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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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You've understood some of it, but not the context.

I understand the context, but my interpretation isn't ruled by it. The theme is universal. Saltburn is about the British class system at Oxford in the same way that Notes from Underground is about petty Russian bureaucrat life. It evokes themes that stretch back to Plato and Nietzsche and forward further. It calls to mind the death of Princess Diana, the life of Brittany Spears, the way we approach celebrities, we want to fuck them and we want to kill them and after they are gone all we can do is miss them.

RE: Emerald Fennell

A lot of the criticism I saw, in reading articles about the movie after watching it, was this exact species of ressentiment. The critics, the writers, her old classmates, they hate that Emerald Fennel made a movie and people like it. And they don't counter it by making a better piece of art, a more stirring story, they tear it down. She had no right to make it, and people must be told so. They hate her, at best, for getting lucky.

Saltburn is about snobbery. Ollie hides that he's upper middle class not primarily because it will get him more sympathy in the American sense that the wealthy Felix will feel sorry for his poor friend. He hides that he's upper middle class because to be upper middle class is the worst possible thing you can be in the presence of 'old' money, because it's to be present in the same spaces as them as both an ignorant and uncouth annoyance and a reminder of a changing world. The English upper classes have a long history of liking the working class as relatively noble, deferential salt-of-the-earth type people (see downstairs in Downton Abbey), but disliking the middle as money-grubbing shysters. Ollie's betrayal is in claiming to the former while actually being the latter.

This is good analysis. Ollie feels himself entitled to something better than what he has because he sees that other people have it. He blanches at a friendship with the student who screams at him to ask him a "fucking sum." He wants to be one of the beautiful and the good, not one of the normies.

But it can be extended to a range of relationships, it's a typology. It extends to race, to gender, to wealth, to class. The same dynamic appears over and over.

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