No Substance #168: Saltburn and Other Concerns
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I watched Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn the other day. It’s about a young man, Oliver Quick, who is invited to spend the holidays with a rich friend and his equally rich family on their estate, Saltburn. It’s a well made film, but I didn’t like it. In fact, I found it to be a rather cynical display of brand management by the wealthy in this day and age when the rich are more often than not described as villains.
Emerald Fennell was born into wealth. She is the daughter of jeweller Theo Fennell, the so called King of Bling, and the sister of fashion designer Coco Fennell. To illustrate just how much money and privilege Emerald comes from and has, you should know that the magazine Tatler covered her eighteenth birthday and all its celebrity guests. Normally, I wouldn’t bother mentioning this, but there’s a lot of class commentary in Saltburn that has been designed to portray the rich as victims and the middle class as grasping, jealous monsters who cannot be content with what they want. I say the middle class and not the poor here because Fennell doesn’t give voice to any poor people in the film. They’re simply a prop she has both sides of the film use callously and with disregard while she paints her educated middle class as psychopaths. The wealthy aren’t without fault, I should say, but in Fennell’s world they’re family orientated, kind, and largely well meaning if a bit self centred.
Fennell’s previous film, Promising Young Woman, was a smart, knowing film. I liked it quite a bit. It presented itself as a revenge film and it was, subversively so. It’s hard, then, to believe that the same intellect and subversion isn’t at play in Saltburn. The difference is that this time it is not being used to critique men, or societal attitudes towards men, but to defend the wealthy. Fennell wants to show you how hard it is to be wealthy, how people will constantly try to take advantage of you and your wealth, and how in their jealously, the wealthy are stripped of their personal traits and turned into something not quite human. And look, that’s no doubt true, though to say that and not address the massive inequalities that exist because of wealth is either deliberately neglectful or because you don’t understand the problem. It is, frankly, a little bit obscene to watch a film that tells you, again and again how wrong it is to be envious of wealth, how you should be happy with what you have, when the creator of the film has come from the privilege she tells you that you can’t have and you ought to just suck it up and get on with your life.
The fact that Fennell has settled on the middle class as the subject of her villainy is also a telling one, I think. You see, no one actually gives a shit about middle class people, especially comfortable, professional middle class people who have aspirations of greater wealth. Those people have long been ridiculed in film and literature. They’re at best boring, vacant zombies who shuffle from gardens to jobs to liquor cabinets, or psychopathic monsters who murder children, or the handsome sons of wealthy families. It’s easy to suggest that a monster would and could emerge from those hills, and even easier to make it so that no one could sympathise with him. It’s from here that the film’s cynicism finds its well. If Oliver Quick had been genuinely poor, you would have felt sympathy for him, no matter his deceptiveness, or violent acts, and the wealthy would never have been able to be victims in comparison.
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