Saltburn Hates Its Audience

It’s less than subtle that Saltburn, a movie about social media envy, is set before Instagram or TikTok invaded our lives. Every scene is a perfectly composed snapshot of wealth porn. A thirst trap. Of course, Saltburn does not wish to be subtle, in any way, at all.

Much has been written about what it means to set this movie at Oxford, in 2006. At the height of pre-Financial Crisis excess? Sure. When MGMT scored every college party? Yep. But the summer of 2006 is also one year after Facebook would have reached Oxford.

And it’s when writer/director Emerald Fennell would have finished her third year at the crenelated university.

How It Feels, Scrolling Insta

The early Oxford sequences find weaselly scholarship boy Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) standing outside rooms at staring at the gorgeously dissipated life led by gorgeous Felix (Jacob Elordi).

Oliver watches as Felix lounges at party after party, as the besotted women of Oxford steer into him, and are blithely discarded. The wantonness is the point. How easily all this comes to Felix, and how hard it (supposedly) comes for Oliver.

This must be personal for Fennell. Her father designed jewelry for London’s upper crust. Dukes and duchesses attended her 18th birthday party. So, she knows her way around a great big house.

When the movie relocates to Saltburn, Felix’s staggering family estate in the English countryside, the watching continues. Oliver watches Felix and his friends taste the best of life — and we, in turn, watch all of them in luxuriant montages of summertime languor.

This is a prurient movie. It is a movie about prurience. We see Felix and friends composed in tableau after tableau, slurping bottles of champagne, in designer clothes (GQ ran an article on all the wristwatches in Saltburn), lounging in a constellation of lawn chairs that we know must have been carefully arranged by the estate’s many footmen.

That offscreen effort to create those tableaux is part of what Fennell is getting at. This is a movie about watching beautiful people live beautiful lives in classic luxury, and knowing deep down that you are grotesque and can never have that life. But it is also about how those images are composed, literally art directed, especially when we consume them through an Instagram feed.

The Untalented Mr. Ripley  (spoilers from here on)

Again, I’m reminded how personal this must have been for Fennell. All the time she spent at Drayton House (the real location where Saltburn was filmed), learning how to shoot it and light it. The lengths she went to, so she could take over a big, lordly manor. She wallowed.  

This is not the male gaze, or the female gaze… it is the consumerist gaze. Her camera wants to devour everything it sees.

While Saltburn has a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, that other 29% loathe it. There are no critics who dislike it, only critics who despise it. They all seem to assume Fennell is on a progressive mission, satirizing the useless lives of the Leisure Class. But this is not a satire. This is a slap in the face.

Much has been written about the movie’s twist and the sour turn it takes at the halfway point, when it is revealed that Oliver was not the wretched poor orphan he claimed to be. His father is not dead, his mother not lost to drug addiction. He is not an only child. In fact, we meet very loving, Upper Middle Class parents. Two of them.

So Oliver is some sinister mashup of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Psycho’s Norman Bates.

This is maybe not the shock Fennell intends. When Oliver first describes his wretched upbringing to Felix at Oxford, he paints a such lurid picture — a schoolboy huddled inside a violent opium den — that we do not believe him as easily as Felix does.

Brideshead Regurgitated

And when in Hitchcockian fashion, Oliver proceeds to murder Felix’s entire family, one-by-one, and ultimately, steal the Salbturn estate out from under them, we are shocked only to finally discover how much this movie hates us, its audience, for our prurience in enjoying its first hour.

The extended and music-less gravefucking scene feels only like a punishment. You liked that, didn’t you? You liked that feudal/capitalist consumption porn, didn’t you, you sickos? Now, sit here in your own filth. Literally.

What Hitchcock’s Psycho pulls off so gracefully (our first protagonist exits and the movie hands itself over to a new, less-innocent, main character) Saltburn bellyflops into. Oliver starts as our audience surrogate, then abandons us.

Oliver’s reveal as a simpering, plotting, eat-the-rich vampire, and his pathetic gravefucking loathsomeness, is so complete that as audience members, we find ourselves grasping around for a new protagonist to guide us to the bloody end of the movie (and please hurry).

But there is no one. And so, we find ourselves almost pushed out of the movie by the director herself.

Putting It Up on the Whiteboard

And then, in a final insult, Fennell feels the need, in explanatory flashbacks, to reveal how Oliver plotted each of the murders of Felix’s family, and even the “chance” introduction to Felix back at Oxford. This is played like the reveal at the end of The Sixth Sense. And it is thoroughly unnecessary. We understood all along that Oliver was sinister and dangerous.

We are, at the end, limping out of this movie, browbeaten by the didacticism of the explanations. By the heavy metaphors. And finally, by one last didactic realization: It was about the house all along.

He just wanted the house. He has murdered all our friends, and as the credits roll, he dances naked through the English estate that he has connived away from the bloated aristocrats.

Of course, the movie is called “Saltburn.” The house is in the title. Not the trysts or the parties or even the footmen who made it all happen.

We leave admonished. In 2024, we live Saltburn a dozen times a day. On tiny pocket-size screens. When we are scrolling through travel porn or fashion ads on Instagram, what we think we crave is the wealth of this life. That’s what we strive for, but all we ever really wanted was friends.

Shaking Your Foot at the Ouroboros

I did not enjoy Saltburn, and I don’t think it’s very good, but I am glad it exists. Because capitalism always wins. And it’s certainly been winning lately: Any attempt to make a popular satire of consumerism has failed to dent our covetousness, and only succeed at launching new fevers of consumption.

(Mad Men, for example, a satire of the American Dream as essentially an advertising campaign, launched the midcentury-modern design revival and spurred billions in sales to Millennial urbanites. And on it goes with Don't Worry Darling, etc.)

I like that the poptimists hate it. That 29% of Obama-generation critics at The New Yorker and The Ringer and The Atlantic. The 2010’s ethos of poptimism is really about embracing mass consumerism, being told we must love Andy Warhol’s soup cans because there are so many of them.

I don’t think Saltburn will break the cycle, but I admire how much sourness it mixes into its consumerist gaze. If art-about-consumerism and consumption-as-aestheticism are a serpent eating its tail, Saltburn is a swift kick in the ouroboros. I admire how intensely it hates itself for wallowing in wealth porn, and that it hates us for wanting to.