'Saltburn', Regrettably

Plus, notes on the new film criticism

I spent the final quarter of 2023 moving between hospital beds, bathtubs, and cushions of varying shapes and constitutions as I recovered from surgery — a momentous occasion whose casualties included missing Saltburn in cinemas. As such, I didn’t get around to watching it until the rest of the internet did.

I am, for the most part, off the grid when it comes to social media, but I heard all the same sentiments — obsessing over the bathtub scene, “maybe the style is the substance,¹” going nuts over its (relatively tame) perverseness and then forgetting about it the next day, and what have you.

But there’s one note on this movie that has somehow managed to encapsulate everything I loathe about Saltburn discourse while simultaneously being the only note worth pivoting around — that it’s a film about nothing.

Before I get into that, I need to touch on Emerald Fennell — a filmmaker who plays too much of her hand outside of the work. She’ll offer up many an explanation for/reading of her film when being interviewed, ostensibly so as to guide viewers to the optimal mindset for taking in Saltburn. Jordan Peele is the same way.

I’ve come to hate this less and less as I grow as a critic, but I find it particularly amusing in the context of Saltburn. In being told — specifically by the filmmaker herself — to look at the film a certain way, we suddenly become drawn to it inorganically.² That is, Fennell’s reading — far more than any other — affects what we pay attention to and perhaps how we ultimately define Saltburn, especially if she talks about something as immediately observable as the camera.

It’s one thing to interpret a stylistic choice a certain way, but it’s quite another when the filmmaker canonizes a reason for that choice.

To that point, one explanation Fennell gave was for the film’s tighter-than-usual aspect ratio (4:3, specifically), which she says was used to manifest a window-peering vibe that we could all feel naughty about yielding to.

This directly strengthens Oliver — voyeur extraordinaire — as the audience surrogate.

But it’s here where the rather despondent poetry of Saltburn comes into play. Voyeurism is defined by arousal or stimulation by way of viewing someone undressing, having sex, or otherwise engaging in a moment of intimacy without them knowing you’re watching. In other words, it’s stimulation defined by a lack of your own presence. Defined by a lack of your involvement. Defined by your nothingness.

The act of watching Saltburn and responding to its intended provocations is fundamentally vapid. We’re attracted to all the scandalous proceedings in Saltburn, but our attraction to it hinders on the separation that the screen provides — we can safely obsess over the bathtub-slurping and grave-humping because we’re not actually present for those things, and therefore needn’t worry about the social shame that comes with indulging our most feral, obsessive impulses.

What Saltburn does is take those obsessive impulses off of your hands and — in exchange for keeping them at a safe distance from you — manifests them on its terms rather than yours, and so you have to settle for whatever Saltburn is doing (i.e bathtub-slurping, grave-humping, etc.) in order to indulge your urges

In this way, those images — those manifestations — mean nothing. Your attraction is now disembodied. You’re no longer involved with your own obsessions, nor with the satisfying of them. You’re a voyeur — attracted to the phenomenon of your nothingness, to your urges sans you, safe from and therefore powerless against the stigma.

Our jealousy of Oliver doesn’t necessarily come from his specific actions, but from the obsessive release that his actions give him. We want that same release, but the closest we can come to doing that is watching Oliver do his thing — a frictionless, distorted reimagining of our nebulous desires.

Oliver, of course, is hungry for more. In his voyeurism, and in our watching of Saltburn, we’re both chasing shadows of something more physical — more present, more meaningful, more than nothing.

The thrust of Oliver’s character is that he’s accustomed to, hyper-aware of, and deeply troubled by this powerlessness. He despises his existence because it’s a bloodless, frictionless one.

Having grown up in a comfortable middle-class home with younger siblings, two very present parents, and with none too few opportunities at his disposal, Oliver is decidedly unfamiliar with conflict and struggle. His life is stable, which is just another way of saying that it’s defined by a plateau, or perhaps by boredom. Oliver yearns for something that will really, truly stimulate him — make him feel.

Oliver fakes coming from a drug-addled home so as to give the illusion that he’s familiar with worldly intensity — a stimulating history of danger that ostensibly makes him stimulating by association. By Oliver’s logic, this will make him more attractive to other stimulating individuals.

Upon his arrival at Oxford, Oliver quickly identifies Felix as the thing that will make him feel something, as Felix seems to have that effect on everybody he engages with. And therein is the je ne sais quo of Oliver and Felix’s relationship — Oliver doesn’t actually know why he’s attracted to Felix, meaning he’s prone to mistaking Felix’s privileged background and social magnetism (i.e. shiny nothingness) as that reason, even if Felix harbours more than that. Style, after all, is much more intoxicating than substance.

Felix, of course, is ultimately just a shallow but sexy rich boy, and is therefore the surrogate for Saltburn itself. Linus Sandgren’s colourful cinematography — like Jacob Elordi — is salivating to look at, and the plot’s provocative beats (again, bathtub-slurping, grave-humping) probe our impulses in the same way that Felix probes Oliver when the two men are first getting to know each other.

