Saltburn is a Comedy. The Joke is on You.

How Emerald Fennell Stole Every Beat from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Diamond as Big as the Ritz

I'm not so much late to “what's-his-name’s” Midsummer birthday rager at Saltburn. I just had trouble finding the place.

It took me five nights to finish watching a movie that felt - every inch - like a perfume commercial directed by Gucci-era Tom Ford with Jeffrey Dahmer as his cinematographer.

I get that Saltburn is a comedy whose main joke is on us: satire is all about exaggeration, so let's mash up The Great Gatsby and The Talented Mr. Ripley, turn them into unrecognizable processed food [without any semblance of nutrients, fiber or goodness], and serve tens of millions of TikTokers the greasiest garbage ever conceived — all while pretending it's Michelin star dining.

I appreciate dark comedies like Eating Raoul, Red Rock West, After Hours, In Bruges and Harold & Maude (look them up if you don’t know them, but you’ll probably just rewatch Saltburn instead). I devour slow-cooked-long-con films like 1977’s The American Friend (an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley’s Game), or Speilberg’s Catch Me if You Can, but Saltburn is neither. 

Outré director Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is all-gritty-1970s-West-Side-Highway New York (with Hamburg and Bavaria thrown in). It follows Tom Ripley’s elaborate art forgery scheme across two continents. It moves fast enough that you have to pay attention to keep up with not just the changing time zones and country codes, but also the subtle social cues of class and psychopathy. It’s funny when it’s addressing late method-actor Dennis Hopper’s (as Ripley) obsessive-compulsive, doting nature (about memorializing every moment of his life on an audio-tape recorder, and his careful watch over another man who is basically a stranger). 

Eating Raoul was made on a pauper’s budget, but it uses everything and wastes nothing: the opposite is true for Saltburn. The former is about a couple who uses personal ads (in a world before dating apps) to lure and rob unwitting victims. There’s a scene where an entire party’s worth of guests are electrocuted in a giant hot tub. The thieves (and murderers) abscond with a full complement of luxury automobiles on a car carrier. It’s funny because it’s unexpected; it hits because it’s an anomaly within the world of the film; it works because it’s never really explained or unpacked. They didn’t mean for it to happen, but it was a happy accident that it did: no bodies to clean up, no loose ends that need tying. The latter, Saltburn, takes every opportunity to shock us into submission. In Eating Raoul, most of the victims are literally hit over the head, but Saltburn cracks the viewer’s skull with repeated bludgeonings of graphic sex — but only the aftermath of violence. We are “treated” to visuals that can’t be unseen for reasons that can’t really be narratively rationalized. 

Anthony Minghella’s version of The Talented Mr. Ripley (with Matt Damon and Jude Law), contains a bathtub scene that generates powerful gay subtext. Tom and Dickie (Greenleaf) are playing chess. Dickie is mostly submerged. Tom is sitting on the bathroom floor. One exits. The other enters. A strategically-placed, far-away fogged-up mirror is used to telegraph Ripley’s lustful longings. It works. It’s not funny, nor salacious, but it’s entirely plausible. For the scene to have poignancy - and for the sexuality of either man to be taken seriously - requires Damon and Law to put in real work as actors. It requires the writer-director Minghella to use restraint. Why? Because it’s already awkward enough. It’s 1958 and homosexuality is criminalized - even in Europe. It’s awkward because Greenleaf is a walking advert for heteros. It’s uncomfortably funny when Tom puts his hand in the bathwater, crosses a line, asks to get in, but then walks it back: “I didn’t mean with you in it.” 

Saltburn’s writer-director Emerald Fennell doesn’t play coy. Her clawfoot-tub vignette is made for TikTok. There’s even a vinyl soundtrack that commemorates the moment. 

And I was thinking about how so many things are “given a second life” by TikTok, or - like Billy Joel’s “Vienna” - a first. More people have watched clips of Suits on TikTok than have watched actual episodes of Suits. How many Gen Zers have actually sat through When Harry Met Sally in longer than ten-second sound bites? TikTok is supposed to make old works of media relevant again, not the other way around.

Saltburn may be the first (successful) “made for TikTok” movie. 

It’s all backwards.

