Saltburn: Can posh people write good class satire?

Early on in Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s sophomore feature, Barry Keoghan’s Oliver Quick bickers with an Oxford classmate. “You’re picking apart the style of my essay instead of the substance?” he retorts. “That’s kind of... lazy.” It’s a valid point. Unfortunately, it’s one that is impossible to apply to Saltburn, a film consisting of only style and no substance.

Saltburn follows in a very new, increasingly boring-as-hell lineage – the ‘eat the rich’ satire. From Succession to Triangle of Sadness to You, raising the highly controversial suggestion that rich people might not be great has become a gauchely-named genre in and of itself. Saltburn is the first aggressively British entry into this canon, and the potential was there – Britain is a country with a vigilantly stratified class system that dictates our lives, after all. There’s so much to say. But can Emerald Fennell, an Oxford-educated daughter of a high society jeweller who attended the same boarding school as Kate Middleton, be the director to say it? Well… 

Saltburn is a movie destined to be spoken about with uniquely British outrage. It’s devilishly dark. Fiendishly clever. Gleefully twisted. Its attempts at provocation are dull and familiar to anyone who has seen or even heard of the works it liberally draws inspiration from, such as Brideshead Revisited. Saltburn’s stabs at eroticism in a vague queer bond between Oliver and Felix feel like fan fiction, a smashing together of two male characters for titillation’s sake, never bothering to dig into the foundations of Oliver’s obsession. Fennell’s set pieces are designed to make the viewer mutter “goodness gracious!” in the moment then go home and reshare gifs of a shirtless Jacob Elordi sucking on an ice lolly. In lieu of actual worldbuilding, it takes totems of 00s nostalgia – The Cheeky Girls, H*rry P*tter, Abercrombie and Fitch rugby shirts, “Murder on the Dancefloor” – and stitches them together Human Centipede-style to make you feel a twinge of recognition.

It’s a film Fennell has welcomed analysis of. She has admired that critics of Saltburn “dislike it for lots of kind of interesting reasons”, though I would not be doing my journalistic duty if I didn’t report the other side, where she has also said, “oh cool, you didn’t like it? Great. I hope you fucking die… and your whole family… slowly.” When she isn’t wishing death on critics and their families, Fennell has been generally eager to engage with her audience and, in many ways, it’s important for her audience to engage with her in turn.

“We’re a bit flashy,” Fennell told David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast, speaking about her family. She has spoken extensively about her personal experience of class, and here Remnick asks her how her background informs Saltburn. She acknowledged the “rarefied circumstances” in which she was raised, but drew a line between herself and the Cattons, the landed aristocratic dynasty at the film’s heart. She didn’t grow up on a vast country estate (though she knew people who did).

“Do you think you’re thought of as being very, very posh if your father is known as the ‘King of Bling’?” she said to Remnick, referencing the tabloid nickname for her jeweller father. This is a kind of fastidious detail that is impossible to differentiate from the outside looking in – the gap between posh and “very, very” posh is neither here nor there to the rest of us. Unlike the Cattons, her family has worked, but then again, not a lot of 18-year-olds have their birthday party photographed by Tatler and attended by a Delevingne, multiple Guinness heirs, several members of the nobility and the daughter of Sting. You can’t really hide from your class when you’re someone like Fennell, who has spoken about her particular cross to bear; “I mean, I have to introduce myself to people with a straight face as ‘Emerald’,” she told The Times. “I’ve had to get thick-skinned about how absurd I am as a person.”

This insider view of the higher rungs of the British class system is what ultimately brings Saltburn down. The reveal that Oliver is, in fact, an ordinary middle-class lad lands wetly. He may not be the son of a drug dealer and an alcoholic but he’s not exactly part of the gentry, yet Fennell paints him as a callous, manipulative upstart. Fennell has said that Saltburn is a satire of the rich but “it’s also a satire of those of us who want in”. This is a fascinating wrinkle because the Cattons are never once shown to be as malevolent as Oliver – they are never the subject of ‘satire’ – and Saltburn ends up being a baffling indictment of its poorest character. 

Honestly, Saltburn’s ensemble of rich people are some of the nicest aristocrats ever committed to film. Shallow? Yes. Sometimes cruel? Yes. But worthy of that fate? No. They are impressively apolitical, Fennell never daring to give these people something as complicated as an ideology. Their richness manifests in social faux pas, almost entirely played for laughs. Yes, they may say the most terribly frightful things but they aren’t evil people by any stretch.

It’s all oddly conservative, despite the characters not actually being Conservative. There’s none of the xenophobia and bigotry you would expect from a couple named Sir James and Lady Elspeth Catton. Saltburn briefly gestures to the family’s disconnect with Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), their Black American cousin, then quickly moves on before committing to anything. There are some details that make Saltburn stand out (“The turnover of a footman is notoriously high!”) but there’s the distinct sense that Fennell is too close to figures like the Cattons to land the necessary punches; Richard E Grant was quite literally cast after knowing Fennell and her family since she was a child. It starts as a stylish, arch-social satire and ends with a literal victory dance but never bothers to justify anything along the way. It’s a satire that never bares its claws, never lifts a finger to criticise these people.

Part of Saltburn’s success internationally is because its blunt, incoherent class politics are appealing to American audiences less familiar with the intricacies of British high society. Its tweeness and period details (“chirpsing”) will delight cinemagoers worldwide but they will fail to understand why the proximity of the director to the subject matter is a sticking point. Fennell has called out misogynistic critics who have questioned her intentions with Saltburn – “as though you’d sort of blundered onto set and had no plans” – but, as the director herself has acknowledged, class solidarity can be an unconscious thing. And to buy what Saltburn is selling, you must accept who is selling it. In this case, I think I’m good.

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