From The Riot Club to Saltburn

I recently watched Saltburn and while this is a film with all the trappings of something that I would love - aesthetic debauchery, Barry Keoghan, homoerotic intrigue - but I was left not only cold by the film itself but with the immediate urge to rewatch The Riot Club.

These two films are both centred around the ultra privileged Oxford set but with Saltburn it seems that in the ten years since The Riot Club came out we have entered such a dark phase of late-stage capitalism that we don’t even care enough to offer analysis or critique of the upper class anymore. The film could suggest that social media and the algorithms have trained us so well that we all covet the excessive, gorgeous, extractive lifestyle so much that we are willing to become monsters to acquire it. However, I am not so sure that the film itself offers much meaning at all.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge Saltburn as a class satire. That is what others have called it. Director and writer Emerald Fennell herself is far more interested in discussing the “sexiness” of it, the obsessive love, the perceived transgressive nature of desire. The dichotomy of desire and disgust. But even if that is what she is attempting, doing it in this setting makes it impossible to ignore the class implications. The heart of the problem, as I see it, is that she places all the objects of absurd desire with the upper class family and all the elements of possible disgust with the middle class sociopath masquerading as a working class orphan.

Oliver is both meant to be one of the most calculating and cold con-men since Tom Ripley (revealed by his framing monologue that gives away all the steps of how he pulled it off, like some sort of classic who-done-it villain) and also at the same time so consumed by desire for Felix that he cannot stop himself from fucking his freshly filled in grave. (Seriously, how is it possible that I didn’t like this movie?) Fennell herself says that the latter was the intention: “We wanted to present the feeling of that locust love: impossible, carnivorous, forever, impossible vampire love.”

And, to be fair, the award season chatter about Saltburn has been almost entirely focused on the “shocking” elements, with extra mileage given to the bathtub-cum-water drinking scene. (Not a phrase I thought I’d ever use but here we are.) The build up to the act itself is crafted meticulously. The tension Fennell builds as Oliver watches Felix masturbate in their shared bathroom makes the risk involved in that voyerism feel tangible. Fennell continues to show her skill in building a taught scene but when Oliver sucks the dregs of water out of the drain it comes across as weirdly anticlimactic. It felt like a less interesting version of the scene from Call Me By Your Name where a pre-cannibalism Armie Hammer eats the peach that Timothee Chalamet’s character just ejaculated into. That felt transgressive, like it was an inevitable outcome of that obsessive, all-consuming love.

We are supposed to be aroused and disgusted by Oliver drinking the bathwater, we are supposed to be aroused and disgusted when Oliver performs oral sex on Felix’s sister on a “heavy flow” day, we are supposed to be disgusted and aroused when Oliver seduces and subjugates Farleigh, the American cousin. When are we meant to be disgusted with the family? By the evident generational wealth that Felix breezes past when he gives Oliver a tour? By their ridiculous affectation that they dress for dinner? That they are mentioned in passing to be careless and cruel?

The issue is that in Saltburn, the excesses of the upper classes - while frivolous and capricious - ultimately only seem to affect, and thus harm, themselves - the eating disorders, the excessive drinking, the constant need to fill some undefined void with new people that provide some sense of self. The worst consequence is that they are entirely disinterested in the fate of Poor Dear Pam (portrayed by Carey Mulligan). While this shows their fickleness, at the same time she is coded as some type of wealthy-socialite-addict who doesn’t know where Liverpool i. Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant are hilarious and delightful in their roles as the parents so if that’s who we are meant to find dislikable, the message was missed in the translation. And Felix, even when he discovers Oliver’s betrayal and lies, is gracious enough to offer him a way to slip away without losing face. So isn’t it a bit harsh that Oliver murders them all?

Saltburn feels devoid of a wider context and that makes it devoid of any meaningful way to offer actual engagement with the theme of class. That is where The Riot Club comes in. If you haven’t seen it, or not seen it since it came out in 2014, I think it is well worth a (re)watch. It is not a perfect movie and comparing it to the aesthetic prowess of Saltburn seems unfair (also I imagine there is quite a difference in the budget though my basic desk research hasn’t been able to confirm it). The Riot Club follows Miles, played by talented nepo-baby Max Irons, and Sam Claflin’s Alistair as they try to earn their initiation into the legendary club, a fictional double of the very real Bullingdon Club and it all goes a bit wrong, to put it mildly.

