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scyllas13thtentacle · 3 months

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Saltburn: class, desire, and perversion

Before diving into back and forth critique let me first say that I immensely enjoyed Saltburn. To paraphrase a film critic (https://www.tiktok.com/@jstoobs/video/7302156309531512106), This film was for the sickos (complimentary). And yes, Hello there, Nice to meet you, that would be me! Lifelong sicko here! This film served filth, it served glamor, it was giving depravity, and to that I say, Thank you mommy!

But now that we've had our fun, we must now sully our snouts digging through something even dirtier, even filthier, even more depraved: literary criticism.

There is absolutely no way to watch this film without being splashed by a torrent of filthy class commentary, like walking on the shoulder of a muddy road in a rainstorm while a truck breaches like Ahab's great white sperm whale through a puddle filled with trash and used condoms.

Lots of critics (https://www.tiktok.com/@jstoobs/video/7302156309531512106?_r=1&_t=8iBVVT8Rgsc) classify the film as a part of the recent genre of "eat the rich" films, even if many argue that the film fails to criticize the elite (https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/61407/1/Saltburn-can-wealthy-people-write-good-class-satire-eat-the-rich-emerald-fennell) (https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/emerald-fennell-Saltburn-emptiness-eat-rich-trend-2757791). For whatever it's worth, the creator Emerald Fennel openly acknowledges the presence of themes of class and desire, especially pertaining to the UK, within Saltburn (https://www.nme.com/features/film-interviews/emerald-fennell-Saltburn-director-oxford-university-3540076). Saltburn is certainly a narrative which thrusts the viewer right up into the English class system, but there's a fierce debate among as to exactly what we are to make of it.

To start with and to frame the conversation, I think it's worth keeping in mind a common narrative, especially common in Britain (https://www.tiktok.com/@luckylikesaintsebastian/video/7317263954055564576), that basically goes like this: the upper class are snooty and vapid, but they have great parties, live luxurious lives, are still the admirable arbiters of discerning taste despite their laughable out-of-touch-ness, and this is generally where you wanna be. The lower class/poor are miserable and it sucks to be them but they are at least interesting in their misery, they have fascinating experiences and dynamic lives, they produce lots of culture most of which is garbage but some of which is neat or at least trashy and enjoyable, and they are fun in their own messed up way and know how to cut loose. The middle class is neither fun nor tasteful nor interesting. They are dull, and banal-- as pampered and soft as the upper class but also laughably tasteless, tacky, and they don't even know how to have fun, and what's more, while soaking in their mediocrity they are sick with envy of their betters who they will never be.

With that narrative in mind, a superficial plot summary might approximately go as follows: Oliver, a member of the middle class, becomes obsessed with fellow university student Felix who is from a wealthy and aristocratic family (the Cattons), and through lies and manipulation, and winning sympathy by pretending to be a struggling member of the lower class insinuates himself into Felix's life, eventually murdering Felix, and with time and patience takes Felix's place within the aristocratic family, culminating in a twisted victory.

From the superficial plot summary it would seem that Oliver is a sort of villain protagonist while Felix and the other Cattons are victims, and based on this framing it's a stretch to even call it an "eat the rich" film, because in the end the rich are more humanized and sympathetic than anyone else, and it seems like the movie ends off by satirizing the middle class more than it satirizes the vapid aristocracy. Sure the aristocratic Cattons come across as unintelligent vapid people, and prove to be users and cowards, but they aren't exactly malicious or evil-- they didn't lie about anything, nor did they particularly harm anyone throughout the movie. To an extent their surface charms and even a minor extent of generosity, however superficial and conditional, is genuine or at least an un-self-aware attempt to be genuine. They are not, for example, trying to lure in Barry Keoghan's character under false premises to knowingly exploit him, in Felix's own mind he is trying to help Oliver. It may be that Jacob Elordi's character only befriends Oliver out of some shallow fetishization of the poor and yes the possessiveness and the power imbalance is toxic but to a certain extent his affection is still real, as real as such a shallow person can have. So even as the narrative makes fun of the aristocratic Cattons for being fools, the real liar, fraud, and exploiter is not the rich who IRL systemically exploit the world for their own benefit without having to ever see the consequences of their action, but rather the status and identity obsessed middle class striver.

