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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.
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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