Burn After Viewing
The entertaining "Saltburn" falls apart in its last act, but the film managed to leave me with uncomfortable feelings about my own college experience.
Upon its Amazon Prime streaming debut this week, I watched Saltburn, the controversial, satirical film from director Emerald Fennell about a young man who infiltrates a wealthy British family. From the volume of reviews, articles, and think pieces about the movie, I was expecting to be blown away by its sheer audacity and left pondering its message about the feckless irresponsibility of the rich. Instead, I found myself pleasantly entertained for the run time but unimpressed with the illogical story and uneasy about the muddled message of the film’s clunky final act. While formally Saltburn mirrors the setup and setting of Brideshead Revisited, beneath the surface, it is a close copy of the first half of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1998), but a degraded one that somehow manages to be less insightful than the very similar film made a quarter-century ago. However, I will confess that it made me reflect uncomfortably on my own college experiences.
Saltburn follows the Dickensian-named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) during a vaguely defined period at Oxford University, variously stated to be the first year of “the class of 2006” (thus presumably 2002, unless Oxford number classes differently), 2006, sometime after the release of the 2007 film Superbad on DVD, or around the time of the 2008 songs the characters sing. It takes place over “six months,” according to one character, though it seems to have begun in August or September and ended the following August. The ambiguity is, I suppose, a bit of dream logic, and at any rate, it has nothing to do with the story. I was in college a few years before these characters, so I recognize the signifiers of the era, namely the limited role of cellphones.
Ollie, as he comes to be called, is somewhat stiff, formal, and bookish, attending school on scholarship. He finds himself alone and lonely in his first days at university and vaguely contemptuous of the only student to befriend him, an even bigger nerd whose idea of conversation is to demand math problems to solve. Instead, Ollie develops an infatuation with Felix (Jacob Elordi), who is everything Ollie is not: tall, impossibly handsome, charismatic, stylish, beloved, and—most importantly—wealthy. They live in the same college (the Oxford equivalent of a residence hall), but Felix doesn’t know Ollie exists; Ollie is simply background noise in his charmed life.
One day, Felix’s bicycle breaks down on the way to an important class, and Ollie happens upon him and saves the day by lending Felix his bicycle. This leads to a friendship between the two young men that intensifies rapidly. Felix brings Ollie into his elite social circle and supports and defends Ollie against the snobbery of his friends, who look down on the non-rich. Saltburn depicts their bond as intensely homoerotic, though Ollie insists he is not in love with Felix in the very same breath he claims to love him deeply. When Ollie informs Felix that his father suddenly died and he can’t bear to return home to his drug-addled mother, Felix warmly invites Ollie to spend the summer with him at his family’s sprawling stately home, Saltburn.
(Some major critics have criticized Felix, and one even called him a secret villain, for extending kindness to Ollie because they read a rich person befriending a non-rich person as inherently patronizing and abusive due to power differences. Indeed, one review suggested that Felix shouldn’t have extended hospitality to one person but should instead have used his money to help categories of oppressed people impersonally. He’s a teenager helping out a buddy, not a foundation distributing grants, for Pete’s sake! Felix’s sister tries to hurt Ollie by suggesting Felix sees him as a toy, like his guest from last year, but she is not a reliable narrator, and the evidence presented in the film only shows Felix as kindhearted, if somewhat oblivious to the cultural differences between the aristocracy and everyone else.)
(Warning: Some spoilers for Saltburn follow.)
Once ensconced at Saltburn, Ollie’s infatuation with Felix becomes an obsession, not just with Felix but with his life and his world. Ollie seems to both want Felix and to be Felix, and to that end he sets out to manipulate and maneuver himself into possessing everything Felix has and is and vanquishing any threat to his ascension—even Felix himself. The remainder of the film unravels the lies Ollie told in his social climbing, and the film becomes increasingly illogical and nonsensical as the story loses focus and turns Ollie into essentially a supervillain who masterminded a decade-spanning Bond villain-style scheme of absurd complexity. Saltburn never quite balances the cold-blooded, vampiric master manipulator version of Ollie against the scenes of Ollie longing for and weeping over Felix, a problem doubly compounded by sensationalized images of Ollie performing explicit acts that simultaneously render Ollie’s internal desires in a literal physicality and serve to repulse the audience. If the movie’s theme was supposed to be a takedown of the rich, rendering the middle-class antihero a pathological, perverse archvillain is a strange way of criticizing the wealthy.
While the basic outline of Saltburn—a young man from a humble background becomes infatuated with a handsome playboy and murders people to steal his life—is the same setup as The Talented Mr. Ripley and even certain scenes play as mirrors (notably the bathtub scene, which in Saltburn renders grossly explicit what Ripley only implied at an angle in its bathtub scene), it’s worth comparing the two films’ main characters. (I’ll skip the original Ripley novel, as the movie made several alterations.)