Where Saltburn attempts to provide shocking scenes in sumptuous environments, The Riot Club offers truly shocking moments perhaps in part because it is so aesthetically scaled back. Watching it again now - for the first time since I saw it in the cinema when it came out - I found myself pausing it repeatedly during the dinner sequence which makes up the largest part of the film. This is the culmination of the initiation ritual and as the alcohol consumption escalates so does their transgressive behaviour. This group of highly privileged men arrive at a country pub - the only one they have yet to be banned from - in white tie attire under the guise of a “young entrepreneurs” club. The pub owner, kindly and gullible, welcomes them with pride and they play the part as gracious guests. However, one they are ensconced in the pub’s private dining room the public facade of gentility falls away and they occupy the space as if they own it. They expect the pub owner and his waitress daughter to move in and out in unseen silence as the servants they view them as. To the members of the club this is a place that does not matter, with people that do not matter, and that is why they can remove all pretence of polite social norms. The rising tension and horror of what was to come kept making my skin crawl, it was dreadful. And I wasn’t given the option to delight in stunning cinematography and production design to distract from it.

This is not to say that Lone Scherfig was not concerned with making this group of men attractive to us. The cast is a who’s who of desirable young British actors of the time. The boys of The Riot Club together represent the facets of British upper class. The landed gentry with their estates and Land Rovers and insistence that they “all drink together at the village pub”, the financially poor but academically privileged, the well-meaning London upper class with their love for the NHS but not the tax reforms that would be needed to truly fund it, embodied by the surface level sympathetic Miles. Then there is Alistair, perhaps one of Sam Claflin’s best performances. He is the true aristocrat, the one who is a product of the Empire and thus entirely superfluous and unmoored in the post-empire UK. He is the one that unleashes them all.

The Riot Club is a film steeped in the context of tradition and heritage. The club is all about it, it connects them to History and gives them purpose and a sense of belonging. But that’s really just the tinsel, the story they tell themselves. At the end of it all it’s revealed that Lord Riot himself was actually Ryot and had nothing to do with riotous behaviour, but this is part of their power - they can rewrite history to suit their needs. What the club really does is concentrate wealth and power, the elite within the elite. They protect their own. Meanwhile they have no care or interest in what is presented as genuine history and tradition, represented in the film by the setting of the country pub. It is never explicitly stated but the pub is coded through its design as a historic establishment, a place that has served a community for years, and run by a family man. The pub owner takes pride in his work and the service he provides. The club cares so little about the actual history of the country they supposedly venerate that the whole affair culminates in them smashing every photograph in the place. When the pub owner tries to step in, to stand up for the value the place represents, they physically assault him. It’s not a subtle allegory, but it is powerful.

The Riot Club so brutally places the antics of the upper class, the things they do in the privacy of college before their life of scrutiny begins, within the context of the society in which they live in and feed off simultaneously. Their actions spill into the world around them and the film shows it - while they are having a riotously good time in the pub’s private dining room the rest of the pub’s patrons are having their whole evening disrupted by the noise. The film makes their actions simultaneous desirable - attractive for their debauchery, for their laughter, the camaraderie - and disgusting - selfish, disruptive, destructive. Meanwhile, Saltburn does such a good job keeping the Catton family apart from the world it is as if they only have an impact on their very small sphere. And that is how the British upper class wants to be perceived. Why yes we are a bit eccentric and will on occasion maybe upset on or two people because we freeze them out but in the end we really just want to dress for dinner and drink champagne on our manicured estates but we definitely don’t in anyway have any impact on the corrupt structures of society or benefit from their continuation.

The message in Saltburn is that anyone who isn’t on the inside wants nothing more than to be on the inside and will put up with just about anything to achieve that. Poor Dear Pam leeches on for dear life and ends up dead without it. Farleigh allows them to treat him any way they want and still comes back for more, though he at least seems to have a real world excuse as to why the money would make a difference to him and his mother. And then there is Oliver. He was raised in a comfortable middle class family but sees an in with the upper crust by playing to Felix’s need to be the benevolent God. And he spends the whole movie finding ways to give them all exactly what they want, all just so he doesn’t get kicked out of Eden. In The Riot Club the people on the outside see the club for what it actually is. The sex worker, played by Natalie Dormer, asserts her labour rights and they can’t pay her to compromise them. The daughter of the pub owner immediately sees the boys as the assholes they are. And when the club attempts to get Miles’ working class girlfriend, played by Holliday Grainger, to preform oral sex on them all in exchange for thee years of tuition fees she walks away and never looks back.

