Saltburn

 "I don't think you're a spider, you're a moth. Quiet, harmless, drawn to shiny things, banging up against a window, and begging to get in. Well, you've made your holes in everything. You'll eat us from the inside out."

A few days before finally watching Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman, I watched John Sayles’ 1987 film Matewan. Matewan is about a 1920 coal miner strike in the titular town in West Virginia that was part of the Great Coalfield War and sparked the Battle of Blair Mountain, the bloodiest conflict in the United States since the Civil War. The battle lines between good and evil are clearly drawn, and Sayles’ sympathy lies with the mine workers, who organise in a union (a union that notably crosses racial lines) and stand up against the thugs sent by the mine owners, who do not hesitate to lie, terrorise and torture. Chris Cooper’s Joe Kenehan (a fictional union organiser invented for the film) lies it out like this: there are those who work, and those who don’t, and to the owners, the workers are nothing but another easily replaced tool in the business of extracting coal. The work itself is dangerous, and frequently deadly, with coal companies disregarding dangers to the miners. It’s generational – consider Johnny Cash’s Loading Coal, “My Pappy said when I was seventeen / You're six feet tall and your face is clean / And it don't look right for a boy that old / To not make a living loading coal", and mining companies have successfully kept out other possible employers from Appalachia, with profits leaving the area and schools underfunded to prevent the future generation of workers from making it anywhere else. Unions improved working conditions and pay, but fell victim to the assault on organised labour in the 1980s and 1990s. I can highly recommend Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, an Appalachian story (inspired by Dickens’ David Copperfield) about an orphan who grows up there in the 90s and early 2000s – it entwines the personal narrative of struggling through failing institutions and deliberately created economic deprivation with a political history of sorts. So much has been written and filmed in the last few years about what happened when the Sacklers threw their ticking time bomb of lies and misery into the mix.

I don’t know why this was all I could think about while watching Saltburn, which happens an ocean away from Appalachia. The scene quoted at the top is my favourite from the film: after hours of watching Barry Keoghan’s Oliver weave his web, or build his cocoon, or play his con job on Felix Catton’s (a name that literally means the lucky one, played by Jacob Elordi) family of titled and landed gentry, Felix’ grieving sister Annabel reveals that she’s figured it all out: but it’s too late, and the plan has already fully hatched and can’t be stopped anymore. Her brother has already died, she’ll be dead soon, as will her father, and her mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike, having a ton of fun being on the other side of the con for once after Gone Girl and I Care A Lot) will be the final, miserable host for Oliver’s ambitions. The parasite will take over the host body completely. There have been plenty of films over the last years that were variations on the theme of eating the rich, some more literal than others (if we want to connect back to the Sacklers here, we can through Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher): variations of it occur in Ready or Not, The Menu, Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc films, the great Parasite. All of these films share the dichotomy between workers and non-workers, who have, mostly through generational wealth (in which the accumulation occurred in the past, and through morally questionable means, or sometimes in the Wild West of the new economy of tech and fame), acquired a life of leisure and luxury, while the quiet staff eases the complications of their lives in the background, mostly unseen (the kitchen staff in The Menu, whose motivations and plight remain mostly unobserved, the complicit servants in Ready or Not, Ki-Taek’s family, eager to switch places). Actual traditional “work” in Saltburn, which mostly takes place in the Catton’s family estate of that name, happens off-screen: someone prepares the lavish meals, unpacks the luggage of arriving guests, tidies the endless gross (and I mean gross: Fennell does not hold back) messes left after parties. Butler Duncan (Paul Rhys), unreadable throughout, seeing everything but revealing nothing, is like a stand-in for everything that happens unseen. The “work” that the film is interested in is the toil of the grifter – the spinning of stories, creation of an image, careful unravelling of secrets and weaknesses. If you went into Saltburn having no idea what it is about, the first reveal that Oliver is not quite what he seems – a boy hopelessly out of his depth in the overwhelming system of unwritten rules of the aristocracy – is when he excitedly asks Felix’ father about the Palissy plates, pretending to have a deep appreciation for the artist, only for the film to reveal that he snuck out at night to read the booklet to prepare for the conversation. Saltburn doesn’t succeed in everything it does (and maybe is weaker for leaving so many things in the air, not providing clarity about motivations, and revealing Oliver only in what he chooses to tell the final victim, with no other interiority), but it does excel in contrasting the ease and boredom of Felix’ family (it doesn’t feel like anyone is still doing any kind of work – the mother mentions having worked as a glamorous model, once, in days past) with Oliver’s constant labour. The Catton’s are living off the prestige and money of their ancestors, and the result of their leisure feels like a scene, frozen in time: there is much lounging, drinking, the only real distraction from the nothingness and meaninglessness appears to be an obsession with gossip (Carey Mulligan’s character only exists at Saltburn to provide it, and dies off-screen, missed only for the drama that is now absent), and everyone exists in a vacuum where empathy and true engagement with the outside world cease to exist. These empty shells are so easy for Oliver to inhabit – Venetia accuses him of being a moth, eating holes into the fabric of their lives, but there isn’t much to start off with except the estate itself, with all of its ridiculously historical and notable artwork. One of my favourite bits of the film is the reveal that the Cattons aren’t even using all these rooms – rooms with names – but have carved out a bit of the estate in which they’ve recreated an almost middle-class living room, with pictures taped to the wall and a television that plays Superbad. The wealth and status here do not result in any kind of intellectual or artistic superiority, and to a 2024 audience embedded in the current aesthetic of understated elegance (Gwyneth Paltrow at the ski trial, etc), what they wear feels tasteless at best, if deeply reminiscent of 2006/2007.

