Saltburn: Emerald Fennell’s 00s Era Homage to Brideshead Revisited, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Single White Female

Emerald Fennell’s Academy Award-winning debut, Promising Young Woman, had a promising start indeed at the beginning of 2020, before anyone knew that movie theaters worldwide would be subject to the shutdown of numerous “nonessential” businesses. With favorable reactions to the trailer and a soundtrack that seemed determined to give Sofia Coppola a run for her money on use of music in film, Fennell’s debut looked as though it would be an all but assured box office success. Even if most of the potential (non-gay) male audience would definitely not be excited by a premise such as this. Nonetheless, after finally being released to video on demand at the beginning of January, the movie started to generate the Oscar (and audience) buzz that would eventually lead to Fennell winning the award for Best Original Screenplay. A feat unachieved by any other woman since Diablo Cody took home the same award for 2007’s Juno at the 2008 Oscars. 

The mid-00s, incidentally, happens to be the era during which Fennell opts to set her stage for her second film, Saltburn. And, like Promising Young Woman, college is at the center of where it all turns very, very dark. For Americans used to seeing “Class of [insert year here]” and automatically taking it to mean that it announces the year a class is going to graduate, at Oxford, it means the year the class is entering the school, which is 2006 (thus, the big sign above our “protagonist” as he enters the school that reads: “Welcome Class of 2006”). 

Later described by a particular Catton family member as being like a moth at the window constantly trying to get in, this is actually one of the first (inverse) “positionings” we see Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) posed in as he skulks in his own dorm room and peers outside at the beautiful people we reckon he’ll never be able to infiltrate. Among those beautiful people is not just Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), but also someone with an ass prominently outfitted in a Juicy tracksuit, the mark of peak 00s fashion…apart from Ed Hardy. A brand noticeably missing from the costume department’s consideration, but then, Juicy tracksuits were more emblematic of a time when the rich were free to flaunt their layabout ways without post-2008 financial crisis “guilt” (or rather, feigning guilt so as to avoid the proverbial guillotine). And yet, it’s unlikely that those in Felix’s British blue blood echelon would have much bothered to conceal their wealth after the crisis. Luckily, that’s supposed to be two years away when we first meet Felix, a vexingly rich, attractive, popular guy without a care in the world (other than deciding which “hot bitch” to have sex with today). 

Oliver, on the other hand, appears to be the exact opposite. A scholarship student who confesses to Felix that his father is a drug dealer and his mother is an alcoholic. This after ingratiating himself into Felix’s good graces by loaning him his bike when he sees that Felix’s has a flat and he’s already late to a tutoring session clear across campus. So it is that with this one small act of kindness, the two quickly become besties, with Felix’s approval lifting Oliver up from social exile and allowing him entry into the fold of the “in crowd,” even though one its members (and Felix’s cousin), Farleigh Start (​​Archie Madekwe), will never accept him. Constantly finding ways to belittle his class and identify him as “other.” Perennially on the outside looking in (or on the inside looking out, as one of the aforementioned first scenes eerily foreshadowed). Such details include how Oliver’s rented tux doesn’t fit in a tailored way, with his sleeves being “obviously” too long, at least to the trained eye of someone like Farleigh. Whose character seems to stand in for Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. And no, Fennell certainly isn’t trying to hide the fact that Saltburn is pure Evelyn Waugh homage (she is, after all, a British woman who was raised on such classics—herself an Oxford alumna with a father whose name has a hyperlink in blue on Wikipedia, therefore she knows something about shedding light on the sinister world of privilege).

At one point, in fact, Fennell, wanting to give (meta) credit where credit is due, has Oliver respond to Felix’s recounting of Farleigh’s mother squandering a large chunk of the family fortune after attaching to Farleigh’s father (a Catton) by saying, “Sounds like an Evelyn Waugh novel.” Felix replies, “You know, a lot of Waugh’s characters are based on my family, actually. Yeah, he was completely obsessed with our house.” As Oliver is. Something he doesn’t try to hide upon first arriving at Saltburn and entering the main room with his mouth agape as he repeats, “Wow” in front of the skeptical and cynical butler, Duncan (Paul Rhys). In this moment, it’s clear that Fennell is speaking to one of the primary themes she wants to address with the film: “We are all in this very strange world now, I think, of wanting. We’re just in a perpetual state of desire and need and want. Our relationship with the things that we want when we look on Instagram, or we look at clothes, or we look at food, whatever it is: ‘I both want it and I’m disgusted with myself for wanting it.’” 

