SALTBURN - A Sordid Picaresque
Spoilers, obviously.
Almost two years ago, long before I had seen the light and migrated my publication from Blogspot to Substack, I published a beefy essay on William Makepeace Thackeray’s classic Vanity Fair. Deep ecologist Chad Haag published a brief analysis of it and I still remember having to scramble on my phone to correct the post’s settings from black text on a charcoal background to white on black after seeing complaints from his commenters about how ugly it was, all while waiting for a flight at Barcelona airport… Long live Substack!
That essay looked at the novel as a subversion of the Picaresque and I feel its insights can be expanded on in reference to another film that I’ve taken over a month to get to writing about - the ever so controversial Saltburn.
Emerald Fennell’s first feature-length film looked to me from the trailer like a Sundance Film Festival rehash of Brideshead, or of the “long summer vacation at a rich Oxford friend’s country estate” trope: the palatial allure masking something deeply sinister this time around - that our outsider protagonist was to be eaten or maybe killed or sacrificed or turned into a lawn ornament by a gaggle of demented toffs. I was ready to be underwhelmed - “how many times can this same cheap formula where the seemingly attractive, well-off and healthy people are secretly evil monsters, be lapped up as “daring” and “subversive” horror?”, I thought. I have to say, I was surprised.
Whatever my critiques of it, and I am by no means unambivalent about the film, I can commend it not only for refusing to play into what’s fast becoming a tired trope (re. Get Out, Midsommar etc), but in being actually quite daring in not only subverting this dynamic, but in challenging the ideological assumptions at its base, however clumsily shocking its own methods are.1
The film centres around Oliver (Barry Keoghan) a seemingly impoverished but studious and intelligent young man from the Northwest of England arriving poor, friendless and out of depth in Oxford, presumably after qualifying for some scholarship or other. Successfully peeling off one awkward early acquaintance, the company of whom means social ruin at the university, he helps the good-looking laid-back and well-liked Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who just so happens to be the heir to a stupendously wealthy aristocratic family, with a flat tyre on his bicycle.
Almost echoing the love of Desdemona for Othello, after plying Felix with tales of his abject poverty, drug-addicted parents and chaotic home life, the two become close friends, their dynamic always tinged with condescension and sycophancy. As Ollie himself says, it “Sounds like an Evelyn Waugh novel”. The film very self-consciously and with wry self awareness looks to investigate this dynamic, with a dash of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and more of the book than the film.2
The film, plot wise, and frankly as far as characters go, was not overly interesting. The estate, the Catton family and Oliver’s would-be obstacle Farleigh are all window-dressing in aid of the central arc - Oliver’s later-revealed plot to ensnare the family and steal the estate from under them.
Attention has remained on the film’s disgusting scenes, the psychopathic Oliver, of which the film is something of a character-study, when viewed in light of its twist, is ruthless but also sadistic and depraved. This is, however, only part of what has made the film controversial. People are far more furious at the film’s refusal to play into the tired ideological formula they paid to see repeated to them.
Sharp and Quick
Saltburn, like Vanity Fair, is a Picaresque narrative that sees a character of humble origins clash with the aristocracy, but just like the famous “novel without a hero” (Vanity Fair), Saltburn too challenges the assumed virtue of a “rags-to-riches” arc. Old school readers may remember my dissection of Vanity Fair’s main character, Becky Sharp, the equivalent of Saltburn’s Oliver Quick3 - similarly appropriate surnames... They are both of them perceptive and intelligent - to the end of manipulation.
While Saltburn hams up the depravity, Thackeray’s novel paints a picture in its main character of an utterly shallow social climber, obsessed with accruing wealth and status. Largely through this character, the novel takes aim at what I called “the ugly side of striving”4.
She (Becky Sharp) is the image of hollow social ambition. Avaricious, vain, cold, calculating, manipulative and deceitful. Where novels of Thackeray’s day had heroes, his biting satire has a yawning gap where a hero ought to be. In the place of the regular fountain of selflessness and justice we have a gaping pit of avarice and consumptive desire. Turning the picaresque on its head, in a sense, Thackeray shows us what in fact goes into social opportunism; the dark side of ambition.5
Ambition is, in many ways, the most sacrosanct value in modernity.
