SALTBURN
Directed by Emerald Fennell
Amazon MGM Studios
IN THIS AGE of biopics about famous people—Leonard Bernstein and Bayard Rustin are current examples—along with historical films about ancient Rome or World War I, it is somewhat reassuring to see a film that plays fantastically with entirely fictional creations. That would describe Saltburn, which begins at Oxford with characters seemingly adapted from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: a young, handsome aristocrat named Felix and a smart, middle-class student, Oliver, who was lucky to get into Oxford.
Oliver immediately becomes smitten with Felix and, as the plot unfolds, with his family. Waugh is actually name-checked early on in the film. However, he is soon left behind in a narrative that turns shades of The Talented Mr. Ripley when the middle-class Oliver (played by Barry Keoghan) befriends the super-rich Felix (Jacob Elordi). Felix brings Oliver home with him and introduces him to his family at their summer estate, known as Saltburn. We learn in due course that Oliver is steadily implementing a long-term gameplan to kill off each member of the Catton family, including Felix’ sister and mother, so that, if he succeeds, he’ll wind up inheriting everything.
This extraordinary scheme is laced with sexual perversity and queerness throughout, as Oliver attempts to seduce or sexually manipulate everyone around him, all the while plotting how best to eliminate them. But is this a queer film? To be sure, we only discover the depths of his fiendish plans by the end of the film (though you can see it coming), and some of the narrative does seem to spin out Oliver’s unrequited feelings for Felix as well his own sexual fluidity. That fluidity comes in handy when deployed as part of his plan to weasel his way into the lives and affairs of the Catton family. And this is what Saltburn is really about: the seductions and pursuit of wealth and respect. The Cattons are depicted as pretty despicable people, emotionally attenuated, blithely unaware of the world, and often vicious to those around them. And yet, their lives of leisure and those fantastic parties are apparently too attractive to resist.
While we might read Oliver as pathological, and queerly so, I can’t help but think that the film’s focus on the pursuit of wealth is why it isn’t really a very queer film in the end. Sure, there are a lot of “queer” goings-on, broadly defined: fucking with menstrual blood, a bit of domination play, intergenerational intimacies. And Oliver seems genuinely smitten with Felix at times. But all of this perversity and homoeroticism plays itself out in a context of great wealth and, more to the point, the adoration of wealth—that most normative desire of our culture. There’s nothing queer in that, if you understand queerness as celebrating desires in opposition to the norm.
If anything, Saltburn, which basks far too much in conspicuous consumption to be a critique of the lust for wealth, might—just might—be salvageable as a critique of homonormativity, or the alignment of gayness with assimilation at its most extreme expression. Even so, there’s nothing startling or particularly new about the mobilization of homoeroticism for greed and power. So all of the queerness in the film just seems like so much titillation in a narrative centered on the relentless and unethical pursuit of greed. The word “queerbait” applies here insofar as certain queer trappings are deployed to give the film a queer bona fides—as well as a kinky subplot—without ever exploring the question of what it means to be an LGBT person, historically or today.
The closest Saltburn comes to such exploration happens when Oliver hovers over Felix’ grave, other mourners having dispersed. Sobbing, he slowly disrobes and starts to fuck the newly disturbed earth over the coffin. The requiem music ceases and viewers are left with a seemingly distraught Oliver mimicking intercourse over the buried body of his beloved. Maybe he really did love Felix, after all. Whatever. The pleasures of abjection are on full display, underscored by the lack of a musical score except for the pounding rain, which will never wash away all of Oliver’s sins; we can be sure of that. It’s a powerful but fleeting scene.
Oliver isn’t Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder, whose romance with the rich Flyte family is just part of his journey toward his true romance with the Catholic Church. And he isn’t Tom Ripley, one of my favorite fictional queer protagonists, whose acquisition of the finer things is secondary to the sheer pleasure he takes in inventing, impersonating, and becoming another person. Instead, Saltburn’s essence is revealed in the final moments, when a triumphant Oliver beholds all that he has gained: a great big house.
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. For more about his writings, visit: the-blank-page.com.