This reading of the film is certainly what I've anecdotally seen to be the most common and easily accessible take that is quite common amongst detracting somewhat pissed off viewers (https://www.tiktok.com/@justmeliha/video/7319827265464929569?_r=1&_t=8inEjunAJFy). Especially in light of Emerald Fennel's own aristocratic english background, it seems like Fennel is just punching down when the villain is some sort of middle class envious psycho, while the most interiority is afforded to the rich fools who are the victims of the middle class psycho. It's like she's saying to us: u bitches wanna be us sooo baaaaad it makes you look stupid. All very much in line with the "old money" agenda of mocking new money to suppress upward mobility. After all, the wealthy have been for centuries trying to portray the act of trying to better yourself as cringe.

To be clear, I don't think the viewers with these takes are totally hallucinating, but I still this reading is not totally fair. The more charitable interpretation of the film's meaning, or at least the intended meaning, is that the film indicts and satirizes the obsessive and especially middle class desire, for wealth, glamor, and excess, and not literally the middle class itself. Saltburn in this reading is not really a satire of the rich, but rather it's a satire of class envy and the striving for vapid wealth and status, even after seeing how morally and intellectually bankrupt it is first hand.

In this more charitable framing the Cattons representing the aristocracy are a sort of socio economic carrot that's dangled in front of everyone else, they are the embodiment of the incentive system that keeps everyone else running on hamster wheels trying to get there. Of course most people realize that actual social mobility is near to impossible, and so the next step you'd think would be some sort of revolution because people are sick of a rigged game, but therein lies the real trick: the upper class justify their existence with a sort of subliminal argument of beauty, charm, and taste. The splendor of a place like Saltburn draws us in and we get lost in a sense of empty marvel and it swallows us up. Perhaps some rationalize that the aristocracy's role is to be the bearers and guardians of culture. But the result of this glamour is that people regard them as deserving of their positions of superiority, because by adoring and envying them, we fall under their spell and acknowledge their superiority and legitimize their status. Part of the artistry of the movie is that it makes the shallow charm of wealth look and feel so delightful, replicating and exposing for us the magic.

It's particularly twisted in the fact that it hijacks our healthy and natural yearning for art, culture, and beautiful things, and uses it to justify class based hierarchy, and in turn our desire for art and beauty is twisted into an envy of status, and a desire to oneself by adored and envied the way that we adore and envy those with high status. Class infects our very hearts, it twists our dreams and desires so that the fulfillment of them is not possible without class itself. For as long as people are chasing status, then the class system is justified. Owning a massive beautiful house full of rare art is not possible unless the very few can hoard wealth at the expense of the many. Being a social "better" is not possible without social lessers. If that's your deepest desire then you need inequality to exist, even when you're not at the top of the pyramid. The real trick to the power of the aristocracy is that you have been made to desire your own subjugation.

But this superiority of status is merely a fascade. Without Saltburn, this beautiful house filled with marvelous things, the Cattons appear as they are, trashy and mediocre just like everyone else (https://www.tiktok.com/@authorstephennothum/video/7322537234505223470). If there's one thing this movie is good at, it's cutting through the narrative that the aristocracy are superior to the rest of us by possessing some hidden repository of knowledge and refinement.

The kicker is that Oliver gets to see them up close, seeing them watching Superbad and singing pop music kereoke mere steps from the library filled with shakespeare and classical music, he sees precisely their disinterest in art save for whatever utility it has in impressing other people (https://www.tiktok.com/@authorstephennothum/video/7322537234505223470), and yet he remains under the spell. Despite seeing the reality of what's behind the fascade, he still dreams to be the Cattons.

To a certain extent the Cattons architect their own demise, by creating a charm of wealth and glamor so overpowering that it attracts in the depraved villains such as Oliver. But even with the Cattons all dead, the class system still remains strong. Oliver does not break the wheel, he merely places himself at the top of it.

