SALTBURN: LOVE & HATE MISDIRECTED
Emerald Fennell’s eighteenth birthday party with Graham Cooke, Tatler Magazine, 2003
“Saltburn… was mostly based on a family I murdered. ”
“The details are the stories; stories in miniature. ”
Saltburn is a film that everyone has been talking about without really talking about it. To talk about Saltlburn would involve a certain amount of dirty talk, or an unspoken suppression of content — the spilling of deets. This is what Saltburn has become infamous for in the mere months since its cinematic & Prime releases. This has resulted in the social face-off of knowing looks but don’t-tell nods & smirks from those who have seen it, & those who have partly seen it through the online viral mill. Everyone knows but doesn’t know. Saltburn is like a dream in bad translation, repressed & unconscious. Wake up!
It’s 2006. Before iPhones & social media. Saltburn opens with working-class scholarship student Oliver Quick entering Oxford's college campus. At first glance Oliver — played by Barry Keoghan — looks like a buff Harry Potter. Yet first glances can be deceiving when it comes to the psychological fluid that plumps up the face & arse cheeks of this little boy-man, cheeks which are repeatedly presented, creased & prancing, in occasional 4:3 aspect.
In a predictable twist, “more-please” Oliver ends up not being working class at all, or anything else he shares with deep sincerity to the ones he plots to deceive. The reason for this deception is still unclear after watching. Perhaps there doesn’t have to be a deeper reason for unreasonable behaviour. Maybe prancing around a castle naked, alone — if you ignore the director’s clutching of Oliver’s glutes with her camera — is enough of a reason. That said, Oliver Quick is at least quick in intellect; truths & lies, projected & introjected, are at the aesthetic heart & missing head of Saltburn.
Dumb & quick youth comes in all colours & shades. In Saltburn the camera beams down upon summer-sweaty bodies draped in transparent & loose threads. Oliver Quick is an empty & drenched narcissist, looking for the black pool of the self at the end of the rainbow. Oliver wants to be them by erasing them. He loves them & hates them all at once. The pronoun them creates a distance, “thus” — a word Oliver is accused of overusing — a desire to want & need. Them is over there. And over there is always better than thus.
This story has been told countless times. Someone, usually a male narcissist — psychopath, genius, obsessive — infiltrates a social group above their social status. The infiltrator lies as much to others as to themselves, because they in fact don't have a self. Their modus operandi is to explore selfhood through their own negation of self. To be possessed by their obsession. Their ability to introject & parrot the other is so they can adopt what is not them.
We are immediately given a perception of how the there & them — yet inner-world — of the elite first perceive Oliver Quick via a sniggering “Hey, cool jacket” slight by Fareligh, a complicated boy aristocrat, who makes several exits & entrances in Saltburn. However, dress is also a funny thing with regard the hidden psychological makeup of an individual’s identity, making clowns — in this case victims — out of the clowns who guess wrong.
And there are a lot of clowns & clowning around in Saltburn. Not least the structure, which slowly & suggestively builds its fractured & freestyle narrative in the self-conscious slaying & stereotyping of cultural norms regarding class, sexuality, race & film genre itself. It’s comedy. It’s cringe. It’s cliche. Every detached emotion is included under the fetishistic & cultured gaze of its director Emerald Fennell (pronounced Fen-nell), Oxford-educated & featured in Tatler Magazine for her high-society-attended 18th birthday in 2003.
Following the release of Saltburn Fennell’s omnipresence online in the form of podcast & fashion magazine features is surprising, especially when the algorithm kicks in. Bloggers & YouTube video essayists, hungry for clicks, have used Fennell’s talking-head ubiquity to unravel the intentions of the very intentional & open auteur that is Emerald Fennell. The director’s viral oversharing breaks the fourth wall for those who want to get lost in film. But for those who want more than losing themselves for two hours, it is difficult to resist the access we have to a director who has written & parodied what she knows after rubbing shoulders with a class of people so out of reach for the majority.
But what percentage of Fennell’s class knowledge & experience are translated into the filmic “real” — a word repeated ad nauseum in Saltburn, & the ultimate plaything for the cast of cazh-cosplay aristocrats? No doubt Fennell enjoys transgressing mainstream cinematic norms via an aesthetic filter that wallows in the gothic & macabre. But why the transgression? And why now?
Is Saltburn a post-pandemic film, as suggested by its director, a black hole in time when a backlog of desire to touch & get close was withheld? Is it — in D.H. Lawrence’s estimation of Cézanne — “[Her] rage with the cliche made [her] distort the cliche sometimes into parody”? Is the cliche of Saltburn Fennell’s hydra-headed rage monster lopped off, squirming & besmirching the floor of her own class, or own secret history, with shock & glittering awe (her dad is a jewellery designer, called “the king of bling”)?
Although seduced by Fennell’s aesthetic attention to detail, I wasn’t shocked by the cum-licking bath-juice scene, the pun-intended ‘period sex’, or the humping-of-the-grave. Fennell’s beauty filter is definitely always switched on to max. Everything is suggestive, not hardcore forced. Truth be told, I willed Saltburn on, celebrating the licky & lavish transgressions from the comfort & remote control of my couch. The arousal of art & desire is always dependent & provoked by its setting. (If Saltburn was presented in a contemporary art gallery it would be experienced & conceptualised in a very different way.)