But nothing is actually happening here — Oliver’s master plan doesn’t make any sense as a twist (neither in terms of plot logic or turning the emotional/psychological knife), and the film doesn’t unfurl the themes of obsession and privilege so much as it simply observes these things.

But then, Saltburn is only masquerading as a film about obsession and privilege when it’s actually a film about nothing; not in the sense that it’s not about anything, but in that it’s about the phenomenon of nothingness.

Indeed, what do we do when our susceptibility to nothingness — of our shame-fueled, self-imposed inability to be and do — overtakes the aspirations we have for experiencing life as rawly as possible?

• If you’re Oliver, you pretend you’re not nothing so that Felix will like you and make you feel good.

• If you’re Felix, you use your charisma and privilege to live vicariously through other people.

• If you’re Farleigh, you weaponize the nothingness of others to forget about/hide your own nothingness.

• If you’re Elspeth, your nothingness is your aspiration, because going beneath the surface is just that terrifying/difficult.

• If you’re a real person, you watch Saltburn.³

Hmmm… Isn’t someone missing?

Ah, Venetia, the dame who Venetia’d her way into the proceedings before Venetiaing this whole state of affairs right up. I could watch Alison Oliver act for six hours straight.

Now, Venetia is just as susceptible to nothingness as the rest of Saltburn’s characters. We learn from Elspeth of Venetia’s intense promiscuity, meaning she fills herself in a manner not dissimilar to Oliver or Felix — that is, throwing herself at other people.⁴

What sets Venetia apart from everyone else, however, is that she isn’t entirely without substance. She manifests ghosts⁵ and is enamoured with the full moon’s potential to rewrite humanity’s current circumstances. There is far more going on with Venetia than meets the eye, but most of it is effectively incomprehensible.⁶

That incomprehensibility speaks to the mileage that substance has in the world of Saltburn. That is, none — substance, in Saltburn, is illegible currency. If you harbour anything beneath the surface, it will be swallowed up by a storm of glitzy excess and Elspeth’s shallow, behind-the-back commentary.

It’s no wonder Venetia has to destroy her body just to feel like she can exist — be seen, be more than nothing — in this world; that she “gives it away for free” in hopes of landing in the vicinity of someone who can match her freak.⁷ In a world without substance, what does she have to lose?

The question, then: do I like Saltburn? Which side of the fence do I fall on?

The answer: The new film criticism will do away with the notion that criticism is about expressing oneself, and we will all be better for it. As such, I quite strategically don’t care whether I like Saltburn or not. I can’t bring myself to care, because opinions — like Saltburn itself — are about nothing.

Indeed, opinions don’t actually mean anything outside of yourself. You can choose to invest in the opinions of others, absolutely, but the external significance of that opinion begins and ends with your investment. You can’t actually do anything or discuss anything with “I like Saltburn” or “I don’t like Saltburn,” no matter how stylishly(!) you package that sentiment.

And that’s just it — modern film criticism does not want to be challenged, so it operates within the confines of opinion, because an opinion can’t be wrong.

I’m allowed to say that Mad Max: Fury Road is aggressively mediocre, but I’m not really saying anything; I’m just telling you how I feel, which is objectively only relevant to me exclusively.

But if I actually say something about Mad Max: Fury Road, that would open me up to scrutinization, which is incompatible with modern film criticism’s mandate of validation.

The new film criticism will create objective conversations out of subjective art. That’s the true power of subjectivity — not in allowing everyone to be “correct,” but in being unbound in its capacity to evoke. How, then, can limiting criticism to a matter of opinion be anything other than defeatist?⁸

The new film criticism will not be about longform scores and judgements, and will not retreat into complacent subjectivity so as to avoid the challenge of discourse. No, it will have a conversation with the film — a conversation as objectively real, tangible, and critiqueable as the film itself — so as to spark even more conversation. It will be a forest of diverse observation rather than two opposing bubbles of opinion.

The new film criticism, unlike Saltburn, will not be about nothing.

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1. Maybe it also insists upon itself!

2. Which, as you’ll soon see, is a loaded statement.

3. No shade, and no value judgements here; I watch Saltburn, too.

4. Felix, of course, doesn’t need to throw himself in the same way that Oliver and Venetia do, but the end result is the same — guzzling the energy of other people.

5. Pay attention to the scene where Oliver is having his first breakfast with the Cattons, and Venetia is telling a ghost story. Look at the window as she speaks.

6. Perhaps even supernatural.

7. And who maybe looks a lot like Barry Keoghan.

8. That’s not to say there can be absolutely no opinion within a piece of criticism. In fact, every piece of criticism is likely born out of some kind of passion for the film itself; I sprinkled quite a bit of it in here. What’s important, however, is evolving the criticism beyond opinion to the point where it’s, at most, a fraction of the whole piece.