[..] nothing can get in the way of our ability to accumulate more stuff and put on more airs. In its spin on the picaresque, […] critiquing the foundations of the genre’s archetypal hero, it (Vanity Fair) dares ask, “what lies at the bottom of all this striving?”6
Inverting the Picaresque archetype, both Becky and Oliver make us uncomfortable when they ought to be sympathetic. “pitting a slightly awkward middle-class striver against a toxic scion of British ultra-aristocracy and his rich-beyond-measure, one-step-from-inbred family, it should be fairly clear who the good guys and bad guys are. But in Saltburn, it isn’t, and that’s a great part of the fun.”7 There is an ironic discomfort surrounding both of these protagonists.
We want to root for main character and it’s seen as good and commendable to pursue a higher position in life, and right that all people should have access to wealth and prosperity, but where the more classic hero does so with nobility and virtue, Oliver and Becky are shown to be duplicitous, calculating and sociopathic - that is, possessing the traits that actually often lead to success and the accrual of wealth.
Why all the Fuss?
As the film moves into the second act, Oliver’s tales of poverty and domestic chaos turn out to be fabricated, as Felix discovers that his intact and pleasant family lives in a tidy semi detached house in a leafy street. Appealing to Felix on just the same grounds that the Picaresque underdog does to us, this vulnerable image of Oliver Quick is a complete invention. His surname is no accident. He is a shrewd and devious rogue and as it turns out, to Felix’ and the audience’s horror, thoroughly middle class.
The significance of this revelation is very interesting and accounts for, in my opinion, a portion of the outrage expressed among certain people to this film. I feel as though many feel a finger pointed at themselves - at their commitment of a similar fraud. Many people today, for their moral security and sense of self righteousness, depend on a complex of victimhood. In fact, this is central in many ways to Middle-Class morality. While they may never match the aristocracy in refinement or wealth in absolute terms, the bourgeois elite (newly ascendant in Thackeray’s day) and the endless swarm of strivers desperate to find their place among them, have long sought to demonstrate their moral superiority instead. In Victorian England, this was seen in strict Christian values, today it surfaces in maniacal adherence to whatever value is the most current; inevitably some species of victim narrative.
Becky Sharp, in her vacuum in the place of a personality, is bent on consumption and maximal status. At the bottom of her desire, which can never be sated, is a void, a consumptive vortex of envy. The same envy that ultimately characterises many oppressor-oppressed narratives that inevitably call for some kind of material or status concession to redress their claims. Like many in these highly competitive games that go on today, Oliver, while by no means marginalised, exploits the notion of marginalisation for his own gain, tearing through the Catton family one by one Kind Hearts and Coronets style. The middling sort from which he comes, occupying an unstable and shifting gap between the two firmer and more established classes, are an instantiation of social climbing and a kind of social chaos - their success lies inherently in the undoing of a firmer order.
Modern psychology might ascribe to these characters “borderline” style traits, characterised by an internal state of chaos, fragile sense of self and mental instability. To redress the threat and chaos they feel in the world, this kind of person will seek to maximise their own power. Saltburn’s antihero exhibits other dark-triad traits, committing heinous acts on screen that I won’t describe, that have caused outrage on the same level with and often gone together with the complaints about the film’s politics.
Barry as an actor, he's from such a working class background, he's had such an incredible life story to get to where he is, and then this rich girl's got to make a rich film about being rich, got the working class boy in it, got him to do all these depraved things on screen just to make the punchline be: “rich people aren't that bad, if poor people had the opportunity they would.”8
It’s fun to see left wingers suddenly become prudish moralists once they see what the film is putting across, or indeed what it isn’t. They realise they’ve been duped! “What?” they cry, “this isn’t what I agreed to see!”. This outrage stems from people so used to receiving the same message from all the media they consume bucking at a narrative that deviates from it even slightly. Suddenly they find all kinds of things unacceptable and disgusting, which, had they been in service of something politically agreeable to them, they would have been more than happy with. “Brave” and “daring” it would have been. They are taking “[…] the movie to task essentially for being an insufficient ally in the Great Class Struggle.”9
The essence of the controversy is simply that the film doesn’t adequately reinforce the envy-laden politics of the day. It’s remarkable to watch people suddenly become moral prudes when they short-circuit on realising they have consumed media that doesn’t scream what they already believe loudly enough.