Saltburn could be viewed as a product of the internal voyeurism the director Emerald Fennell has with her own class. That is what makes this film so perverse & fun, the director’s fetishistic detail & intimacy with regard to the characters & their elite settings. Yet love doesn’t enter the Saltburn equation; the look always subjugates love in the gaze of the fetishist, who makes objects out of subjects. Fennell makes bold claims about being on the side of her objectified characters. I felt neutral all the way through. Fennell may have known the upper-class girls, the boys, the families & their settings, wherein eccentric social cues could only cue parody to a thirty-something looking back on her twenty-something years, but from a seemingly great distance.
Like the genesis of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, which was built upon the author’s dream-fantasy of blood & death mixed with love, Fennell’s Saltburn is gothic-romanticism at its bodily fluid core (Gothic Romcore?). On a quick search, Saltburn is listed as a “Mystery/Comedy” with the following blurb: “Troubled by his classmate's unfortunate living situation, wealthy Oxford student Felix invites Oliver to stay at his estate, but a series of horrifying events soon engulf his eccentric family.” Just below on Wikipedia the same movie is described as a “black comedy”. On watching the movie, Saltburn falls between the cracks of black & comedy; the “mystery” aspect being a mere add on to create a kind of structural semblance to a narrative that is always breaking down into the aestheticisation of bodily fluids, what Julia Kristeva most famously named “abjection” under the poetic title for her essay Powers of Horror.
Most criticism volleyed at Saltburn is structural, especially the last 10 minutes, when one too many explanatory monologues & montages tie the burlesque narrative into a mainstream straight-jacket. James Wood writes that, “Stories are dynamic combinations of surplus & lack: disappointing because they must end, & disappointing because they can’t really end”. Saltburn’s end is disappointing because it feels forced, to appease a mainstream audience & the box office return. It is a better film than its ending.
One of Saltburn’s endings celebrates Oliver’s empty attainment of material wealth & liberation from the other in naked & rhythmic abandon to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dance Floor. There are no pawns left on the board, except for stone & puppet-box representations. But what happens after the dance? Like a dream, the motivation for such a dance is not borne upon any narrative coherence or logic or desire, but on the surplus & lack inherent in desire. Like in Fortnite, there is no game-advantage in “emoting”. To dance just is, not was or will be. This episode surely illustrates Fennell’s intention (or unconcious desire) for instinct to circumvent plot, & even meaning. Saltburn is desire caught, the most empty of desires.
The Talented Mr. Ripley creator, Patricia Highsmith, with her cat
There have been better told & ended stories in the Saltburn vein, such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, something that Fennell has unfathomably denied as an influence in interviews. You can understand Fennell’s reluctance, what a psychoanalyst might call disavowal, to concede to such an influence so close to Saltburn’s vein & bone.
Especially if you dig deeper into the creator of Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith, who, according to Edmund White, was a “vicious anti-Semite… an equal opportunity offender …disliked almost every minority… & Like Ripley, a social climber & intensely aware of status; most of her girlfriends were upper middle-class, rich, well-connected, preferably married. Like Ripley, she constantly fantasised; even in her journals she seemed incapable of distinguishing between reality and her inventions.”
Emerald Fennel, Vanity Fair feature, 2023
It is this “distinguishing” between reality & her inventions that is so intriguing about Saltburn & its creator. In a Vanity Fair feature on “Breaking Down the Arrival Scene” from Saltburn, we are presented with a portrait of the gothic sensibilities of the artist & her creation, from Brideshead Revisited to Hammer Horror. But what sticks out, what the VF editors are very aware of with respect to click bait, is Fennel’s ironic disclosure on being “not nice”:
I don’t think any of us are nice. I just don’t know anyone nice. Not really. Not anyone I know well. I don’t think I’m nice. I think we are all in complete denial about our own characters.
Further, on being asked by an interviewer where Saltburn came from, especially concerning the more controversially abject scenarios written by Fennell & performed by Barry Keoghan, the director uses sarcasm to fend off accusations of psychopathology on her part: “Saltburn… was mostly based on a family I murdered.” In the abundance of online interviews with Fennell concerning Saltburn, the director is consistent in her jolly yet defensive posturing when any —mostly awkward jokingly — accusation of psychopathology on her part or on the part of her written characters is brought up. She digs up Heathcliff digging up Catherine’s grave in Wuthering Heights as a literary precedent for Oliver humping Felix’s grave. She reasons out the unreasonable actions of her protagonists through the speculative notion of exaggerated & misdirected love, desire or want. Perversion & psychopathology don’t always have to go hand in twisted hand. Moreover, artists should never defend the naked exposure of self & body in their work. Art has the capacity & capriciousness to shed the world of its protective skin. And beyond such seriousness, sometimes it can be just fucking fun to transgress.
Janet Malcom writes in relation to Anton Chekhov’s distinction between reality & fiction in the novel: “A character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his ‘real, most interesting life’ nakedly exposed.” And towards this realism of being nakedly exposed Chekhov himself writes in a letter: “The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters & what they say; his job is to be an impartial witness.”
Naked exposure & judgement converge in the performative in Saltburn & the critical reception that has followed. The film has received a lot of critical flack & viral lust, but for the wrong & right reasons respectively. There has been critical stress placed on the film in conservative narrative structural terms, & the director’s explicit burrowing from other films. Saltburn is a magpie. It borrows & steals the glittery stuff to dress up its empty core. This is not a criticism of the film. In fact, the burlesque of surface, beauty & its abject defacement peels back our contemporary reality to its empty core. The virality of Saltburn on TikTok is testament to this fact. Saltburn is indicative &, for some, an indictment of the contemporary culture we now reboot & remake in our own image. We are gods of content. Saltburn is, not was.—JAMES MERRIGAN