While I think there certainly is something to the idea of satirizing the middle class enthrallment to wealth, status, and superficial glamor, exposing the limits of merely class envy as a motivation for revolutionary change, the fact that the perversion of Barry Keoghan's character is so out of nowhere and exaggerated and we see nothing of his own life's journey, it's hard to take this critique seriously. Where is he coming from, what are his motives, what's going on in his head besides an all consuming obsession (https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/emerald-fennell-saltburn-emptiness-eat-rich-trend-2757791)? We never really get anything that humanizes Oliver.

As such, the film does feels like an indictment of any middle class individual with any kind of ambition or yearning, rather than an indictment of middle class social conditions and incentives. Contrary to what some critics might argue (https://www.tiktok.com/@jstoobs/video/7321495901942353194), Saltburn absolutely leaves the blame on average people by failing to explore the systemic conditions and incentives effecting society, by ignoring any exploration of cultural conditioning, the processes by which our desires are manufactured and manipulated by wealth, and the fact that these systemic problems are difficult to change. All the film shows us is this fantastically weird pervert who is apparently an average middle class person who out of nowhere has this primal obsession, the cause for him being like this is on himself because we don't see anything else about it. You don't see why he's like that, what perverse social forces have shaped him in such a way, so you naturally blame him himself, his own personhood.

It seems to be saying: it's you, you're an exceptional pervert, a sicko drinking bathwater, a pest-- rather than shedding light on the greater social conditions that give rise to such shallow and perverse glamor seeking behavior.

As such I think this film ultimately shows the POV of the aristocracy. The camera gives the Cattons an interiority even if it's empty and spoiled, it humanizes them and lets you get to know where they are figuratively and psychologically coming from. But it gives sicko perv weird-little-guy Oliver no interiority other than an all consuming obsession that comes out of nowhere; he simply comes in having this desire from day one when he sees Felix through his dorm room window, literally on the very first day of semester.

What's more, Saltburn does nothing to pierce through this narrative of the class system that the middle class is dull, lower class is miserable but interesting, and upper class is best class. It does nothing to disrupt the view that the upper class is where you wanna be, because as we see, literally everyone in the movie is shallow and vapid, you might as well be shallow and vapid and have more fun, better parties, and less worries by being upper class. The upper class is not really more or less shallow and superficial than anyone else, they are just better at it. It shows the upper class as petty and shallow but they are not shown as particularly awful people, they don't go out of their way to cause damage or exploit anyone (but rather people seem to just come up to them asking to themselves be exploited and who are they to refuse?), nor is the systemic harm of inequality portrayed in any meaningful way. The Cattons are not shown as being particularly morally corrupt, or morally vicious, except for the way they use their relationships with lower class people for essentially their entertainment, but other than that they were overall harmless, there was no exploitation on any mass scale. I don't see how generally "slumming it" by hanging out with poor people is really that bad all things considered, and what's wrong with being shallow and having great parties exactly? They have a bunch of servants and save for a throwaway line that the "turnover rate among staff is infamously high" there is no indication of what life is like for these servants, from all appearances they seem like they are doing "fine". If you don't already hate the upper class, they don't really do anything incredibly wrong in this movie, unless you think being shallow, silly, and pampered is itself a sin.

And the narrative does nothing to disrupt the view that the middle class is incredibly dull. Oliver's parents are insufferable and tacky, Pamela is dumb and superficial and can barely take a hint, the people at Oliver's university are pretty boring and shallow, the people at Elsbeth's dinner party are vapid and status seeking whether they be upper class or more-or-less middle class.

So what we have is a film making fun of upper class vapidity but also portraying it as ultimately harmless, while making greater fun of middle class dullness tackiness and class envy, and portraying middle class ambition as being not merely banal but furthermore predatory and perverse.

Class envy and ambition are certainly worthy of skewering, but Saltburn's attempt to explore in a way that does the topic justice are not successful. Oliver's obsession just coming out of nowhere is bad take on the movie's part. But even if we pretend that it was more successful, isn't the focus itself a little lopsided? The film looks at the desire for aristocracy, but leaves alone the fact of the aristocracy itself. The upper class's foibles are in how they treat lower class people as entertainment is apparently nowhere near as perversely, obsessively, and murderously exploitative as the middle class people who desire upper classness. The film has evidently decided that it's more important to go after the people who envy bad and shallow things, rather than the people who actively perpetuate those bad things. The real villain of this story is middle class ambition, which for all of it's faults for being not-revolutionary is surely still not the biggest sin in the grander scheme of things.

