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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.
"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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