a friendship with the student who screams at him to ask him a "fucking sum." He wants to be one of the beautiful and the good, not one of the normies.
But it can be extended to a range of relationships, it's a typology. It extends to race, to gender, to wealth, to class. The same dynamic appears over and over.
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*As an aside on this topic, my wife and I laughed that Farleigh isn't killed on camera, just disinherited or cut off or whatever. So he probably either finished his Oxford education, or went back to America and transferred to an Ivy and took out student loans if he couldn't afford Oxford. He managed to finish up school, got a diversity job offer at some investment bank or law firm or something. Because at the end of the day, getting excluded from Saltburn is nbd: you're still at the best schools with the best connections.
I haven't seen the movie, but going by the discussion of it here, that's Ollie's revenge; Farleigh said to him, more or less, "This is one golden summer for you that you'll never be able to get again, but for me it's my house".
Well not anymore, Farleigh. Now the memory of it will be your golden summer that you can never get back. Oh yeah, he can be at the best school with the best connections, and graduate from an Ivy, and have a successful career in America. But that's all in America. He has been banished from the Garden of Eden and can never go back.
Reading the start of this, about the movie and its setting, I thought "This is 'Brideshead Revisited' in modern dress".
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