Saltburn: the Antipodean class analysis nobody asked for
Will today’s self-made aristocrats get burnt by the salt-of-the-earth types they’ve treated so poorly for so long?
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
Voltaire (reportedly)
“Who is to blame that the Russian people, the peasant and the proletarian, proved to be barbarians? Who, if not all of us?’’
Prince Vladimir Golitsyn (Shortly after the Russian Revolution)
When I Googled ‘Saltburn – a class analysis’, I expected I’d maybe find a lonely Jacobin article.
Instead, within a third of a second, I was pointed toward nearly a million think pieces with titles such as: ‘Saltburn a study of class wars’; Saltburn… Whitewashes the Ugliness of the Upper Classes’; 'Saltburn': Class struggle and unconscious impulses in an English manor house. (Bonus points if you mentally noted a Frenchman must have written that last one).
So, yeah, maybe I’m not exactly leading the pack in noticing Saltburn has dropped at a moment when the Anglosphere, and possibly the wider Western world, seems poised to undergo a tectonic political realignment.
One that may prove as profound as the Keynesian settlement that emerged in a nascent form after the Great Depression and came into full flower after WWII. (A political realignment, it should be noted, that involved confiscatory income taxes and death duties and that resulted in the pauperisation of many British aristos and the sale of their country estates.)
After going through two world wars and a prolonged and brutal economic downturn, people of all class backgrounds – but especially those working-class individuals who had spent so much of their lives as a dispensable factory or cannon fodder – were keen to create stable, relatively egalitarian societies (and a stable, relatively peaceful world) after WWII ended.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for the Boomers to gleefully knock down many of the Chesterton Fences erected by their parents and grandparents. After a brief youthful fling with New Left politics (a proto version of the identity politics that so many university-educated people subscribe to today), the Boomers swung hard to the economic right and remained there. Granted, the Boomers were more socially liberal than their parents and grandparents, but they were also far less communitarian. New Dealer ‘Silent Generation’ parents frequently expressed dismay over the venal “Me Generation” kids they had raised.
Once they had come of voting age, the individualistic Boomers gave stodgy old Keynesianism the heave-ho and enthusiastically embraced neoliberalism.
Low taxes!
Fewer surly public servants to deal with!
Cheap consumer goods from povo Asian countries!
Rapidly appreciating property prices!
And all of it a miraculously free lunch. At least for one age cohort.
The Australian angle
I don’t imagine anybody has yet watched Saltburn and thought to themselves, “There go those Aussies, punching above their showbiz weight again.” But the film was produced by an Australian (Margot Robbie) and features Australian actor Jacob Elordi, who plays the scion of Saltburn.
When I first saw the effortlessly beguiling Felix on screen, I assumed he could only possibly be played by a patrician English actor who’d attended Oxford or Cambridge. In fact, Elordi is a working-class kid who grew up in BrisVegas, the son of a housepainter who immigrated from Basque Country.
Gonna burn this goddamn house right down
Saltburn is many things, but let’s not overlook the fact it’s fundamentally an inspirational – maybe even aspirational – tale of a young man achieving his dream of home ownership.
I don’t wish to belabour this point yet again, but this was an eminently achievable ambition back in the Keynesian era. In 2024, it’s now impossible for those without an above-average income – and sometimes even those with an above-average income – to purchase property in or near many capital cities.
Across the Anglosphere, hundreds of millions of young and not-so-young people must often hand over at least half of their take-home pay just to secure spartan lodgings within commuting distance of their job. Incredibly, London doesn’t often make it onto most of the list of ‘most expensive housing markets’. It’s usually edged out by even more insanely overpriced metropolises such as Hong Kong, Sydney, Vancouver and San Francisco.
While homeowners are aware of the difficulties faced by aspiring homeowners, I suspect they’re still largely oblivious to just how much resentment – class resentment, you might even call it – has been building up among those who believe they’ve shown up to the wealth-creation party just as the tables are being stacked away and the lights turned off.
The estimable
, who leans Right, often writes about how reckless British elites have been in recent decades. This is one of my favourite quotes of his:Some young Londoners in the 21st century are paying up to 60% of their income for the privilege of tiny rooms that are often indistinguishable from prison cells in Europe’s more liberal countries. High-income nations today may not feel pre-revolutionary on the face of it, but if we wish to avoid history repeating itself, even as farce, there is one problem that should worry us more than anything else: housing costs. Indeed, it is the one issue that connects almost all the difficulties currently facing the postindustrial world.
Do homeowners – Boomer or otherwise – need to worry about being offed by enterprising young psychopaths yearning to join the ranks of the smugly propertied? Well, not yet. But I’d expect rather more attention to be paid to the interests of would-be home buyers and a little less deference shown to middle-aged and elderly homeowners and landlords by politicians in the coming years. Especially once Boomer voters start heading in significant numbers to the Great Beatles Concert in the Sky.
Do we want to eat the rich or become them?
Worthwhile art can rarely be reduced to a political talking point. One of the weaknesses of writer-director Emerald Fennell’s debut film – Promising Young Woman – was its heavy-handedness. Many critics lavished praise on its Me-Too political stance, but it didn’t do much box-office business. I suspect Saltburn has, in contrast, displeased many critics while wowing nearly everybody else precisely because it’s not a pat morality tale.
What’s interesting about Saltburn is how (entertainingly) appalling all the characters are, both the cold-blooded aristocrats and the pitiless pleb. Courageously, Fennell even avoids the temptation to reduce the one biracial character (Farleigh Start, played by the Nigerian-Swiss-English actor Archie Madekwe) into a virtuous ‘Magical Negro’ trope. Fennell has said:
If we can fall in love with these people, if we can understand why this is so alluring, in spite of its palpable cruelty and unfairness and sort of strangeness, if we all want to be there too, I think that's just such an interesting dynamic.
Fennell isn’t a man, which is probably part of the reason Promising Young Woman felt so one-trick-ponyish. However, Fennell is a product of Britain’s upper classes and has some affection for Sir James, Lady Elspeth and their two children. This makes them far more watchable villains than those in Fennell’s first effort.
(As an aside, Fennell is shaping up as a younger, female version of Julian Alexander Kitchner-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford and Conservative Peer. Julian Fellowes, as he is more commonly known, wrote the script for Gosford Park and created, produced and wrote Downton Abbey. Fellowes studied English at Cambridge while Fennell did so at Oxford.)
A modern-day Cherry Orchard?
Playing the ‘this book/play/film/album conveys something crucial about the zeitgeist’ game is always risky. It’s all too easy to pick out some convenient examples and argue, for example, Reagan-era cinema conveyed renewed American optimism and self-confidence after the shitshow of the 1970s. The problem with such just-so stories is that many other contemporary cultural products don’t neatly fit the narrative. (In this instance, the many 1980s films that don’t feature Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger machine gunning vast quantities of Slavic Communists, Islamic terrorists and other ne’er-do-wells.)
But something must be going on in first-world societies to prompt so many artists to focus on vexed relationships between the ruled and the rulers. Think Succession, Silo, Leave the World Behind, The Menu, Don’t Look Up, White Lotus and The Handmaid’s Tale, to name just a few recent examples. And it’s hardly just English speakers who have been pumping out eat-the-rich fare, as the likes of Parasite and Triangle of Sadness demonstrate.
Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – a play about the son of a serf taking possession of a Russian aristocrat’s estate – was first performed in 1904. The following year, what’s sometimes called the First Russian Revolution took place. Thirteen years later, a somewhat better-known Russian Revolution occurred. The offspring of serfs seized all the property of Russian nobles, and it wasn’t just the House of Romanov who met the same fate as Felix, Venetia and Elspeth Catton.
What does that last scene mean?
Of all the memorable Saltburn scenes, the one that makes the most indelible impact is the one at the end where Oliver dances naked through the majestic residence he has just improbably inherited.
The scene is mesmerising for several reasons, but chiefly because viewers are left morally confused. Are you – the non-aristocratic viewer – meant to cheer for the bloodstained usurper? If so, what exactly does that say about you? On the other hand, Sir James Catton no doubt had an ancestor who was just as murderously Machiavellian as Oliver Quick. Should we, the meritocratic viewing public, be distressed over a scholarship boy striver efficiently dispatching a bunch of Hooray Henrys and Henriettas? After all, isn’t that the inevitable fate of any elite that tips too far into complacency and decadence?
There are no simple answers. Even for its creator, which is precisely what makes Saltburn so memorable. Here’s what Fennell had to say about her film’s climax:
It had to be an act of desecration, an act of territory taking. It's ownership. ‘This is fucking mine. I do whatever I want’… in that moment, we need to love him. I like the audience to be complicit.
And there’s the rub – we are complicit. Just as many aspirational voters have been complicit in recent decades in shaping the neo-feudal societies they now find so unsatisfactory.
Writing in Jacobin, Mae Losasso observes:
Oliver has to be middle class — and not, as he’s led Felix (and us) to believe, working class – for his murderous love of the Cattons to make sense. With his Oxford scholarship, Oliver embodies the conflicted middle-class mindset that a right-wing emphasis on upward mobility has given rise to in Britain… social aspiration hasn’t produced revolutionary fervour in Britain, but a confused, jealousy-fuelled love for those above you… In the end, middle-class triumph has less to do with wreaking revenge on aristocrats than with gaining possession of a place in the country via the most British means possible: inheritance.