According to Fennell the majority of Saltburn is set during the summer of 2007. This is before the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession began to escalate. This setting could have offered so much more meaning beyond the aesthetics and millennial easter eggs like the final Harry Potter novel, Felix’ eyebrow piercing and MGMT’s Time to Pretend on the soundtrack. GQ, of all places, published an interesting breakdown of all the anachronistic flaws in the film pointing out that many of the iconic markers of the summer are actually from later in 2007 or 2008. So why not set it in the summer of 2008? It would have been a greater opportunity to allow the context in, but instead Fennell opted for historical inaccuracy. Who needs that pesky context to clutter up the “sexiness”? The Riot Club, on the other hand, is inherently a product of the Great Recession and perhaps that is why it is much more married to its context. The play it was based on premiered in 2010, just two years after Lehman Brothers collapsed and the consequences of the financial crisis were still real as the film was getting made.

Full disclosure: I too am of the middle class that (thanks to socialist university funding reforms) was allowed entree into the grand academic circles similar to where both films’ settings. The Riot Club premiered a year after I had graduated from the University of St Andrews, the third oldest university in the UK after Cambridge and Oxford. Perhaps that is why the film stayed with me. It felt familiar in the characters, the setting, and the world it depicted. The university, which drew me in with it’s Scottish small town setting and renowned International Relations department, is generally most well known as the place where Prince William fell in love with “middle class” Kate Middleton when she walked the runway at a student fashion show. This was a few years before my time but it cast a long shadow.

My first real encounter with the weight of the particular class system that infuses so much of British society was during freshers week, the first week students arrive in town and spend seven days partying and sorting themselves into social circles before the academic work takes over. I was standing in the function room of my hall of residence which was hosting one of the regular “vodka bars” where the student hall committee filled plastic crates with bottles of cheap vodka and fizzy lemonade. I, a formerly awkward kid, was making an attempt at socialising and ended up talking to a generically attractive white guy. We were having a perfectly pleasant conversation when he asked me where I went to school. I explained that I grew up in Sweden so he probably wouldn’t know it. He followed that with telling me he of course went to Harrow. When I asked him what that was, he just walked away. I am not exaggerating. I don’t think I exchanged another word with that guy in the four years we were at the same school.

The two films offer two very different depictions of the upper classes in private - one is mundane in its misogyny, fun only for the ones on the inside, disgusting and pointless, primarily designed to bond the powerful closer so that they can never betray each other, and the other is shiny and magical and absurd and separatist and loaded with sex and power, so desirable that you either, like Poor Dear Pam, die when exiled or, like Oliver, do anything you can to stay within the glow.

It is a shame, because there are individual parts of Saltburn that are excellent. The lunch scene after they discover Felix’s body is a masterclass in directing, acting, production design and cinematography. They just don’t quite seem to amount to anything with very much to say. The kindest reading of Saltburn is that it is literally attempting to say nothing about class, which I guess would be a fair commentary on a part of our current zeitgeist, and instead insists on being about love and desire. The problem is, I don’t believe that part of it either - I don’t believe the obsessive love and I don’t believe the shock is actually shocking. And if it’s about class? I don’t know that I am interested in what it’s trying to say in that case. Why did Saltburn not end with Oliver burning down the mansion? It’s literally in the title. Then I would believe that it was only ever meant to be some sort of absurdist piss-take on the middle and upper classes. Now, it ends with the confirmation that all those dirty bourgeoisie want is what the upper echelon has. Not to be a buzzkill, but we could have had a film that gave us an opportunity to really look at what the world has been rebuilt into since the 2008 financial crisis. A film that engaged with our reality where the mega-rich build ultra-secure compounds in Hawaii while we covet the latest trends as the world burns. Instead, all we get is Jacob Elordi on late nigh talk shows confronted with “bathwater” scented candles.

TRE SNABBA: The Great Transition, Industry Stats, and Kickstarter

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