#12: Gnomes and Grey Crushed Velvet Sofas (on Saltburn)

The pleasures of writing from the middle; the banality of direction by needledrop

Oliver Quick…interloper extraordinaire?

My friend once told me a little story about how the British class system can be explained via attitudes to the garden gnome. Posh people, who love their eccentricities and knick-knacks, adore the odd gnome. Working class people have them in their gardens non-ironically. But to the middle class, they are a fearful object: a mark of clutter, and an indication to the world that you don’t have good taste. The gnome is the Uncle Onslow who threatens to disrupt the curated lifestyle of Hycaninth Bucket’s pristine floral surburbia in Keeping Up Appearances. The 90s BBC sitcom is probably my mother’s favourite; Hyacinth really is familiar to a lot of materially aspirational first gen parents of pushy experience.

In Emerald Fennel’s sophomore feature, Saltburn, the writer-director reveals, it seems unwittingly, her inherited disdain for the sour-faced tidy middle class set, too fussy to have a laugh over the ridiculous to ever come close to the sublime. I say this not just because Fennel is so posh she makes Kate Middleton sound like Lily Allen — though, bless her, it doesn’t help — but because of the few bits of ideas she’s dropped into the film. Which is to say it’s not her upbringing or background that’s the problem, but her artistic choices.

I come to the film with a certain bias, and a certain expertise. If you haven’t watched the film and you intend to, I might suggest skipping this entry until you have because I want to talk about the whole thing unencumbered. My position is this: private school, scholarship then Cambridge, then a career in the arts, then not. I know someone whose family includes the author of one of Fennel’s primary inspirations for the film. I’m a pretty adept middle class grasper and one of my favourite novels is Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, in which a non-straight Oxford friend of the older brother in the boy-girl sibling duo outstays his welcome after being dazzled by the proximity to exquisite objects he only has access to through his wits and learning, set during a period of economic stability, if not boom, in Britain.

Instead of Hollinghurst’s Nick Guest, Fennel has Oliver Quick. Oliver, presumably because it suggests a destitute orphan status the Catton family, and the audience, are primed to look for. But this Oliver isn’t just satisfied with picking a pocket or two. This Oliver is out for blood, including during an outdoor period-cunnilingus scene involving Felix’s sister, Venetia. He comes, he kills and eventually, in a post-covid world, he conquers Saltburn and becomes its new owner. One question though: why?

Fennel’s script is very much an Oxbridge essay. By which I mean that, owing to a system where you churn out at least one essay a week in eight-week sprints and there’s mainly not very much continuous assessment and lectures aren’t compulsory, the tutorial and supervision systems incentivise a kind of bombastic flourish in its humanities and social science students. Something like this:

BIG GO INTRODUCTION — command of the subject material established — body of the thing: reference and quote a few texts from the reading list, at least two of which are the big hitters (I hear Webber has something to say about the rentier society and maybe I could make the case for how that’s about streaming services now?) but one slightly more niche one so you can make depth appear when there was actually another night at the pub, gallop gallop gallop, nicely styled concluding paragraph.

If this feels familiar to you (apart from in my own writing lolll) it’s because you’ve been reading as many disappointing reviews and bits of criticism in the New Statesman this year as I have. Be it in their attempted takedowns of Vittles, or ‘sad girl lit’ or Elizabeth Day, their contributors this year in particular have made me yearn for the more expansive cultural criticism landscape of the US, where longer word counts have meant for more rigorous hating. Where would one pitch, and place, a Hanya’s Boys in the UK?

I don’t begrudge undergraduates for picking pints over the week’s reading. I do begrudge Emerald Fennell for twice failing to make an ending land, to the extent the visual jumps of the previous hour and a half plus start to unravel before you’ve even got out of your cinema seat.

