My Reading of Saltburn

When I watched Saltburn in theaters, I felt a strange closeness to the story, protagonist, and themes explored in the film. So many of my friends felt intense disgust while watching the movie, and many reviewers dismissed the work as immature and exploitative for simple shock value––so why did I feel so entranced by the experience of watching Saltburn?

I related to Oliver Quick, the protagonist, in a way I found striking. Upon the first watch, I felt so enamored with the first half of the movie––pining with Oliver, feeling a familiar unrequited, unreciprocated, and desperate kind of love. I felt open to all the sensations of the film. I felt the butterflies and bitterness that Oliver felt as if they were my own indignities and passions, so I was receptive to the ugliness that unfolded in the later half of the film.

It seemed to me that I was watching something visceral and symbolic, and the more I thought about what I had seen, the more the sensations I felt could be tied to experiences that have shaped who I am. To understand my sympathy for Oliver, we first have to explore who he is as a character and what motivates him in the story of Saltburn. At first, we see him wrapped in the very real trope of an overachieving student with a love for language. He has spent his entire life inside books and stories, looking up to prestigious academies where he believes he will be accepted. He is also solitary, burying himself and deepening his knowledge of worlds old and beautiful that are lost to the Modern Age. Oliver experiences these lost worlds through the time travel of words, and he loves them. He is utterly misplaced in his lifetime burgeoning with internet memes and intrusive texts and Abercrombie, so he must learn to adapt.

When we first meet Oliver, he is a serious student of literature. His life is one of symbols and plot structures, dictated by story. The setting of Oxford carries a certain weight and depth that embodies all of his self-sacrificing solitude where he spent intimate hours in volumes of text and toil. In the first scenes of the film, he venerates Oxford as an institution of knowledge that housed a sanctum of secrets reaching as far back as the 1200s. His deep respect is most evident in his dress––suit and tie––basking in hallowed halls, only to be humbled by the social scene of the early 2000s which venerates cool indifference and superficiality. All his life, Oliver has clamored his way toward a place of dark relics and grandiosity shared in communion, shared in a sort of ascetic bliss, but he is mistaken. His reality takes shape and he realizes he is lost to the margins of life.

At the film’s outset, we quickly learn that Oliver is a scholarship student who finds himself among billionaires. Insulated by their wealth, they look at Oxford as a playground, not a serious place of study. Oliver understands this truth most blatantly during his academic advising sessions. He regarded knowledge as a mechanism of power that allowed him access to Oxford––which was to him––a place of academic height. However, periodic encounters with his academic advisor completely change his perception of knowledge and power, and he learns critical lessons about human psychology. He shares his advising sessions with Farleigh, a beautiful and seductive student of an entirely different kind. Farleigh’s demeanor is antithetical to Oliver’s personality; he is rebellious, coquettish, and lazy––with utter disrespect for study. Yet, he wins the affection of his academic advisor using sexual manipulation, hidden in soft speech and narrowing gazes. From then, Oliver is cast out of favor and perceived as a freak––a fringe member of Oxford society. Farleigh seems to like seeing Oliver overlooked and insecure, and Oliver’s grudge expresses itself later in the film. Through these early experiences, Farleigh initiates Oliver into an ugly, competitive game of power and desire. Everything changed for Oliver in that room, and it was there that he learned the rules of power among the elite.

While Oliver is exiled to the shadows of Oxford, a quiet, unrequited love expands the story of Saltburn in a way I found beautiful and smarting, like a salt burn itself. When a fish spends too much time in salt, nothing more can penetrate its skin; overindulgence in dunes of salt makes it so that nothing can reach its interior. Similarly, when someone plunges into ocean water, their eyes run red and bloodshot and blinding. Eyes burned and blinded never see things for their core value––never for what lies beyond the surface. So too does love become all-consuming, warped, and illusory. I know this feeling. It’s an addictive feeling. It’s a feeling where you can lose yourself to yearning. This is how Oliver feels about Felix.

Felix is beautiful, wealthy, and confident, with an aura of goodness that surrounds him and ensnares Oliver at first sight. It’s easy to see Felix and love him, but seeing isn’t true perception, is it? Love enters through the eyes, but eyes cannot fathom what is true beyond the surface feeling of infatuation. When Oliver narrates his feelings for Felix in his final confession, he hesitates to name his feelings as love, and he oscillates between love and hatred, in a way only romantics can.

