A bit too wet for me in the end

Saltburn; Triangle of Sadness

Rosamund Pike as Elspeth Catton in Saltburn

Hi friends,

A quick update not unrelated to Saltburn vs. Triangle of Sadness: before the holidays I had the pleasure of speaking with

Stephen G. Adubato

on his Cracks in Postmodernity podcast, about The Portrait of a Mirror, mimetic desire, literary moralism, and art for art’s sake. You can find the episode on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube if you want to w(h)et your appetite for today’s entrée.

The entrée is surf & turf: two messy-rich-people films of opulence and class anxiety, role reversals and pseudo-Wes-Anderson aesthetics, dangerously exclusive settings, conspicuous literary allusions, excessive bodily fluids, and direct personal resonance. One of them I loved. The other? Not so much. Warning: spoilers abound.

Saltburn

The critical compliment of cleverness is too often backhanded—modified by “fiendish” or “diabolical”; followed by a rankling, gendered “but.” When men are overly clever (James Joyce, David Foster Wallace, et al), this “but” tends to be something like: “but he’s a genius, so we’ll forgive his eccentricities.” It is disproportionately women for whom it heralds some corresponding failure—a ludicrous co-implication on the part of the critic that the artist is too clever to be trustworthy and the trustworthy critic himself is somehow cleverer.

It would be amusing if it wasn’t so offensive. To be fair to Richard Brody, his review of Saltburn is better than most—the New York Times doesn’t even mention Brideshead Revisited, which is frankly embarrassing. But Emerald Fennell’s “implied” film is the one she delivered. Saltburn’s allusive rigor, synthesis, and acute Juicy-assed 2006-7 specificity are what make the film her film, and what make her film so good.

Saltburn is an English country house, and Saltburn a conspicuous heir to the English country house novel—indebted not only to Waugh (who is deftly name-dropped on top of the teddy bear imagery), but to Austen, Peacock, Wodehouse, Ishiguro, Hollinghurst; to some of the greatest works in the Western canon. It is worth considering what exactly makes them so, because this is the first standard by which Saltburn should be judged.

Yes, I think the common denominator is mimesis, though I don’t just mean it in the Girardian sense. As much as the film teems with runaway metaphysical desire, from Oliver’s bedside frame monologue to the bath drain rimjob, Eric Auerbach’s imitation of reality in art comes equally to mind.

What country house settings so effectively facilitate is less the skewering of the upper classes (though it does, deliciously, allow some) than the shrewd Auerbachian analysis of them all. The tightness of an estate’s borders and rigid hierarchy of its roles—the upstairs-downstairs tensions between metaphysical distance and physical intimacy—create a closed-loop circuit for keen social observation, a sort of psychosocial Petrie dish. Class differences reveal shared human wants and frailties. It’s a prime environment for behavioral and moral inquiry—but this is icing on a glamorous cake, distinct from and perhaps even antithetical to moralization. Rich equals bad, poor equals good is emphatically not on the menu, any more than it is in the real world.

Saltburn effectively leverages its inborn advantages, exploring contemporary class and to a lesser extent racial dynamics through the genre’s traditional characters (the dashing heir, the snooty butler, the poor relation, the overstayer) without allowing them to fully collapse into stereotypes. Nowhere is this line more deftly toed than in Oliver’s own (ahem) twist—what I’d consider the film’s main innovation and Fennell’s temporal stamp on a timeless story.

The revelation of Oliver’s comfortable, upper-middle-class background complete with living father both shakes loose his association with the canonical “scholarship kid at boarding school” character and catalyzes Saltburn’s mid-film gothic Midsummer Night’s pivot toward murder and empirically, if unintentionally, The Talented Mr. Ripley. (Homoerotic baths! Necrophilia! Highsmith’s “Il meglio” finale!)

The genre pivot is worth a little structural aside. It echoes the ingenious shift from heist comedy to dark satire in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite—not to mention the mid-track key/tempo/tonal shift so popular in aughts indie rock, e.g. Block Party’s “This Modern Love” on Saltburn’s killer soundtrack.