In 2006, it wasn’t so easy to feel that sense of simultaneous attraction and revulsion on a daily basis (thanks to social media), unless you found yourself in Oliver’s situation of being amid people with so much to envy. This, in part, is why Fennell chooses to set the narrative during this period (in addition to being a loud-and-proud millennial who palpably lived through this era during what would be deemed by ageists as “the prime” of her life). Even if there are certain “inconsistencies” with pieces of pop culture that wouldn’t have been out at the time. Take, for example, the fact that Felix’s parents, Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and Sir James (Richard E. Grant), are watching Superbad when Oliver first arrives at, one would presumably imagine, the beginning of the summer. In reality, the movie wasn’t released until mid-August of 2007. While, sure, it’s fathomable that a rich household could gain access to some kind of screener beforehand, it’s little details like these that occasionally take more perspicacious viewers out of the story. This also includes one of the Cattons’ blue-blooded, middle-aged family members singing karaoke to the tune of Flo Rida’s “Low,” which wasn’t released until October of 2007. The same discrepancy goes for “millennial anthem” “Time to Pretend” by MGMT. Prominently used during a lengthy montage and in a manner that smacks of something out of the Sofia Coppola playbook, the album Oracular Spectacular wasn’t released until October of 2007, while the single itself was released in March of 2008. As we watch Felix, his sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), Farleigh and Oliver (looking evermore comfortable in these environs) laze about in the lavish outdoor areas of Saltburn, it’s easy to imagine why Fennell decided to forgo total historical accuracy so as to be able to have the lyrics, “Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do?/Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?” soundtrack the fast yet slow lives of these privileged youths. Minus, of course, Oliver, who, once again, starts to find himself falling out of favor with Felix. 

This is the second time in the narrative that he risks losing his precious meal ticket of a friendship with the rich—nay, princely—kid, who he so desperately wants to become (to the point where he’ll even lap up his bathwater from the drain…surprisingly, though, this is not one of the more shocking scenes from the movie). And as Saltburn goes on, it’s evident he’s willing to do whatever it takes to cling to this class he’s managed to penetrate…while also clearly wishing to penetrate Felix. With that sexual tension in mind, it bears repeating the old adage that “there’s a fine line between love and hate.” An “ism” that most definitely comes into play by the time of the film’s “twist ending” (sardonically soundtracked to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor”). 

Instead of verbalizing or otherwise making known his sexual feelings for Felix (which relate more to “total possession” than anything else), he briefly settles for Venetia (in yet another nod to Brideshead Revisited, as Charles Ryder indulges in his carnal desire for both Sebastian and Julia Flyte). That is, until Farleigh rats him out to Felix and it becomes a brief source of contention, with Oliver putting the kibosh on that by insisting to Felix that he was just “being polite” to a drunk Venetia when she threw herself at him. Oliver, after all, doesn’t have the last name “Quick” for nothing, ready with an excuse or machination at the mere hint of any unwanted spill of a secret. And, if not, there are always more drastic measures to be taken. Something Tom Ripley and Heddy Carlson knew all about in their own bids to become the object of their obsession. And the “gothic tradition,” as Fennell refers to it, is all about how obsession with something we want can so often take a macabre form. Fennell summed this gothic motif up by noting, “Take Count Dracula: the reason Count Dracula is so frightening is all the women in the book want to fuck him. That’s all of our relationship with the things that we want: they have to be kind of a bit scary for them to be interesting.”

Turns out, Oliver becomes the scary one (to the rich who assumed he was harmless and helpless). This much is elucidated toward the third act, when Venetia starts to see—much too late—who and what Oliver really is, telling him, “I think you’re a moth. Quiet, harmless, drawn to shiny things. Batting up against the window…just desperate to get in. Well, you’ve done it now. You’ve made your holes in everything. You’ll eat us from the inside out.” That, in effect, is something only a “middle classer” like Oliver could dare to achieve (this “in between” status making it easier for him to become an “interloper” among Felix’s friends and family). Which is also where Fennell choosing to set the film in the 00s factors in. Because that was arguably the last time there really was a middle class that didn’t struggle with almost as much difficulty as the “lower” classes. Thereby further rendering the platitude “eat the rich” (like a moth) into as much of a “fairy-tale ending” as the one Oliver carves out for himself. Because, honestly, these days, the middle class doesn’t have time to harness the kind of focus required to do that. And it’s by the rich’s design that they don’t.