As an audience, we meet Felix in a courtyard from behind a window. What more perfect metaphor exists for feeling banished in the shadows than a boy hiding behind a sunlit window? His gaze towards Felix awakens a dangerous desire that becomes instantly recognizable to me. But, he is fearless where I am not, and lets his eyes be matched by Felix, he becomes part of Felix’s life and he enters a hellish realm because of it. It’s scary to be seen, but even as Oliver jumps back from the window, he decides to pursue Felix––a fatal blunder that leads to a descent into envy, obsession, and desire.

A lot of reviewers had much more forethought than I did, and they divined that the film’s Meet-Cute was a lie––citing predictability in their condemnations of the film. Maybe I am foolish, but when it was later revealed that Oliver set things up to happen, I was surprised. Even knowing that Oliver punctured Felix’s tire so that he could swoop in––even knowing that many moments shared between them were not authentic––even knowing everything that Oliver did at the film’s conclusion––it does not change my silent conviction that Oliver’s intentions were pure. I believe that Oliver was motivated by a crush-like obsession, that sent him into rapture and bliss and happiness. His cute, heart-fluttering obsession was so sweet to see, so giddy and irresistible, and I refuse to believe it was all a lie. Thus begins the unfolding of my favorite part of the movie: the secret, pining love story. I felt such second-hand joy in Oliver’s experiences with Felix. The camera during this part of the film omits the deception Oliver employs to chase his intense and blinding feelings, but the feelings are real. They are as real as anything.

Oliver begins a friendship with Felix after saving him from a flat tire, and so, Felix includes him in his life. Accepted into an inner circle where Oliver no longer feels relegated to a shadowy, peripheral existence, Oliver changes. He sacrifices his formal dress and his serious study for social inclusion; he changes and becomes new in his love for Felix. He smiles, he laughs, and he radiates. But, one day, he begins to understand his precarity when he tries to express his true self––his serious and respectful and dutiful self that lies beneath the persona he created for acceptance. In Felix’s room, Oliver lets himself shed his persona because he feels secure in his friendship with Felix; he feels safe to be himself. His true self is concerned with cleanliness and order. He likes neatness, beauty, and symmetry, so he tells Felix his room is a mess and offers to help him clean. Suddenly, Felix forsakes him for this trivial piece of advice––it was shocking to me––but his advice symbolizes a true part of Oliver. His advice signals his authenticity, it signals the self Oliver always hid from view with the barrier of books or persona. It was so strange to experience how quickly Felix dropped Oliver at the insinuation that he could be entitled and messy, that he could be anything less than perfect. Oliver stepped out of his role to be mother, maid, and homemaker––and Felix banished him for it. Felix only liked him for his role as a serf, servant, and repressed worshiper, never able to express his feelings.

As we know, every love story follows an archetype: usually, a hero saves a damsel. Oliver knows this––he has read enough books to understand roles, to know how love manifests. This is not an excuse, but a reason for his tremendous lies, that come off as sociopathic in the later half of the film. He lies to regain Felix’s affection. He doesn’t just lie, he employs an intricate and manufactured story that Felix cannot forgive. But to me, upon closer inspection, Oliver’s carefully crafted story does not feel like a monstrous lie. In college, many people amplify their lives and embellish their struggles to understand themselves more. So, after being pushed out of Felix’s favor that one day in University, Oliver shows up hungover, knocking on Felix’s door in distress. All damsels are in distress. He then opens up to Felix about his dad’s death and his tragic life story. He goes on about escaping an adverse environment and leaving it all behind to pursue his life at Oxford. He says that his mother is mentally ill, his father is an alcoholic who just passed, his whole life was spent in abject poverty, he was born alone with no siblings or support, and thus, he will forever be alone in this world. In swoops the hero.

