One takedown of “Saltburn” by a British writer (so the cultural differences excuse doesn’t apply) hedges its bets by calling Oliver “middle/working class” and condemns the film as “a morality tale for the privately educated, that moral being ‘keep an eye on the silverware, lords and ladies, those greedy lower classes want to get their hands on our riches.” Fennell herself is described as “a jewellery empire nepo baby who counts everyone from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Madonna as family friends.”
First of all, “jewellery empire” is a bit of a reach. Fennell’s father, Theo Fennell, came from an army family, attended Eton, went on to art college, and then apprenticed with a silversmith. After launching his own jewellery company, Fennell’s ostentatious designs attracted a pool of high-profile celebrity clients, earning him the nickname “the King of Bling.” But the company’s annual turnover peaked at around £35 million — not exactly empire territory. In fact, soaring rents recently forced Fennell to move his business out of its flagship Fulham Road store to a slightly cheaper location.
To refer back to the example of Bill Gates, wealth acquired from learning a trade and building a business is not nearly as respectable (at least, in the view of the British upper crust) as birthright wealth. Mr. Darcy’s much-admired ten thousand a year in “Pride and Prejudice” comes from inheriting Pemberley, along with half of Derbyshire. Darcy himself is unemployed but (to borrow a quote from “The Good Place”) he’s unemployed in the “good, rich way.”
Equating the Fennells’ wealth with the Cattons in “Saltburn” is simply incorrect. The Fennells are firmly new money, with no inherited country estate or titles. In terms of both wealth and class, Emerald Fennell is actually somewhere in the middle between the Cattons and Oliver. If Fennell is indeed unqualified to make a movie about the specific class tensions in “Saltburn,” then by extension Bong Joon-ho had no right to direct “Parasite.” After all, Bong’s family was not poverty-stricken like the Kim family, or rich like the Park family. “I grew up in a middle-class family,” he told The Guardian. “Even in terms of real estate, the house that I grew up in is in the middle — between the semi-basement home and the rich house you see in the film. I was really close with friends and relatives from both classes.”
“Saltburn” and “Parasite” are very different films, but what they have in common is that neither paints the rich as villains and the lower classes as heroes, or vice versa. Looking for a message or a moral or a lesson in “Saltburn” is a fool’s errand. If the movie can be said to have a message at all, it’s this: