TikTok cult film ‘Saltburn’: super-rich freaks and jealous culture

Simone Meier

The Fennell family has never made a secret of their wealth and has profited from it well. Dad Theo Fennell says: “I grew up not knowing the need to make money.” His parents were already rich, he went to the elite college Eton, then he became a jewelry designer, his best customer is Elton John, you can imagine the style, too much is never too much. In England, Theo Fennell is called ‘the king of bling’.

He likes something crazy, a silver knife with Jack the Ripper as a handle or cufflinks that allow you to look through a scope at (presumably German) ships and planes from the Second World War. Mama Louise Fennell wrote some super rich insider trash novels like “Dead Rich” and “Fame Game.” They named their daughter Emerald. Emerald. How things go in a family of jewelers.

Emerald Fennell is now 38, studied at Oxford and has been an actress for half her life. She played a Russian princess in “Anna Karenina” alongside Keira Knightley and young Camilla in “The Crown”, she was in “The Danish Girl” with Eddy Redmayne and the perpetually pregnant doll Midge in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie”.

After turning 30, she became a major screenwriter, became world famous in 2018 with her scripts for the series ‘Killing Eve’ and in 2021 she won her first Oscar for the script of ‘Promising Young Woman’, the punk-feminist revenge drama with Carey. Mulligan, who also directed them. And now her new movie ‘Saltburn’ is the big hit on Amazon Prime. And the big talking point on TikTok. Shortly after streaming started, TikTok posts already crossed the 4 billion views mark.

The two main characters Jacob Elordi (simply beautiful) and Barry Keoghan (perverse) can be seen in numerous clips. In hundreds of clips, very young people, mainly women with expensively groomed hair, imitate the final scene from ‘Saltburn’, Barry Keoghan’s nude dance. Only they are not naked. But like him, they dance through their families’ villas, country houses and castle-like homes. It’s shocking how many of these young, wealthy people there are. But why do they do that?

“Saltburn” is considered the “most controversial film of the season” (“Guardian”). Some think it’s great, others think it’s a big failure, it was barely seen in theaters, the breakthrough came on Amazon Prime. In fact, dramaturgically speaking he has some cardiac arrhythmias, the sharp consequence of “Promising Young Woman” is quite bumpy here, but overall it is a grand, devilish, sensationally acted and sumptuously staged delight. Like “Promising Young Woman,” it is a revenge epic, but not “revenge porn,” but rather “revenge property porn,” real estate porn with a twist.

Barry Keoghan, just the mentally ill-equipped boy from the Irish backwater in “The Banshees of Inisherin”, is now Oliver Quick, a supposedly financially disadvantaged student who falls in love with the charm of beautiful, relaxed, generous rich boy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) expires. In 2007, retro, says Emerald Fennell, but not so retro that it could make you nostalgic, the retro feel has to be a little awkward for the audience, awkward, you have to think you might have something similar to how the movie costumes look still lie in a dark corner of the wardrobe and that you once danced exuberantly to the soundtrack of the film.

And just like in England – we know the advertisements for luxury real estate that have been turned into films such as ‘Brideshead Revisited’, ‘Gosford Park’ or ‘Downtown Abbey’ – the Catton clan has owned a beautiful estate for hundreds of years: Saltburn – Salt Burning , the salt that burns when sprinkled into a wound. Because the emptiness of the dispossessed and the man without any significant pedigree yawns like a wound in Oliver.

He ignites: for Felix, for his sister, but especially for Saltburn himself, and he embarks on a criminal crusade of appropriation. Just as ‘Saltburn’ is also Emerald Fennell’s orgy of appropriation. Without making any secrets, she refers to three role models: the talented Mr. Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ and Evelyn Waugh’s novel ‘Brideshead Revisited’, which has been adapted into films several times.

Brideshead is also the name of a country house, where a young student, who does not come from a luxurious background, falls in love with the house, with the son and the daughter, but ultimately remains an outcast, an inadequate person, the last entrance to Brideshead and the attendant class change are denied him. Oliver Quick, on the other hand, will have good reasons to dance around Saltburn stark naked. The soundtrack: “Murder on a Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis-Bextor, which reached number two in the UK charts in 2001, and is now back at number two thanks to “Saltburn”. The Rich Kids dance during their house tours on TikTok.

Like Ripley, Oliver is an incredibly smooth and murderous con artist who learns quickly. And just like in ‘Psycho’, Emerald Fennell played the role of the villain with an actor who was previously a pure crowd favorite. In “Psycho,” the good-hearted Anthony Perkins became the ultimate evil. She directly quotes iconic images from ‘Brideshead’ and ‘Psycho’ – the semen in Felix’s draining bathwater (and slurped by Oliver) matches the blood in the draining shower water in ‘Psycho’, and like Brideshead’s patriarch, Elspeth Catton (Rosamund Pike) on life support at one point.

Of course, the interior design press has already discovered where Felix’s bathtub can be purchased, and the scented candle called “Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater” already exists.

‘Saltburn’ is something of a picturesque revenge on the entire British upper-class glorification industry. And at the same time for those who project their dreams and desires onto it. About the houses, the titles, the lifestyle. There is nothing good in this system, says Fennell, who should know this: money or the pursuit of it completely corrupts any character and makes you amoral.

But of course the film doesn’t say this as sloppily as it now sounds; decadent stupidity and shabby progress are celebrated with the most borderline British sarcasm and in beautifully decadent images. In images as meme-worthy as squirrels scratching baby cats. There’s the beautiful Felix. There is Oliver, who, like a vampire, absorbs the Cattons’ bodily fluids and thus the lifeblood of their existence; the bath water is just one of many possibilities. And so the ‘highlights’ of ‘Saltburn’ quickly became popular culture after a brief shock from the public.

The super-rich are the entertainment freaks of the moment, and as long as they are, there is no reason to exclude their fun decadence from the great honey sucker that is fiction. Countless series are dedicated to their homes, their clothes, their privileged detachment from reality and their corruption. They are called ‘Succession’, ‘White Lotus’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘Big Little Lies’, ‘The Crown’, ‘The Undoing’, ‘Billions’, ‘Expats’ (Nicole plays surprisingly often in them Kidman a suffering rich woman) and so on. Many things are even more underground than “The Geissens”.

The truly rich probably see this with narcissistic glee and as an outgrowth of a culture of envy that can still be gleefully stoked by dancing around your villa on TikTok. You want to show your worth.