Because here is what I was thinking, in all the time afforded to me by that long, long closing scene with Barry Keoghan’s willy as he saunters naked through Saltburn to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’: ok but why was this man being interviewed then? What was the point in that frame, if not just to appeal to the audience of Taylor Jenkins Reid, whose novels often feature interviewing or oral history as a narrative device. It doesn’t make sense here because, almost 20 years on from his first year at Oxford, fundamentally he’s just some guy who now owns some pile. And why did she have to make the black boy accuse Oliver of failing to ‘pass’ before they went to a ball? Does she understand what she’s failing to do here? And why oh why oh WHY are studios so convinced of our abject idiocy these days, because I honestly don’t believe even Fennel put this in of her own accord, that we have to have a flashback to prove that said mixed race black American Catton cousin, entirely financially reliant on his English relatives, indeed had not attempted to flog a family heirloom to Christie’s with some urgency. Why do producers think we cannot work out that the guy who kills the brother and the sister, also frames the more successful family usurper for fraud?

And I resented having the time to ask these questions because I was bored. The man slurped semen-infused bathwater yet at the end of the film, I was bored. Which I think is because of a couple of things, and the main one is a lack of idiosyncratic style on the part of the filmmaker. There were bursts of bright things, definitely — I queued up for an early morning screening as part of London Film Festival before pulling another shift at the Class War Factory (trade union) down the road right after. I didn’t want to not enjoy myself. Jacob Elordi is perfect as the casual posh guy and I did enjoy Richard E Grant, though Rosamund Pike at times for me was a little insistent, mainly because of the script. But there was basically no one in this film that Fennel could say she had found for herself. Alison Oliver has previously played a thin and boring and somewhat unapproachable girl before in Normal People (though obviously not as posh); Rosamund Pike and Carey Mulligan have worked alongside each other before, most successfully in An Education, largely because Mulligan is drawing on her best skill as a screen performer, which in my view is convincingly portraying uncharismatic people. Even Lolly Adefope and Joshua McGuire, who are barely in the film, are basically reprising their roles in Lovesick. As a director, you would hope she would have the ambition to pull out something surprising with the talent she gets to work with, but it seems she’s not curious, or confident, enough to do so yet.

It’s the same with the choice of songs. I hate the term ‘needledrop’ because it gifs a moment, and crystallises it to something which can be checked off for an end of year list. omg NOT the sophie ellis-bextor at the end! That sounds curmudgeonly but it’s a trick she used in Promising Young Women too: using Paris Hilton’s ‘Stars Are Blind’ or the Cheeky Girls’ Christmas single is stolen valour if the rest of the world you are drawing feels shallow. I have a soft spot for the use of the Bloc Party track ‘This Modern Love’ in the film, I think because it was about 8:30 in the morning when it came on and I love that track, but the MGMT ‘Time to Pretend’ feature? It’s giving farcical, I’m afraid, and not in the fun way.

As a writer, Fennel has a disadvantage compared to a Hollinghurst or a David Nicholls as per One Day and Starter for Ten in that they are writing, like so many of us are living, from the middle. I joke that lots of posh British actors are bad at American accents (Mulligan, Emma Watson, Eddie Redmayne) because they think they are located in mainly the resultant sounds rather than the movements of the mouth to get there. The middle class person with the perfectly fine home life, if slightly fussy front room and kitchen, are a goldmine for writers interested in interiority, but also the exterior too. Immediately your protagonist is more attuned to their surroundings, because they are trying to work out to what extent they do, or don’t fit in. The other day, in my Arrangements In Blue piece, I mentioned waking up by the thought I would be the only person at a wedding without a partner or a postgraduate degree. Being able to create leaderboards at will just to place yourself at the bottom is not a positive trait to have in life, but in fiction I find it compelling, provided it is not a pure underdog fetishism.

Fennel’s depiction of Oxford prompted more questions than I think the text had intended. In Saltburn’s world, there’s the rich kids who have parties, and then about three losers per year in each college who don’t already know each other and are vitamin d deficient library dwellers. The rich girls are interchangeable floozies, by the way, and, except for aforementioned Gay Black Cousin, far nastier about poor little Oliver’s apparently lowly status than the men, like grinning, winning Felix, could ever be. Britain likes to export visions of itself where no middle exists. But how funny — when I was a student, admittedly at a slightly more politicised time when EMA got slashed, tuition fees tripled and maintenance grants abolished, those kinds of nakedly rich people were not ‘the’ centre. I certainly can’t claim not to have lots of upper-middle class friends but the boarding school ‘oh, crumbs!’ boating society people didn’t really seem to be where it was at. They got on with their thing, just as much as the evangelical Christians got on with theirs, and the theatre obsessives did their stuff and the student journos kept chugging at it. How quaint, Emerald, to paint a world in which being far away from wealth means you don’t have anything to fill your time with? Even in the most elite and hallowed of halls, fundamentally most kids are going to make friends.

