Saltburn, Seduction, and What Turns This Generation On
Saltburn is a meditation on the power of seduction, slipping into the stolen clothes of a rags-to-eat-the-riches story. It’s The Talented Mr. Ripley if he’d hidden Dickie’s body from the audience. The film, set in the summer of 2006, first at Oxford University and then at the eponymous castle estate, is placed so firmly in a recent past that we can’t help but set up narrative expectations. Nostalgia forms as we cram ourselves into university halls. We create clean dichotomies. Nerds and jocks. Hopeless crushes and fledgling awkward romances. Bitchy enemies and friendships that should last forever. It makes us ripe for seduction and in turn deception by our narrator, Barry Keoghan’s Oliver.
Saltburn, and by extension, its protagonist, uses short-hand archetypes to influence how we perceive its cast of privileged characters. A desire is catalyzed in us to see the clueless rich come crashing down, justifying any cruelty with which they’re brought to heel. Categorization becomes characterization — before Emerald Fennell’s script carefully subverts us at every turn.
From the first frame, we’re situated in the spider’s web. We’re told so, clearly and honestly. Oliver says he protects his love by watching over him in ways that are controlling and obsessive. Yet our sympathies for an apparent underdog are twisted as successfully as Oliver affects every other member of the Saltburn estate. We are coaxed into rooting for him through his apparent character arc. He grows from a family tragedy into confident flirtation, exerting vengeful manipulations. Even as things slide into the audacity of blood-soaked fingers, we are open-mouthed and intrigued, before a final, inevitable, fatal corruption of his morality.
We are induced to believe Oliver is being enticed into a place where he is out of his depth. He seems fated, endangered beneath the oppressive thumb of gothic tropes; the red herrings of a Rebecca-like groundskeeper that hangs in shot for a moment too long or the chequered past of the house’s matriach, played to perfection by Rosamund Pike. All this serves to distract us from the credibility of Oliver’s sob story.
Much has been said of Saltburn’s use of a unique aspect ratio. It has been adopted to capture the grandeur of the set and frame its sparkling, gorgeous aristocrats as if they were figures in classical artworks. Yet, what is most telling is how the protagonist comparatively sits within the frame. Oliver is tiny in a film of gargantuan proportions. We find him awkwardly placed in the Oxford uni bars, dwarfed ominously by the doors of the castle, infantilized beneath the great arms of his co-star Jacob Elordi. We are seduced into the material pleasure of its atmosphere, then befuddled by irreverent contrast; the traipsing of cheap tinsel over chandeliers and tales of illicit sex acts beneath vaunted portraits.
The upper classes’ carelessness towards that which is mouth-wateringly unattainable for the audience demonstrates the decay of the formality of the house. It shows the layer of separation of aristocrats from ordinary people becoming that much more illusory. It is the absolute belief in their unjustly wielded power and resources that keeps the family from crumbling, and in-turn every effort to appear more down to earth and human makes them weak to someone like Oliver — who sneaks in from the corners of the frames, leaning upon shadows. It is a testament to their entitlement that they don’t realize this conflict is what makes them vulnerable — that castles like Saltburn stand because of resoluteness rather than common qualities like kindness.
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This theme is no better embodied by the film’s central object of lust. Felix — eyebrow studded and Polo-shirted — is represented as an icon of Greek masculinity that Oliver paints more purely than a marble statue. The applicability of their unconsummated queer yearning and lavender field gazes to Tik Tok aesthetics seems itself a mirror for the superficial pose of Oliver’s affection — that even his most authentic emotion is more useful as a short-hand for a feeling, a justification for his actions rather than a sincere desire for connection.
Oliver — like everyone updating their profiles with the best angles of their holiday snaps — wants to believe his own stories. His passive love, one of a doting observer, is revealed to be more akin to a desire for inhabitation and possession.
Through the construction of a tragedy, as cautionary as Little Red, it seems Oliver is being swallowed in the jaws of the castle, yet it is Oliver’s appetite that is most consuming. This story reveals itself to be as pre-meditated by its protagonist as those who made the film. In his escalation to an unyielding killing spree, we are left wondering if we too could dispel our empathy, to romanticize and follow our desires if we felt as justified as Oliver portrays his experiences.
His journey of sexual power plays challenges the lines of fantasy — how much we want to dominate or submit, to be told what to do or take what we want. At first, we are scandalized by the boldness of erotic taboo being enacted within the social suffocation of British upper-classmen, only to be left with the post-coital realization of their consequences once we exit the bedroom.
The sexual tension in this film is so appealing precisely because it is taboo, violating and voyeuristic — and by creating perfect victims, we allow ourselves to suspend our moral judgments. Even if our response is to react with shock at the depravity, we have looked closely at acts most would not normally watch or voice. In an age of endless franchises, we need to face the fact that people don’t always know what they want — and lets face it — they don’t know everything that will make them wet or hard. Saltburn examines how the neuroses and social mores of the upper class can dictate it, but in its execution demonstrates that oftentimes its up to artists to display it. When one doesn’t get exactly what one wants, in being unnattainable, one risks the want for the thing to become stronger, or for their wants to mutate into something altogether darker. Being bold about what you want can make you powerful whilst being too predictable in letting others knowing it about you can make you weak. Saltburn succeeds precisely because it resists being the film you expect it to be and delights in shocking in an age that thinks it has seen it all. What’s more seductive than surprise?
The film and its success stands in defiance of the apparent negative and ambivalent reaction of gen-Z towards the apparent “excessiveness” of sex in film. The new generation doesn’t just want happy uncomplicated representation ala Heartstopper, but have been crying out for something that broke from the stereotypes of the male gaze that defined the sex scenes of the culture we were brought up in.
Ultimately, Saltburn is the story a vampire — born of a vampiric culture — wants told to us. Oliver knows only to feed but, observing the duplicity of his host family, he learns how to play with his food. It is no accident that an animatronic set of the family comprises the final shot of the film. He plates them as he pleases. Oliver succeeds because he allows others to hold their facades of conformity and respectability, whilst continuously shedding his own. He knows what is sacred to people’s status and sanity, even when there is no sense in what holds them together, even as the curtains are stained scarlet and cracks emerge in the walls.
It is only Venetia whose armor breaks just enough to see him for who he is. Oliver leaves it unclear if she is rewarded with the control she craves, whether she takes her fate in her own hands or if she’s met with one final authentic expression, one of rare candid violence. She is the only one who gets to see the monster. Regardless, its too late — dying eyes opened, still as Ophelia in a bloody bathtub. The film asks us to play voyeur — to want to violate the secrecy and privacy of Oliver’s targets — and makes us complicit in every window-watching, bath water-drinking moment of it.
Ultimately, when we are seduced, we see what we want to be and believe. We want our fantasies to become true. We want to be lovable and have our consciences clean. We want to be told or shown how to do it — and that makes us easy to be used; to turn our closed eyes to crystal chandeliers, and our throats to the vampire’s bite.
