#and when i dont i just abandon stuff. i know all my saltburn meta. vika does. finn knows ALL of it and more. i dont feel like sharing much

[aquickstart]

pls may i have some saltburn takes. i saw u liked my post abt oliver never having read the reading list and it made me giggle.

OH YES DUDE oh i Loved that post because it brings up actually something that for some reason i haven't seen discussed much. oliver's unreliable narration.

i have a brilliant, i think, genius four-question plan for making people understand saltburn, and it has worked before and i will maybe elaborate on it, but not right now. right now i'll talk about one of the questions.

who is oliver telling this story to, and why?

we've established that he's an unreliable narrator at least because it's the logical conclusion for a movie shot in a way that opens and closes with his narrative. but what does oliver being untruthful actually mean for what we know about anything and everything that happened. have you ever obsessed over this particular question. well. i have.

my hot take, first of all, is that oliver is not that smart. he's clever, but the point of the movie is that he's caught up in and driven by desire; desire, pointedly, in the moment, merging desire, adapting to circumstance and leading him on. his want is not concrete from the beginning. his want is insatiable hunger that grows.

so, okay, from the top. the whole meet-cute with felix? because of a punctured tire? eh. idk if that's true. the money thing at the bar, pretending to not have any while he actually did? eh, perhaps. chronologically he then lies to felix about his dad, and this is big, this is deliberate, this is what ties felix to him for good.

what if the first two instances were coincidences? like, felix genuinely in trouble then, oliver genuinely out of cash. makes sense to become attached and actually do something, something impulsive, drastic, when felix seems to be drifting away, and lie about his dad.

interjection: you might be saying, nadia, he lied about his family from the get-go. well of course. i didn't say he's not smart enough to clock what image of a damsel in distress felix would gobble up. i'm saying he didn't do it for the long game, because there was no long game to speak of, as narrator-oliver would have you believe. i think he wanted felix so badly in that moment of several months in oxford, i think he was so blinded that he would've said anything. and he did.

now, i've briefly talked about oliver's feelings about the invitation to saltburn, and i think this is very important here. in the moment, he couldn't possibly know what exactly this invitation could mean, in the long run, only that it is definitely the next step in progression of desire for felix. present-day oliver interjection, and i believed him, after felix said he could leave anytime, i read as a slip up, an admission that oliver didn't plan shit, or at least from the beginning he didn't. it lured him in as soon as he got there, gothic house driving mad-style. he held on to a dream of something elusive (felix as a friend? lover? forever-partner in whatever capacity? i want him so bad i don't care what he is as long as he's there? please? please?).

the other obvious hole to poke at is in the end. venetia very conveniently takes the razors he places for her, and while sure, it could be read as him just hinting at how he conveniently read her fragile state and took advantage of it, i don't buy it. (i'm honestly even tempted to suggest he met elspeth on accident, to then spin a pretty story for his own sake, but him keeping tabs on the surviving cattons all those years tracks with what we know about obsessive oliver; he's definitely known about her flat for a while.)

but those are all minor stuff. i get completely if you think i'm reading too much into it and this is all just a headcanon after all, to be fair. BUT. but.

my second big take is that oliver was/is madly in love with felix. i know, shocking. but you have probably seen people say he wasn't. i will elaborate.

i wasn't in love with him. i loved him. i hated him. what does this sound like. have you ever had a friend come to you after a breakup fuming and telling you how they'll never end up with this asshole for sure and then get back together with him and then break up and say the same thing again.

i loved him, but i wasn't in love with him. i know everyone thought i was, but i wasn't. have you never told anyone something of the sort, specifically the last part, to emphasize just how it's everyone around you that's kinda hung up on whatever it is, and you've moved way past it, actually. have you never told yourself that.

i have. i know many other people who have, too. so, who is oliver telling this story to, and why? there's no one but dead elspeth in front of him. there's no one but himself. fun fact: each time you recall an event, it distorts under the influence of the mix of past and present emotions. each time you recall, you mold memory (source, e.g., x). the way i personally see it, oliver, for whatever reason, retells the story in order to solidify his own memory of it in the way that he wants to remember it. whatever he says, this is his final word, and this is his final truth.

this is also why details slip through, like my beloved i believed him, like the emotional i hated him growing into self-convincing, misleadingly dismissive, definitely unsure i hated him by the end. those are the true emotions that he recalls, those are the times that are hard to rewrite, for whatever reason.

of course, he hated them all. but before that, he loved felix to the point of blindly following where felix's desire led oliver, at least the way oliver perceived felix's desire. it failed, crucially, when felix's desire brought them to the center of the labyrinth, where oliver could not be the desired anymore.

my third hot take in connection to this is that oliver did not know he would kill felix until the very night he did it. he didn't know it, i think, until the last hour, until felix refused to reconcile completely, until he made his blood run cold. i also briefly mention it here, specifically how farleigh is tragically connected to felix's death, in my opinion. this tracks with, again, my strong belief that oliver lies, lies and lies throughout this whole story about wanting to take everything from felix from the beginning; no, he fucking didn't. he wanted felix. he wanted felix to be his. that was number one priority. he wanted felix and whatever else came with it, undoubtedly, but not the other way around.

paradoxically, he also wanted to be felix; he wanted to be him and be with him just as us tumblr people can often relate and the tragedy is that you always have to choose. felix pushed him away, so there was no other choice but to take what was left of felix that oliver could take. hence the clothes wearing, the table scene talk, the refusal to leave.

felix chose not to choose oliver, so oliver became felix. it's his fault. felix promised oliver could leave. felix left instead. what was oliver to do.

but to your point about the books, i think it could be either way, actually. i think he could have lied about it because technically that's also in character for him, he was performing for an audience of his tutor. but i also think that he was, genuinely, a nerd before he came to oxford, and he didn't, and still doesn't, have any friends, and he hates his sisters and his mother and is miserable. he's the perfect profile of someone who'd read king james' bible over the summer, and then some, imma be honest.

so, yes. i think oliver lies about most things in saltburn and i think he's pathetic, lost, confused, grieving, angry, horny, down bad and in denial. and i fucking love him. i so fuckin do.