Saltburn is not a good film, but it is an instant classic of a specific genre I cut my teeth on as a teenager: homoerotic movies that aren’t about gay people, but are about vibes.
At its heart, Saltburn is a deeply stupid movie. It’s a riff on a type of media, one part The Talented Mr. Ripley and one part The Secret History, with an added dash of millennial nostalgia. The film takes place at Oxford University in 2006, following Oliver Quick, played by Barry Keoghan, as he goes from a nerd with no friends to receiving a personal invite to spend the summer at the Saltburn estate with his new rich friend Felix Catton, played by Jacob Elordi.
Despite an electrifying performance from Keoghan — who spends the film’s runtime watching Felix have sex, slurping Felix’s bathwater, drinking Felix’s sister’s period blood, and then dancing nude throughout Saltburn to “Murder on the Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis-Bextor — Saltburn is just not very good. The script doesn’t trust its audience to put together some very unsubtle signaling about different characters’ unsavory motivations. Meandering conversations lead to nowhere. While the film is ambitious in its maximalist visual style, montages elude to feelings and alliances that are quickly forgotten, and shots are crowded to fit the full ensemble cast in the frame while sacrificing visual unity and cohesion.
Ostensibly a story about class, Saltburn doesn’t really have a lot to say on the subject, other than some people are rich and other times people are not as rich. None of the servants who live and work in the Saltburn estate get much characterization; only one of them has a name. While class differences are a source of tension between the characters, by the end of the film I got the sense that I was supposed to be as enraptured by Saltburn and its history as Oliver is. The film seems to insist that at the end of the day, everyone just wants what the rich have, rather than objecting to a system that creates haves and have nots in the first place.
Despite my misgivings, I knew where this movie would be an immediate hit. It’s the kind of movie that I used to live for on Tumblr — movies like The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The Chumscrubber or Thumbsucker. There was once a whole genre of indie movies about young men growing up, sometimes with weirdly homoerotic friendships, that would be in theaters for maybe a week and do pretty well on DVD, gaining a fandom with young people who would go on make gifs, write fanfic or draw fanart.
These movies all have fun performances and interesting bits and pieces, but none of them are truly excellent films — they are all kind of just fine. But their electrifying moments — like when two of the lead characters in Altar Boys get into a physical fight to resolve their mounting differences in a deeply true to life demonstration of pre-teen male friendship, or when Keanu Reeves gives a slideshow about spirit animals in Thumbsucker — have stuck with me well beyond my adolescence. They are, like Saltburn, more a series of moods and vibes than cohesive stories, which is what attracted me to them as a young person. They are movies that can be summed up in a series of four gifs, or that require extrapolation in the form of fanfiction or art.
If there’s any reason to watch Saltburn, other than to gross out your relatives over the holidays, it’s for the chemistry between Keoghan and Elordi. The movie begins with a loving montage of Elordi’s body and face, focusing in on little details like beads of sweat nestled in the hairs on the back of his neck. The film opens with Keoghan asking the only truly unanswered question about the film’s narrative: did Oliver Quick love Felix Catton? Despite Quick insisting that he loved Felix but wasn’t in love with him, the entire film has shown us how much and how egregiously Oliver Quick lies.
This is fertile ground for the kinds of people who write fanfiction or draw fanart, and these people have been writing and drawing up a storm. On fanfiction website Archive of our Own, there are already 200 fanfics about Saltburn, and around two thirds of them are about Oliver and Felix. According to some number crunching in the wider fandom community, Saltburn is the fastest growing fandom on Archive of our Own. My favorite artist from the Succession fandom has even gotten into the mix.
These transformative works really do alter my recollection of Saltburn. Thinking about these characters in the context of being prompts for fiction or art rather than fixed points in a closed story opens up their personalities. The chemistry between Oliver and Felix is so potent because the possibilities are so obvious but are also totally unresolved — I, too, want to know what would happen if these two young men zigged instead of zagged in their lives.
I would much rather peruse fanfiction about Oliver and Felix’s romance than watch Saltburn again. In the world of transformative works, character moments with Oliver and Felix come to the foreground while Saltburn’s actual narrative, a half baked class commentary, recedes into the background.
