Emerald Fennell is certainly more “heavy-handed” in depicting her lead striver as a murderous, calculating, jizz-and-menstrual-blood drinking demon, but there’s a power in letting the viewer know in no uncertain terms that we are (or have been) rooting for the worst person in the story. She gives us a traditional up-by-the-bootstraps, Great Expectations-style fairytale about the proverbial scholarship boy getting over on the aristocrats in the beginning of the story, which we were perfectly content to enjoy no matter how many times we’d already seen it. We loved watching Oliver sheds his outsider status through his homoerotic friendship with the handsome lead aristocrat Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), to see Oliver blossom in the glow of attention from Oxford’s Sun King (Fennell deepens the symbolism by constantly depicting Felix shimmering in morning sunlight).
It’s only halfway through that she twists the knife, by revealing that Oliver isn’t the son of penniless alcoholics he’s depicted himself as, but rather just a covetous upper-middle-class kid who dreams of inheriting an even bigger house. His tragic home life was just a well-calculated tale designed to appeal to all of the Cattons’ noblesse-oblige instincts. He literally murders the entire Catton family and fucks their graves, and by the end of the film he’s wound up with a huge empty estate and no friends, running through the cavernous hallways with his dick and balls flapping happily in the wind.
Whether Fennell was “too nice” in her depiction of all the rich kids at Oxford (she certainly portrays them as snobby, entitled pricks, though she also probably could’ve been meaner) is a little beside the point. And the point wasn’t Gosh, aren’t rich people jerks? but rather to ask the question of who’s worse: the idle, entitled wealthy who are blithely unaware of the suffering of their inferiors, or the ruthless strivers who, even knowing all that, still desperately want to be them? Is it worse to be born terrible, or to aspire to it?
It’s a salient point — after all, isn’t deliberately, calculatedly turning yourself into a rich son of a bitch kind of worse than just being one by accident of birth? — but even more so than that, it’s a clever conceit that puts us in the position of rooting for the pervert. And so then it also asks us the question of whether we want art that stimulates our most humane ideals, or art that allows us to vicariously indulge our most craven impulses within the safe confines of entertainment. Wouldn’st we like to live deliciously? Perhaps we, the viewers, were the real “disgusting brothers” all along, and so forth.
Both are satires of wealth, comedies of class, and explorations of strivers vs. swells. Saltburn is just more open about thumbing us in the eye. And maybe the fact that it asks for a little more self-examination in the end accounts for its much-less-universal acclaim.