If social media had been a thing in 1983, then Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen dancing in his button- down Oxford with Ray-Bans on inside his parent’s Chicago North home would have been duplicated millions of times over. This light-and-fluffy scene from Risky Business belies the film’s tone, if not the plot’s trajectory (Joel will eventually turn his ancestral home into a brothel, the mob will take everything his parents own hostage, and he’ll go to Princeton). The movie has an “R” rating (back then - no one was admitted under 17 without a parent), but Cruise’s long-tailed business shirt provides a modicum of modesty. From Risky Business, Cruise becomes a sex symbol, not a sex object. There’s an important difference there. 

Lip-synching in front of your bedroom mirror to a pop song is something we’ve all done. Dancing around your kitchen or family room like no one’s watching is both human and potentially embarrassing.  

Oliver’s fleet (or quick) footed - seemingly improvised - dance at the close of Fennell’s “dark comedy” happens because “everything is diabolical, because it’s exhilarating.” I have no idea what that means, but Fennell said it to a Variety Magazine journalist, so it must make sense in her head. Much like the movie.

Juxtapose, for a moment, in your mind a 30 year old jauntily unclad, whirling, twirling, Barry Keoghan (as Ollie) two-stepping to “Murder on the Dancefloor” at the end of Saltburn, with a 45 year old Will Ferrel streaking nude through a scene in Old School. 

I’d imagine that most people laugh, if not marvel, at Keoghan’s finale performance. The same can be said about Ferrell’s — for very different reasons. 

But Saltburn is a comedy. Emerald Fennell has marketed it as such. 

When we laugh, is it out of our own discomfort, or - in the end - comic relief? Oliver Quick has inherited a colossal estate that had been Farleigh Start’s one-time day-to-day reality and Ollie’s perverse, far-off fantasy. 

I laughed because I was relieved to be free of the movie once and for all. 

I laughed when I noticed everything Fennell had lifted, whole-cloth, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” The Great Gatsby, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Don’t Worry Darling, and so many other works that had come before. 

In “Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” the main character is seduced into accompanying his obscenely wealthy Boston boarding school friend to his family’s hidden estate in a town called Hades. The old-money family are direct descendants of American royalty (George Washington), and their private home has its own off-the-grid zip code, untold treasures, and a daughter who is also “sexually incontinent” (to borrow Fennell’s phrase). The idea behind “Diamond?” Once you go to Hades you can never leave. Once you sleep with the Washington daughter (Kismine), you are marked for death.

Sound familiar?

Yup. It’s the exact plot of Saltburn. 

Also: Washington’s classmate is from the lower classes. 

Fitzgerald’s story also ends in tremendous self-inflicted violence and death: the Washingtons essentially destroy themselves over intense paranoia about the secret source of their wealth, and an unwillingness to get out of their own way. 

It’s basically what Venetia Catton says to Oliver at her bathside (or what TikTok calls “Venetia’s Bath Monologue”) — 

Hey, Ollie, Ollie, don’t be upset.

I don’t think you’re a spider.

I think you’re a moth.

I’m right, aren’t I?

Quiet…

harmless…

drawn to shiny things…

batting up against the window…

just desperate to get in.

Well, you’ve done it now.

You’ve made your holes

in everything.

You’ll eat us from the inside out.

So little of the fault lies with Ollie, though. And none of it is funny, even darkly, that many of us have a death wish, walk straight into certain doom, eat in a way that is digging our graves with our own teeth. It’s ironic perhaps.

But what’s “darkly comic” about a movie that steals from everything that’s good (save for the unwatchable Don’t Worry Darling), but still has to explain itself to an audience that it can’t possibly respect? 

This review has no spoilers because you can’t spoil something that telegraphs its every move, frame-by-frame. 

Comedy doesn’t come from the expected, the predictable, or the implausibly exaggerated. 

And satire has to attack something recognizable. The world-building in Harry Potter is more down to Earth. 

When I watch the black comedy In the Loop (by Veep’s Armando Iannucci), I am introduced to familiar politicians and politicos. The operative that Malcolm Tucker represents is a real person (Alastair Campbell). Gandolfini’s General Miller is Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf. 

I get the jokes because there are jokes to get. Iannucci skewers both K and Downing Streets as they deserve it. He unleashes the darkest of diatribes on men and women (on two continents) who manufactured a war under false pretenses. It’s a serious topic, with tragic results on many fronts, but In the Loop is light when it needs to be, and heavy where you wouldn’t expect it. 

Saltburn is just trying to be viral, shocking, outrageous, heavy-handed, overtly plagiaristic, pornographic, necrophilic, representational, and - well - funny - every moment, everywhere, all at once. 

It’s a comedy, sure. But the joke is squarely on you.

Emerald Fennell must be laughing though.