Of course, we learn later that his father is not dead, Oliver grew up in a nice neighborhood, he has a few sisters who are older than him, and he belongs to a normal and wholesome family. But where then do the bones of this story come from? Lies don’t often come from thin air, they usually come from somewhere. I suspect that when his dad is “gone out fishing” he knocks back a few beers and comes home to pass out on the couch, looking sloppy and snoring loudly. Oliver, who hates disorder, might wish his dad gone from his life, who knows? I suspect that his mother manages her mental illness quite well, but that it once resulted in childhood scars for Oliver. People with mental illness have what is called an “invisible” disability, and it can be hidden well. His mom remarks to Felix––when she perceives that he has caught Oliver in a lie––that, “Oliver probably wishes he was an only child.” That checks out: reserved kids with their nose in a book get picked on by their siblings. Wounded people lie because they want to please others. Having a scholarship around billionaires makes Oliver feel poor. I could go on, but I would be speculating further into a feeling I can’t prove. The point is that I don’t think Oliver is a sociopath for lying, and I think that in his lie, he was expressing wounds that might have been true.

That’s conjecture. What is irrefutable is that Oliver kills Felix, encourages Felix’s sister to commit suicide, bides his time for when Felix’s father bites the dust, and then smothers Felix’s mother with a pillow. Those are shown as unmistakable facts. So, how did we get there?

What people never tell you about unrequited love is that it develops out of personal deficits––that it exposes insecurities. I can only love someone so deeply and madly and intoxicatingly if they cast me aside. Mutual love is not ugly, but unrequited love is, and sometimes we feel ourselves to be ugly. Unrequited love hides repressed desire, sadness, and self-cruelty that feels as painful as it does beautiful. Who can deny? I’m less interested in what Oliver did (his sexual dalliances) than his final confession to Felix’s mother, who, in a comatose state, never even heard him. Why would he open up like this to Felix’s mother?

Felix’s mother is all the callousness and coldness in Felix personified, representing the emptiness of a person who uses others to satisfy expectations for their enjoyment. She gets bored of the tragic figures she deems to protect, and she plays with people as if they were dolls, unsympathetic to their downfall, or even their death. We see Felix do the same thing to Oliver, only we feel justified in watching his callousness to Oliver because we know of his lies and perversions which draw him so near to Felix. That doesn’t change the fact that Felix is the same as his mother, and Oliver sees it; he is smart enough to exploit the character of people who use others, but he is motivated by approval and power instead of amusement. He is motivated by love. His mistake was loving Felix, and falling into a dangerous game of power and envy that took him further into the depths of his inadequacy and pain. He thinks he can rectify his mistake by calculating vengeance, but it only envelops him further in all the ugly feelings that trapped him there in the first place.

Oliver’s hatred is still self-hatred, and it drives him to the very end, confronting Felix in all his forms––killing him in all his forms––in his family and in his past. I think it hurt Oliver to know that he could seduce and manipulate everyone but the one he truly loved. Previously, he sought ways to seduce anyone important to Felix to indirectly express his desire for him. When Felix died, Oliver did not want sex, but blood. His blood lust comes from his feelings of regret for having never expressed his love––instead falling into a perverse game of sex, power, and material comfort. It’s ugly, it’s obsessive and crude, but it’s human. I cannot look away at its humanness and call it monstrous or condemn it for being disgusting, weird, or immoral.

If we were honest with ourselves, we would recognize ourselves in Oliver’s pain. This movie is not meant to be taken literally, as a threat to the wealthy or a condemnation of social climbers and gold diggers––it’s so much more. This story is symbolic. Saltburn symbolizes woundedness, obsession, and love in its most grotesque and ugly forms––to an utterly human degree that is perhaps difficult to watch, but deeply revealing of the human psyche.

The final moment of the movie is a naked dance scene. It’s a controversial moment, but I feel that it redeems the movie. It is not a triumph in the way we think of triumph. It is catharsis, it is the symbolic self-acceptance and understanding that Oliver is not a monster, but someone in so much pain that it took the murder of his hero, his love, and his former self, to redeem him. The dancing and shaking figures of a Father, a Mother, and two children in the miniature theatre once scared him, but they scare him no longer––they live in him because he took their lives; he absorbed them into himself. They are the parts of himself that embody Love, Hatred, Order, and Beauty––which he can now distance himself from and integrate into himself interchangeably. And so, he is, in a way––free. It is freeing to see Oliver truly happy in symbolic freedom––freedom from the love he was denied, the ways he was toyed with, and all the pain he felt.