Ascendant Injustice
Crucially, differing from Vanity Fair is the triumphant, jubilant ending of Saltburn for its antihero, where in over the top 2020s fashion we see Quick dance fully naked through the conquered Saltburn estate while Murder on the Dance Floor plays. Becky ends up instead with nothing to show for all of her manipulation. Like MacBeth and the archetypal tragic hero, she is met with just retribution and she retakes her proper place. Reminiscent of Thackeray’s other take on the Picaresque, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, where once again the roguish Redmond Barry ends the novel, as “stern Fate had determined”, “poor, lonely and childless”.10 “Stern Fate” governs the internal world of both of Thackeray’s novels, and also that of classical tragedy, in which ambition against divinely mandated order predestines the fall of the tragic hero.
It was in the reign of George II that the abovenamed personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now11
There is no justice in Saltburn, being sharp doesn’t cut it, but being quick clearly does. The binding traits of classic tragedy are missing and there is no cathartic moment - one leaves the film taunted by its glib revelry in the triumph of injustice… or is it that simple? This is not a polemical film, but instead a film that, with something approaching an ironic naivety, for all its debauchery, deals honestly with the time that it comes from - in which “stern fate” is nowhere to be found. There is no righteous force to put things back from disorder, no George to slay the dragon or Thor to kill Jǫrmungandr. All of the film’s ugliness and seeming gratuity can be seen as an engagement with that same fact. Fate has been broken; the dethroners are dancing naked through the palace and there is no noble force to put things right. Those familiar with my work will see a ready connection to my notions of the breach in limitation within modernity - the natural order that regulates itself and is ascendant in the world of tradition has been suspended and we are left with chaos.
The absence of a righteous force to counter the evil of chaos in the film is furthered by the effete and decadent state of the aristocracy that feature in it. The unsympathetic and hedonistic lot we see in the film, mirroring their real world counterparts, whose hands “seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepters”,12 seem no more deserving in some respects than Oliver of their position. This reflects what is held by many traditions, that the dissolution of divine order manifests in the degeneration of the higher castes themselves.
Ugliness and evil are in the ascendant in the world of Saltburn, as they are in our own. Is the author dead? I don’t know, but Fennell’s own intentions13 do not detract from what her work puts across. For all its upsettingness and gratuity, this is not a film that should be dismissed out of hand.
It’s a film that suffers in a way from when it was made: a time already so psychopathic that its elements intended to be unnerving may be written off as trendy window dressing to a dull rehash of a worn out dynamic. It’s a film that seems to make antimodern points through thoroughly modern means and I’m still not wholly sure what to think of it.
One critic humorously remarked “Emerald Fennell’s definition of subtlety is bashing us over the head with a small Le Creuset frying pan rather than one of their massive casserole pots.”
The 1999 film adaptation differs from Patricia Highsmith’s original in a number of key ways. Crucially in Matt Damon’s rather more tragic depiction of the character of Tom Ripley, who stumbles rather than plots his way into the game of impersonation and murder that he plays throughout the film’s latter half. The book instead portrays Tom as a psychopathic opportunist, much more in line with Oliver Quick’s character.
“You’re a quick study, aren’t you?” Freddie to Tom Ripley when he begins to suspect his impersonation of Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999 Film).
Michael Lindsey, “Vanity Fair, Ambition and the English Condition”, Thoughtfox, 2022.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Mark Harris, “Yes, I Will Defend the Politics of Saltburn”, Slate, 2024.
Polyesterzine on Instagram. (Gf sent me it lol)
Mark Harris “Yes, I Will Defend the Politics of Saltburn”, Slate, 2024.
William Makepeace Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, p267.
Ibid. p23.
Julius Evola,
Who knows? At the very least, she has been under attack simply for being from a wealthy background and making a film that doesn’t appear to apologise hard enough for this fact. It could be that some of this was intentional, but I do not believe this to be a polemical film.