I'm not going to say that Emerald Fennel is not allowed to make a film of this message because of her own class position, i think that would be a little bit ad hominem, in fact I would affirm her right as an artist to make art as she sees fit. I just don't think the film succeeds at this commentary.

I think if this movie was made by a creator with a lived experience of, or at least a deep abiding and empathetic interest in, middle class life, struggles, perverse incentives, and desires, then this film could have been made with a lot more nuance and given Oliver interiority. Why is he like this? Who hurt our weird little man Oliver to make him so weird??? And what is it that is making us sick with this class envy? Parasite, for example, was a movie made with the lower class strivers in mind, told from their point of view, humanizing them, fleshing them out, actually to give full personhood and human motivations. Saltburn feels like almost the same narrative, but told from the upper class point of view, and it suffers for it, with Oliver being a monster with a hollow sucking vacuum at it's core.

Unfortunately, Emerald Fennel is not that creator with that ability to bring it nuance. "Death of the author" doesn't mean we don't examine the entire social context around the film's making and of the audience, nor does it mean can't look at a work and then ask ourselves what the work reveals about the creators themselves and their limitations. Emerald Fennel has not transcended her positionality as a nepo baby, and yes it does show in her art. She is allowed to make whatever art she wants, but I do not think she's equipped to do it justice-- and I think the term "justice" is appropriate since I think most would agree that there is a socio political sense of justice to be sought for and valued in any art that portrays injustice, such as inequality and exploitation.

To re-emphasize, there IS a lot to be said about how middle class greed, envy, and ambition being a major barrier the true revolutionary change, to breaking the wheel as they say. It's true that too often we see that despite seeing the corruption and emptiness of the upper class, nevertheless the middle class reacts by fighting to become that, rather than by making common cause with the lower classes to tear the structure down.

And perhaps that's the critique that some might want the movie to be, but that isn't what the movie actually ended up meaning. Fabulous decadence is used as a short hand for being vapid and corrupt but what we really see is that decadence is great fun, and it makes us all want to have decadent parties. Someone else making the movie could have explored how this decadence is made possible only due to the exploitation and overwork of the servant staff, but this path is not explored in Saltburn.

Instead of really diving into the real insidious power of the aristocracy, instead of portraying stories of abuse of staff or the methods by which the aristocracy get and keep their wealth, they chose to focus on the perversions of a middle class pervert of ambition. The villainy of middle class desire is elevated above the villainy of actual aristocratic exploitation. This whole film seems more like a diversion from the behalf of the upper class, trying to get people to look away from them and look towards the Olivers of the world; to dismiss the aristocracy as silly and admitting only to being a bit out of touch and callous, while the real insidious people deliberately out to get you are the middle class strivers.

We should remember that the aristocracy is not just a symbol, a carrot of desire for the plebs. They are also real people with huge amounts of power who need their heads cut off. But the movie diverts your attention away from the deprivations of the actual powerful people, and makes you instead look at devilry of the middle class perverts, the bathwater drinking weirdos, who are portrayed as the real villain. The movie puts the blame on us, basically, the sickos who want decadence.

Critic jstoobs opined that "until we as a collective, confront the fact that our desires for this are stopping us from living in a better world, then we're never gonna fix anything". And while I don't necessarily disagree, are we really going to say that above all it is OUR perverse desires are stopping us from achieving a better world, and not the aristocracy themselves? Are we really going to say that WE ourselves are to blame for capitalism??

That's a misdirection if I've ever seen one! Leave them perverts alone!

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A theory of "perversion"

Or, well, should we leave them perverts alone?

Let's take this opportunity to bounce off on a tangent, broaden the scope of the conversation and talk about the concept of Perversion.

I don't necessarily agree with this following argument which I'm about to lay out, but let's walk through it as a starting point for discussion.

Firstly, let us stipulate a working definition of the idea of "perversion" and "perverse desire". For the sake of this discussion, I think the most useful way to define "perversion" is to say that: a perverse act is any act to which all parties (affirmatively) consent to and desire, which is still nevertheless wrong and morally repugnant; and a perverse desire is a desire which is wrong and morally repugnant despite being held privately and not acted upon, at all or at least not acted upon in any way that affects or is made known to others.