Both Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) and Oliver Quick share much in common. They are both social strivers; they both employ the same methods to fake their way through high culture; they are both whip-smart mimics dissatisfied with their lives; they both think they deserve to be among the elite; and they both will kill to achieve the life they believe fate unfairly denied them. The two men are also both queer-coded, though, strangely enough, the older movie was explicit about Ripley being gay but deeply closeted, while the new film is coy about its antihero’s actual feelings, suggesting that he is primarily a parasite and predator. And it is this difference that makes Saltburn less powerful than Ripley. Tom Ripley, while a pathological murderer, came to his crime of passion through a true tragedy: He was gay in the 1950s, when it was not possible to live such a life openly while aspiring to the greatness he hoped would be his. Societal oppression and personal rejection drove him over the edge. By contrast, Oliver Quick has no real tragedy other than an incel’s generalized rage. Ollie invents fake tragedies that never happened to hide his mundane middle-class life and cast himself as a victim and thus more worthy of love. At a university in 2006 (or whenever in the 2000s), he could have adopted whatever sexual identity he wanted. The viewer can feel for Tom Ripley even while recognizing him as a villain, but Oliver Quick has no redeeming qualities, not even Ripley’s overeager charm.
To a lesser extent, the same coarsening applies to the objects of their desire. Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) is handsome and charming, but callow and fickle, and occasionally cruel, and when he rejects Ripley because he has grown bored with him, the viewer’s sympathy for a moment falls with Ripley, just before the killing blow falls on Dickie’s head. Dickie’s rejection feels unkind. But in Saltburn, Felix is, yes, handsome and charming, but also almost preternaturally sweet and kind. At each stage, the fissures in the friendship between him and Ollie are obviously Ollie’s fault, clear transgressions that justify the final rupture when Felix discovers some of Ollie’s lies. And even then, at their last meeting, there is still an erotic charge to their parting, reminding the viewer of what might have been had Ollie not been, well, evil. It’s less subtle, but also less emotional to witness.
The two movies’ conclusions underscore the key difference: Tom Ripley “wins” but at a terrible cost. To preserve his new life of wealth and privilege, he kills his new male partner, with whom is presumably in love. Oliver Quick “wins,” but he is incapable of real love, so his murders mean nothing to him, and he even delivers a final speech about how even his love for Felix was really hate. (This contrasts with the earlier scene where he literally fucks Felix’s grave while weeping, but Ollie is psychotic and an unreliable narrator, and it’s never fully clear whether he felt anything real in killing Felix to avoid being exposed.) There is neither tragedy nor catharsis, only a sort of rote cleverness to the ending and a muddled message that comes close to attacking the non-wealthy as feral parasites. Saltburn’s worldview is perhaps closest in message to H. G, Wells’s The Time Machine, in which humans devolved into two races, the beautiful idiots and the bloodthirsty savages.
And yet, as much as I found the ending to Saltburn almost laughably silly, the early scenes made me terribly uncomfortable for a different reason, an almost painful recognition. I will be the first to admit that I have never looked like Matt Damon, but when Barry Keoghan arrives on campus in Saltburn in his preppy but mass-market clothes, his helmet of hair too neatly combed, his face hidden beneath glasses, moving stiffly and a little too purposefully, it almost felt like Emerald Fennell was satirizing me. Except for the wave in my hair I never could control, it might as well have been me on the screen.
But I almost couldn’t watch the subsequent scenes where all of the other first-year students quickly befriend each other and Ollie is left alone, his only acquaintance and even nerdier fellow who seems perversely proud of not fitting in. The look of annoyance and repulsion Ollie can barely hide is one all too familiar to me. I distinctly remember the awkwardness of the mixer the college threw for freshmen the first night on campus, how quickly everyone else had formed cliques, and the way somehow everyone had slotted me into the “nerd” category and I ended up shunted to the side. Just like Ollie, the only person who tried to befriend me was an even bigger nerd—a gangly, awkward, bespectacled fellow whose idea of conversation was to quote Monty Python lines and talk about economics.
And, oh, how I resented it.
I had hoped to be able to go it alone in college, to make friends with people who shared my interests and goals, and I hated that it never happened. Or maybe it did and I just refused to accept that my lot in life wasn’t to join my journalism classmates in their preppy world but to listen to prematurely old young men complain about the kids these days.
I’ll grant you that I probably set my sights too high and aimed too far up the social ladder, but I gave it a good try and failed. I had come to college alongside classmates from high school, one of whom I was quite close with. He, of course, led a charmed life almost entirely free from consequences and in what seemed like minutes had leveraged his athletic prowess to become the most popular fellow in the freshman class. I didn’t need to work hard to infiltrate a social circle like Oliver Quick or Tom Ripley; I only needed to ask, and if I could not earn the social status I wanted, I could borrow it. And that’s how I ended up enmeshed with a pack of jocks and granted conditional entre to the uppermost social levels.
Let me tell you: For all he perilousness of such a position, I can’t help but see the appeal. It’s so much better on the inside than the outside. It was all very much like what you see in Saltburn, except that my only lie was one of omission—it was neither the time nor the place to be gay—and thanks to my academic prowess (unlike Ollie’s lie, I really was the top student at college) it was more of a connection between equals and opposites, rather than the massively unequal power dynamic that leaves Oliver Quick and Tom Ripley angry and insecure. Nevertheless, my nerdier acquaintance gave me nearly the same warning that Ollie’s does to him about what would happen when the high-ranking buddy randomly moves on, and though it took years, it was just as true. It does come suddenly and without warning, and the whole train of hangers-on and dependents move with him. But the experience left me enriched in ways that listening to a funhouse mirror of myself quote Monty Python could not.
So I will hand it to Fennell for making me squirm with a grotesque exaggeration of my own experiences. I’m not sure I could call Saltburn an enriching experience, but it was an effective moment of recognition that there but for the grace of God go I.
I'll be watching tonight or soon ...