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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.
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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