All of this is to say that there are levels here to the idea of a parasite inhabiting and feeding off its prey until it eventually becomes what it consumes: The Cattons are feeding off whatever has afforded their family the privilege of its riches (much has been written about where precisely generational aristocratic wealth in the UK comes from), they are feeding off the labour of their staff, and they are feeding off the misfortune of others with their titillated obsession with gossip. Oliver knows that the real story won’t get him anywhere, which is why the reveal of his true roots is so effective: he tells Felix that he comes from poverty, that his parents are addicts, and he invents a story that his father has died, which is the key that gets him through the door (because Felix, among all of them, may actually possess empathy, not just his mother’s glinting eyes whenever she hears how someone else has fallen). When Felix takes him back to his hometown, what they find is the most middle-class scene: a charming house, sprinklers on, presumed dead father working in the garden, a mother who feeds them snacks and has baked a birthday cake. The great story of Oliver’s life comes apart at the seams, and what lies underneath it is a mundanity that deeply embarrasses him, maybe more than the lies he’s told. Felix is gracious about the deception and doesn’t drop Oliver until they’re back at Saltburn, but the break sets off the catastrophe that befalls the family (of maybe it was inevitable anyway: Fennell leaves it frustratingly vague at what point Oliver laid out the entirety of his plan, which I suppose hinges on if we believe him that he loved Felix beyond wanting to literally inhabit his skin). The revelation that this middle-class mediocrity could breed a monster like Oliver just as well as a deprived childhood in poverty might is solidly executed: in his return, he seems ill-at-ease in the house of his parents, as if he never really fit in, as if he was born an unknowable stranger (and it is fitting that there is a whole Stoker-esque sense throughout the film that he is a vampire, if not a literal one: consuming blood and other fluids, lurking, taking possession of fellow interloper Farleigh, who threatens him with his capability to comprehend what he is attempting because they are alike, like a succubus).
Maybe this is a tenuous argument, but if they key to this story is the idea of undeserved wealth being repossessed by someone who works harder than his marks, who puts in the hours and deceptions to become worthy of it – and there is a deep sense to Saltburn that it is a story profoundly inspired by Patricia Highsmith’s tales of amoral grifters who run circles around their victims, and therefore deserve that the audience champion their success – then the distinction between those who work and those who do not still applies. It becomes separated from any moral outcomes: a fair share of wealth and profits, or an improvement of working conditions, or even the idea of a group of people joining together in solidarity because of shared interests. Oliver as Tom Ripley is an interesting thought experiment because there is such a range of interpretations in the adaptations of Highsmith’s novels between how much of Ripley becoming Dickie Greenleaf is inspired by a sexual drive to possess what he desires, and to become what he covets (I think Felix, as a character, is more captivating than Dickie, who always comes across as too vain and vapid to truly emerge as an object of obsession beyond his possessions, his wealth). Oliver isn’t burning this shit down, or even critiquing it all – there is no version of the story where Saltburn, which stands so perfectly for how solidly built the class system is, burns down to ashes. He just succeeds in brutally evicting the tenants, who have done little to maintain their place, and becomes an improved, more competitive, and more convincing version (note his transformation into understated elegance towards the end of the film, when the long con comes to fruition) of what they tried to be.   

Saltburn (2023), directed by Emerald Fennell, starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe, Sadie Soverall, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Carey Mulligan.