I am including here a photo that facebook reminded me I posted to the platform 13 years ago this week.

This is my neighbour’s room in our first year of university. The Sainsbury’s own brand gin topping an otherwise totally bare Christmas tree and the Lou Reed album resting on the mantlepiece are such a perfect encapsulation of Abby’s style and aesthetic back then, as well as the near total domination one supermarket has in central Cambridge. In second year, she and a friend would track down and cycle to comically unskilled rodent taxidermists in nearby Cambridgeshire villages found on Craigslist, long before it became a trend heavily documented in places like Vice. It was all up for grabs during those years: Barbour jackets, and platform creepers, and listening to ‘Psycho Killer’ by the Talking Heads as a pre-drinking song along with a novelty track whose only words were ‘Oh, Champs Elysee.’ You couldn’t photocopy that, or homage to death that kind of sincere chillness, even if you’d been brought up with access to all the culture in the world. And sometimes, when things feel stacked against most people who want to make stuff — those who don’t have connections to a previously unfilmed manor house for their movie — it’s nice to be reminded of that.

Like Oliver Quick, I spent a lot of my time as a student watching. I watched my friends play pranks: innocuous things like sending wildly fake stories to one of the student papers with lines like ‘northern industrialist’ and ‘immoral fur coat’ and inventing new roles on college committees to run for, rather than anything too social media. I watched the taxidermy phase and so many more. I’d go along with everyone to a club/bar round the corner from our college that had Guitar Hero and would play the Pixies and the Killers every weekend and I wrote essays, didn’t write essays, ate loads of pesto pasta. In truth, I assessed myself as being ‘friends with, but not actually’ cool, which must be accurate because the people who fixate over where cool is are basically never actually there.

Nicholas Guest does a lot of watching too. I read The Line of Beauty the first time in my mid-teens, studying for GCSEs and rationing my use of semi-colons because I knew I often came off as pretentious. When I returned to the book in the pandemic, all I could think was: my poor, stupid boy. Nick! Nick, who moved to west London in 1981, and whose first boyfriend was a black man, and who could have had so many friends, and experienced so many things, and been part of so many communities, and eventually had so much more support as the decade grew to a close. And all he wanted was to stand and photograph scenes of opulence. Not even for display, but just committing images of ‘beauty’ in his head. It would have been a waste, if it weren’t for the fact he wouldn’t have deserved the subcultures he had no interest in joining.

It doesn’t make sense that Quick spends a large time of his life trying to own and occupy a place we’re supposed to believe has footmen in 2007. Why spend a lifetime trying to get close to poshness when you could be where the things are? And, in the hands of a more visually, sonically or textually exciting filmmaker, it not making sense wouldn’t matter. I love a rollercoaster. But this ended like a jerky kids’ ride at the fairground rather than anything truly rollicking. A shame. Let’s hope she nails the ending next time.

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A quick note on the crushed grey velvet sofa of the title: posh people love not being too tidy. It’s the thing that is the most embarrassing for Oliver when his nice Merseyside upbringing is exposed on his birthday. There are no tatty rugs and the dog and shoes would not be allowed on the sofa.

Contrast this with west London style and fashion influencer, Lucy Williams, and how she describes her approach to her kitchen:

I’ve been reading Sheena Patel’s I’m A Fan, which I am not bowled over by but which does keenly observe all the good taste girlies online, who seem to have infinite resources for the best of the best, especially in ceramics. Never completely matching though, as Williams points out in her tour. Never quite as ‘clean’ and clinical mass-produced as all that.