Eat the Rich, but Be the Rich: Saltburn
obsession with wealth, power & the destruction of a family
Spoilers for Saltburn
In Emerald Fennel’s Saltburn, middle class Oxford student Oliver (Barry Keoghan) gets thrown into the world of the rich when he spends the summer at his friend Felix Catton’s (Jacob Elordi) mansion. Oliver, obsessed with the rich boy, tries to get Felix’s attention by manipulating his way into the Catton family. When everything goes wrong and Felix finds out about Oliver’s plotting, Oliver begins to violently force his way to the top. Eat the rich, but do kinda feel bad for them.
At the beginning of the movie, we sympathize with Oliver: we see how he, coming from less money than the people around him, has to work for everything at Oxford, only to get discredited, while the rich people with connections do not have to do anything and still succeed. In the first half of the movie, the rich get critiqued and satirised; they love to seem nice to their less rich friends, to prove how generous they are, but it is actually just a performance and a display of wealth and power.
During the second half of the movie, the audience witnesses one plot twist after the other, as our unreliable narrator Oliver destroys the Catton family, one by one, making the audience sympathise more with the Catton family than Oliver sometimes. Sadly, Emerald Fennel tends to sacrifice character development, thematic depth and cohesion for the shock value of her plot twists, making her critique of the rich more muddled. It is unclear what exactly Emerald Fennel is trying to criticise — The rich? The disparity between rich and poor?
Still, there are many scene that stick because of their shock value and because of how disgusting they might be to some people (I do have to say that after seeing everyone’s reaction before watching the movie myself, I was expecting those scene to even be far more disgusting).
Emerald Fennel excells as a director far more than as a writer: she’s great at montages and crafting beautiful images, everyone and everything looks great (especially Rosamund Pike in her beautiful dresses). The visual language of the movie offers symbolism and conveys the emotions of the characters. Everyone’s acting is amazing, the dialogue is great (especially everything Rosamund Pike’s character Elspeth says)(I secretly love her), and the movie is definitely fun to watch and pretty to look at. I love how Felix wears angel wings at Oliver’s birthday party, showing how Felix sees himself (as innocent and good). I love the relation to the greek myth of Icarus — whose father build him wings, just for Icarus to fly too closely to the sun and burn to death; Felix has everything but his optimism and belief in the good of Oliver causes him to die. The wings can also be paralleled to a different movie, Romeo + Juliet, in which Juliet wears angel wings that looks almost exactly the same (which might be on accident, but both characters’ deaths are related to poison). In general, all birthday party costumes show how the characters think of themselves: Elspeth is a beautiful queen, Oliver is a stag — seemingly innocent, but actually a predator, always ready to hunt down his prey. I also love how from the moment you see Oliver looking at the miniature of the maze, you know that it is going to come back later. The maze has another parallel to greek myths: in the middle of the Cattons’ maze stands the statue of a minotaur, like in the greek myth, in which a real minotaur is trapped in a maze (the maze was also created by Icarus’ — Felix’s — father). In the myth, the minotaur is killed, but if we see Oliver as the minotaur, this changes; this time, the minotaur survives.
The concept of “boy taking on the identity of a rich boy because he loves him or maybe just because he loves being rich” has been done before, for example in the 1999 movie adaption of the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon as the titular Ripley. In this movie, Tom Ripley increasingly imitates rich boy Dickie Greenleaf and kills him (accidentally), before taking on his identity — just like in Saltburn, where Oliver wants to take on Felix’s identity as the son of the rich family, after having killed Felix out of hate and jealousy. If he can’t get Felix’s love, then he can at least get control over Felix’s fate and a chance of inheriting his rich boy identity. Sadly, the relationship between Felix and Oliver stays underdeveloped, aside from a montage near the beginning, we never really see their friendship develop or come to understand why Felix likes Oliver and why Oliver is that obsessed with Felix (besides his wealth and looks — or maybe it is just that and nothing more?)
Not only the Cattons are mislead by Oliver, but the audience too, which is why we might stop sympathising with Oliver at the midpoint. We, just like the Cattons, think that Oliver comes from a complicated working class family, and we also don’t see the extent to which he manipulates the people around him. It is only at the midpoint where we (and Felix) learn the truth about Oliver’s family and therefore learn that he has lied, realizing how much of a manipulator he actually is. But at the beginning we still feel for him — we only see how he tries to be like his rich “friends”, while knowing that he can never be like them. We only see a desperate attempt at getting the love and attention of a rich boy. We think that Oliver starts out as good and gets innocently thrown into the world of the rich, just because he loves a boy, but his motives are not as pure and he is not as good; Oliver is playing a character all along, just like the people around him, but we only realize that halfway through the movie. At the end, the last scene of the movie beautifully illustrates that Oliver’s behaviour is just a performance of power and money, a power play, that love and desire for a boy might have played a role but it is actually the wealth and status the boy has that Oliver desires. In my opinion, the movie is far more a character study of Oliver (that could have gone ever deeper) than a critique of the rich.
Eat the rich, but they fascinate us and we still want to be like them, become them. Live in their beautiful houses and dance nakedly through the rooms to “Murder on the Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis-Brextor, because don’t we deserve that, too? Being naked symbolizes vulnerability, but Oliver feels completely invulnerable, and he dances through the house, proving to his imaginary audience that he owns this place. No one can harm him any more, and he feels no guilt for having killed a family just to get a house (although he still misses Felix and cries at his grave). By the end, you might say that Oliver isn’t any better than the rich people who came before him, that he is exactly like the people who gets criticised in the movie, and you might be right about that. Oliver wants to be rich, and who can blame him? He already has something, but he simply desires more (although it never becomes clear what exactly drives Oliver to his extreme actions and why he is so dissatisfied with his middle class life). Maybe it is just like Alison Oliver’s character Venetia says right before her death: “You are drawn to shiny things (…) just desperate to get it (…). You leave your holes in everything.“