So question is, does perversion defined as such exist? Is perversion defined as such a legitimate ethical concept? And if yes then does an envy for wealth and glamor count as a perversion?

Nowadays in the realm of sexual morality and oftentimes even morality more broadly, we (as in, progressive left leaning people I guess) tend to regard consent, and by that I do mean affirmative and totally unpressured consent with real desire behind it from all parties, as the deciding standard for what kind of sex and desire is morally OK or not. By this view, as long as sexual acts are consented to by all parties (again, real affirmative consent, not just a baseline consent) then it's fine. As such all forms of private single person enjoyment that don't involve any other parties are fine because they don't require anyone else's consent, and private desires that are not enacted are thereby all morally acceptable for the same reason of not involving any other parties. Therefore, by this view, there is no real such thing as as a perverse desire as defined here, which is desires that are wrong despite not violating anyone's consent, because mere desires just don't need anyone's consent.

This view is certainly popular among people like me: people who are very sick of Christianity and the whole concept of sin, shame, guilt, feeling bad about the things you want, who are sick of judgement and moralization and all of that, and just want people to live and let live. "Don't yuck my yum" is the watchword. How can a mere desire be wrong? Desires can lead to bad actions sure but the desire itself is to a great extent not fully voluntary. Saying that the desire itself is wrong is merely to flagellate and shame people who haven't even done anything yet. Therefore, judge not, throw no stones, let people live and lust, let people be free.

However let's look at the thesis of Saltburn as some might interpret, which is the idea that the obsessive desire of the idea of aristocracy is a perversion (let's put aside for now whether or not Saltburn actually intends this message or not, how effective it was at delivering it, and discuss this thesis on it's own merits).

The thesis is that the desiring of the idea of the aristocracy (call it "class envy"), especially by the middle class who already have materially enough so long as they keep working, is a barrier to real progress. Even though this is a desire of a sort of abstract idea and doesn't violate any actual human's consent, even though the desire isn't directly harming anyone, even though people even acting on class envy in normal non-murder ways seems harmless enough (such as engaging in celebrity worship, mundane consumerism and what not)-- despite all of these caveats, the collective desiring of and fawning over wealth, status, and the glamor and beauty that it can buy, nevertheless does cause harm by impeding progress and directing attention and energy away from solving real problems and into a perverse and cutthroat rat race for wealth and status, and gives undue influence and legitimization to the aristocracy, and therefore this desire is still a perversion. And if it's a perversion that means you should be ashamed of yourself, you sicko! And it may even be true that the actual aristocracy and "1%" themselves, who do exist, are themselves on the whole a greater barrier to progress than merely the middle class's desire of the idea of aristocracy (after all the former is concrete and the later is abstract), but even with all these caveats, this is still a harmful desire, a perversion, and we should condemn it and shun it. Even acknowledging that abstract class envy is not more harmful than the existence of the class system itself, nevertheless the desire for the aristocracy is still a repugnant thing and the people who partake and indulge in this desire have sinned.

Welcome to philosophy. I make up fake people in my heads with totally hypothetical points of view and then I argue with them or get upset when I don't know what to say. We're now beyond the scope of literary criticism where I get mad at fictional characters, and now I'm getting mad at hypothetical arguments.

In all seriousness I don't know how to answer these problems and at this point we're getting quite far from the original topics of engaging with Saltburn as a movie.

But what I do know is that desire is personal, and it's political; race, gender, class, beauty standards, status and glamor-- these things are a part of our lives and they move us and shape us. They shape our very dreams, they infect us with hungers and longings that propel the trajectories of our lives, and to take control of our lives on both a personal individual level and politically on a collective level it is important to understand them. At the same time, the personal being political doesn't mean we have free reign to just shame and flagellate average people just living their lives.

And back to Saltburn, what I also do know is that while these questions are brought up by the movie, they are not well explored and has a lot of blind spots, and however much potential it might have had to shed light into this mentality, it unfortunately doesn't really give us the insight that we might have hoped to achieve by analyzing the narrative. So on to the next movie about perverts we go…

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