Anyway, Oliver’s spiraling class lie seems insane but it is also fiercely rational, resting on the same insight Wes has in The Portrait of a Mirror following his father’s actual death:

Wes’s genuine devastation at the time of his father’s suicide had been swiftly, uncomfortably quelled by the startling material benefits it mobilized. [. . .] Wes suddenly understood why, in the winter of their fourth form year, Portia McLaughlin had lied and told everyone she had cancer. There was a seductive, asymmetric quality to sympathy: so many reasons you might need it, yet such a narrow moral purview for eliciting the real, true, genuine thing.

Like Tom Ripley’s, Oliver’s lie is not just a lie of class but of personal identity, as inextricably tied to his desire to be Felix as Tom’s is to be Dickie. Oliver’s more counterintuitive path toward il-meglio-Murder-on-the-dancefloor manifestation simply reflects the uncanny power of victimhood in our time, his social climbing strategy alarming and explicable in the same way as Jussie Smollett’s or Rachel Dolezal’s.

Felix’s horrified reaction on learning the truth seems reasonable—and yet, would he have befriended Oliver absent the ruse? Invited him to Saltburn thinking his dad alive and well? For all Felix’s kindness to the sympathetically-enhanced Oliver, I suspect not. (Wes: no one would be asking him to Aspen if his father was out on bail from Riker’s Island.) But who knows? These are the new questions Fennell layers on enduring ones, while never forgetting a film’s primary job is to entertain.

Triangle of Sadness

A yacht and a desert island offer many of the same ingrained psychosocial advantages as a country house—if anything, the borders and roles are even tighter at sea. So how can a film boasting them, beautifully shot and with solid performances, be this bad?

The problem with Triangle of Sadness is the script: it’s a wreck. What it suffers from specifically is a dearth of cleverness, and all the things that work so well in Saltburn fall apart without it. Take the allusions. The opening bit is straight out of Zoolander except less funny, and there’s only so much Woody Harrelson and Zlatko Buric can do with the most sophomoric raw lines of Marx (I shudder to think how much worse their quote battle would have been in the hands of inferior actors).

Class anxieties manifest early in scenes so artificial and didactic they recall Alvy Singer’s stilted play-within-a-film in Annie Hall sans the (crucial!) narrative frame. I’m thinking of the restaurant bill argument particularly—but it just keeps going in the cab, the hotel. For almost the first third of the film. Many of the yachting conversations (dinner with the grenade manufacturers, drinks with sad Rolex guy) produce a similar effect.

When the role reversal finally comes, it’s limpid and totalizing and not just literally shitty. Up is down, down is up; the toilet cleaner becomes the matriarch, the models and moguls fight for pretzel sticks. The grenade manufacturers are blown up by one of their own. For all the mess, it’s way too neat. And even the mess somehow lacks humor! As a person who once (and this is true) nearly died from a bad oyster at a resplendent castle-hotel in Ireland, puking and shitting all over their branded Range Rover before being transferred to an ambulance, I feel particularly qualified in speaking to this point. For all the misery of that experience, it is nearly impossible to relate without getting laughs. It actually wasn’t funny! I’ll find myself imploring, but it is invariably me who succumbs to laughter rather than my interlocutor who stops.

The film’s final ambiguity was the only thing that kept me from throwing my iPad across the room. How did it win the Cannes Palme D’Or? Alas, I think I know, have known for a while: “the linchpin of elite decorum rests on decrying the very class structure that elite decorum traditionally exists to signify.” The victim-sympathy path to social ascension that Saltburn so cleverly probes onscreen Triangle of Sadness grossly panders to outside it. It’s kind of sad. I do have to give it that, I guess—Triangle of Sadness is sad.

If you’ve seen either or both of these films, I’d love to hear what you thought.

Until next time,

ANJ

PS—you may have already noticed these two films sit at polar extremities of the choice/no choice plot continuum, with Oliver orchestrating Saltburn’s happenings to the nth detail and the Sad McSaddies ever at the mercy of casting directors and pirates and weather. For newer readers (welcome!), more here:

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