On the surface, there’s much to enjoy about Emerald Fennell’s new ‘comic thriller’. The New York Times called it ‘Brideshead for the incel age’, which has a nice ring to it, though it does give the ‘thriller’ element more weight than it deserves (incels are frightening, Saltburn is not). It works better as a comedy; there are some whip-smart one liners, largely delivered by Rosamund Pike who approximates very well what Olivia Laing once called the “lockjaw of the seriously posh”. For me, though, it’s more Brideshead for the TikTok age — perfect viewing for when you’re happy to let all your intellectual faculties leave your body.
The characters are flatly good looking, the fashions are premium early-Noughties nostalgia and the landscapes are pleasingly oversaturated. Lovely as long as you’re careful not to apply brainpower. When I did, I found myself feeling as raw and unsatisfied as the time I went on a date with a man who cried about his ex-wife after sex. In fact, Saltburn really triggered the old chip on my shoulder.
Without giving too much away (although there are spoilers below, sorry), Saltburn’s overarching message seems to be profoundly anti-upward mobility. The antihero in the tale is a middle/working class person motivated by pure greed to destroy a poor upper class family. The film bills itself as a satire, and most critics have taken that to mean a satire on the upper classes — but that simply doesn’t bear out.
The poshos come off as silly, sure, maybe a little unfeeling, but ultimately you can’t help but like them. “Oliver I have a complete and utter horror of ugliness ever since I was very young, I don’t know why,” says Pike (playing matriarch Elspeth Catton) on first meeting her son’s new friend, Oliver (Barry Keoghan). “Maybe because you’re a terrible person?” quips Felix, her son (Jacob Elordi). But despite a certain glazed-over shallowness, Elspeth isn’t a terrible person, and as the story unfolds you find yourself oddly routing for her. Even Felix, who has the potential to be your classic toxic lad (Elordi draws heavily on the ghost of season-one-era Spencer Matthews, of Made in Chelsea fame, for his meaty upper class swagger), ultimately comes off as good natured.
The satire falls flat because you can’t help but like them and you certainly like them more than their many lower-class hangers-on. There’s just no sense that they deserve the grim end that’s meted-out to them — which means that the whole thing reads like a morality tale for the privately educated, that moral being ‘keep an eye on the silverware, lords and ladies, those greedy lower classes want to get their hands on our riches’.
Perhaps Fennell meant it this way? Martin Amis said that Brideshead Revisited “squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly”. The idea that everyone has their place, and that the place for those born into nobility is at the top, is just posh person 101. Though it seems to me in particular poor taste coming from Fennell, a jewellery empire nepo baby who counts everyone from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Madonna as family friends.
Or perhaps I’m more sensitive to it all because of this chip on my shoulder? When I was 22 I spent a year interning at Tatler, which was an eye-opening experience for a person who had grown up on an estate in Rotherham. On my first day I was tasked with compiling a list of ‘cool people’ who try to hide that they are, in fact, ‘seriously posh’. I spent the day doing what I would spend most of my days at Tatler doing: frantically scouring the Debrett’s website to get a gauge on who counted as ‘seriously posh’. There were often people like Fennell dropping into the office to talk about their upcoming exhibitions or show off their new jewellery business (in fact, I once met Fennell’s sister Coco this way, she’d come in to talk about her then newly-launched fashion label).
The progeny of London’s well-heeled were Tatler’s stock-in-trade and I’d be agog — how had they pulled off X amazing feat so young? As the time wore on, I realised I could pass in this world but only to a point: there were codes I didn’t understand and contacts I had no hopes of making (when your colleagues come into the office on Monday morning with intel they’ve gleaned while at a countryside shoot with a few minor royals, it all gets a bit “Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more”).
I remember going to one meeting where the topic of discussion was whether heroin was cool again. Now, my next-door-but-one neighbours on the estate had been heroin dealers and to me the question didn’t compute — of course not, how could it be? Had they ever seen a strung out addict desperate for a fix? Not cool. But of course, there were social scenes I simply didn’t understand and the editors looked through me when I scoffed at the thought. What I learned from that meeting was that there were people in the world who had the kind of familial or financial safety net to do heroin in a ‘cool’ way. And it was the same for the 20-year-old artists and jewellers and film directors whose parents had gifted them invaluable contacts and a sense that they belonged at the table — there was always a net to catch them, they could follow their dreams irrespective of how obnoxious that made them seem.
So the overwhelming memory I have from my time at Britain’s premier society magazine was of a creeping realisation that the world was so profoundly skewed in favour of a certain type of person that it was almost laughable for someone like me to even try. I quit journalism for two years afterwards. The internship paid minimum wage, which amounted to around £750 a month — out of which I had paid rent and bills on my single room in Holloway, food, travel, etc. By the time the end of the month rolled around, I was walking the five miles to work (and the five miles back) each day and stealing toilet rolls from the Vogue House bathrooms.
I can’t fault Tatler because at least they gave me a chance, and a wage — and thank god for Kate Reardon (the editor at the time) for overlooking the fact that I’d answered “just a comprehensive near Sheffield” when, in my interview for the role, she asked where I’d gone to school. I didn’t understand why she was asking me where I’d gone to school until a few weeks later when I started the job and was confronted with this whole panoply of private and public schools which each said something about the attendee.
Anyway, after a year they offered an entry level job to someone else (posher than me), and I decided that I could not do any more interning. I was sick of being broke and feeling as if the only way to get anywhere was to know people who owned stately homes. I basically gave up, it felt too hard, that world was too closed off.
And so perhaps it’s this defeated 22-year-old version of myself that finds the ideology underpinning Saltburn so aggravating. A film detailing the horror of upsetting the status quo seems to me like a steaming heap of offensive snobbery and while I think Fennell is a formidable talent (I enjoyed Promising Young Woman immensely), I did leave the cinema after watching Saltburn with the distinct impression that if you stacked them up together, all the things she doesn’t understand about class would take up a very large space.
The moneyed upper classes are not, as Saltburn paints them, misguided bumbling buffoons. They are the people running the country and the worlds of business, the arts, the media — and if you let them, they will happily slam the door in your face given half a chance. Brideshead might have been profoundly anti-egalitarian, but it was also written a long time ago. Maybe we need different narratives now, or at least different voices spinning them.
