Hello again,
I saw Saltburn over the weekend and thought it was a mess. I didn’t have high expectations for it. I found Promising Young Woman (also written and directed by Emerald Fennell) to be a cynical, reductive and morally dishonest film.
Promising Young Woman felt, to me, like the kind of cultural product whose entire inspiration was the discourse it may generate about itself. It felt like something for which the creator, as a starting point, had imagined a series of articles they hoped to see written as publicity for the film and worked backwards from that. Or as if they had brainstormed a series of themes which are commercially lucrative right now and then quickly brainstormed how best to incorporate these into a narrative. This is not what art is.
Products like this share some superficial similarities with art; both things provoke a response from an audience. But the response an audience member has to a product like Promising Young Woman is not an emotional response or an intellectual one. By which I mean you don’t feel anything when you interact with a product like this, and you don’t find yourself thinking about anything new.
The response it elicits, rather, is the comfort of recognition. (So perhaps that is a feeling, but still, just one, and a simple one, and one you can get plenty of other places too). When you interact with a film like this, or read a novel like this, you will see a series of arguments and perspectives you are familiar with from the past few years of cultural discourse presented in a narrative form rather than that of, say, an op ed.
You won’t necessarily agree with these perspectives; you may disagree, even quite vehemently. But either way you won’t be challenged, since these are perspectives you have already considered and decided your own opinion on. The pleasure, I think, to be derived from interacting with a product like this is either purely in this sense of recognition. Or perhaps in the idea that, while these perspectives are not new to you, they may theoretically be new and challenging to another audience member. Some people may enjoy feeling superior to this theoretical other audience member. (For the record, I don’t think this theoretical other audience member exists in the target audience group for these products. I’ve written about this previously here).
The dialogue in these products tends to be really bad. There is no attempt to make the characters seem like people. They will reel off statistics or wikipedia style summaries of political events or perspectives. And, while I accept that there are a range of approaches to realism in dialogue, and a range of uses for dialogue in different styles of novels and films (from using dialogue almost purely for characterisation to using it almost purely to advance plot), I don’t believe that dialogue should ever read like quotation marks have been stuck around passages of wikipedia, under any schema.
The characters tend to feel like bundles of themes or types (which you can easily decide a moral standpoint on) rather than people (you will never be invited to empathise with a posh white man, for example). All kinds of tropes and stereotypes are affirmed.
Anyway, Promising Young Women felt to me like an archetype of this kind of product. And, actually, even the negative critical responses to these products can share that sense of comfort in familiarity. PYM attracted a lot of negative criticism, but it had a rote quality, rehashing familiar arguments about the commodification of feminism, white feminism, and so on. I knew, when I saw a negative critical response, that I would basically agree with the points it made. I also knew that I had seen these arguments made many times already, and that the intended audience for these pieces would have done so also.
So this is what I expected from Saltburn. It is about a boy named Oliver who is geeky and provincial. He goes to Oxford, meets a gregarious posh boy named Felix, becomes obsessed with befriending him, manages to do so, and then is invited back to the family home, Saltburn. The class analysis, as well as the broader commentary Saltburn makes on class, fitted what I expected from the creator of Promising Young Woman. It felt of a piece with the first season of The White Lotus, the Glass Onion, the Menu, Triangle of Sadness and so on. It was basically uninteresting and over-familiar.
One redeeming feature Saltburn had in this sense was the Felix character, who I thought was well cast and brilliantly acted. Felix was played by Jacob Elordi, who conveyed the sense of a man who tends always to do what is easiest and most personally beneficial to himself, but who feels guilt about this, in fits and starts. I was interested in how insecure and childlike Felix seemed at points. I felt Elordi could have done something very interesting with a few more scenes and I’m keen to see whatever he does next.
Oliver Quick, Barry Keoghan’s character was, I felt, particularly badly written. You see the film from his perspective, and yet he is almost impressively underdeveloped. His actions are often confused and a great question mark sits over his motives. At the end, the “twist” is the one you expected throughout the film, with a bit of extra detail implausibly tacked on.
At the end of the film Oliver’s entire ideology is explained in a few sentences that read like a confessional personal essay. For all the clumsiness of this technique as a means or characterisation, it could theoretically be a good way to tie everything up neatly. In Saltburn, however, there are still holes and inconsistencies all over the place. There is a bit in the film where Venetia, Felix’s sister, says Oliver is like a moth, making holes in the fabric of life at Saltburn. To me the film often felt as if a moth had sort of had a go at its fabric too, as if random passages of character notes and the script had been eaten and they’d just had to go on without them.
But anyway, in that sense I thought Saltburn was bad in a way that I expected. But it turned out to be bad in a way that surprised me, too. And this was how much of the film felt like a music video.
There were montages of everyone wearing primary coloured ray bans and jumping into the pool while MGMT blasted. Then everyone wore platforms and sunglasses as they swilled champagne on a tennis court. There was a huge chunk of the film where everyone was dressed up for a Midsummer Night's Dream themed party, roaming around the grounds of a mansion dressed like fairies and stags. There were shots of people in fairy wings running around mazes and so forth. There was a scene of a posh middle aged white man doing karaoke to Low by Flo Rida. There was a scene of Barry Keoghan writhing around, naked, on the soil of a gravestone. The gravestone wasn’t in a yard with other stones but instead set against the backdrop of a field and a grey, barron sky. There was a montage of Barry Keoghan’s character, who had, until this moment, come across as fantastically mirthless, dancing around a mansion with his willy out to Sophie Ellis Bexter’s Murder on the Dancefloor.
I know scenes like these can be what make films brilliant, beautiful and memorable. But there was no build up to any of this. Basically music would start and then the scene would sort of start from nowhere. Take the Midsummer Night’s Dream themed party, for example. One character said: Let’s have a party. Another said: Oh yes! A theme! Another said: Yes, Midsummer Night’s Dream!
And then, a scene or two later, all of a sudden, the party was in full swing. Everyone was ornately attired and the grounds were spectacularly decorated. Barry Keoghan was walking around the palatial English country garden in stag ears, backlit by glittering baubles. It was an extravagant display but there was nothing behind it. If you think instead of Scarlett Johansson wearing the pink wig in Lost in Translation, all the thought that went into getting those characters convincingly in that room together, along with the pink wig, it just doesn’t compare.
A lot of the party scenes in Saltburn made me think of the advert for the last episode of an early season of Skins, where someone said “This is where rich kids come to die” and there were fluorescent lights in a grand house and the Klaxons played. But that advert (and it was an advert, not the episode itself) was brilliant and memorable because of the build up of the series. The party there was the culmination of all the interpersonal drama that the audience of Skins had become so invested in.
In Saltburn, these kinds of scenes gave me the sense, again, of everything having been back engineered. But this time after brainstorming what might look good in an advert. The effect is a superficial, clumsy film, the kind of thing I feel I’ve read and seen enough of for a good while now.
Till next time xxxx
Have some work out soon, till then links to order Lazy City here.