Saltburn: The Tumblr-ification of Cinema

I have a podcast called rehash I co-host it with my friend Hannah and it's all about internet phenomena that get us all up in arms only to forget about them within a week so we rehash them as they say we just premiered our fourth season which is all about schmecks on the internet the symbiosis of Humanity's two most Basic Instincts Innovation and getting off we cover everything from Pim and Tommy to Tumblr to fost aesta go check it out Emerald fennels 2023 Thriller salurn made waves across the internet before it even came out with exciting up-and-comer Barry Kean and hearth Robert Jacob a Lordi as its Stars a writer actress director fresh off the success of her feature film debut at its Helm and Whispers of shock and controversy running all over the festival circuit after its premere at tell you ride this was a highly anticipated movie many people loved it the film's final song Murder On The Dance Floor which came out 23 years ago landed at number eight on the charts salurn was the number one film on Amazon Prime over Christmas and it even inspired an insufferable Tik Tok trend of rich people dancing gleefully through their Mansions but as Alonzo Gerald pointed out in his review of salurn by the end of it I just felt like I've seen this movie before what that movie is exactly differs from person to person some have said salurn is similar to Brides had Revisited an early 8s British miniseries based on the novel of the same name by eely and woe about a middle class Oxford student who spends his summer holiday at the home of a wealthy classmate others see it as a contemporary ret take on pasolini's tior a lush religious allegory about a strange man who enters the lives of a bis family in Italy and seduces them one by one some even saw similarities to donat tart's 1992 campus novel The Secret history with its focus on an outsider protagonist and an elite group of students he meets at school all of these Works have queer undertones and sometimes even overtones but the film that's cited most often by critics and viewers is Anthony mela's 1999 adaptation of the Patricia heith book The Talented m Ripley which stars Matt Damon Jude log WTH ptro Philip Seymour Hoffman and cap Blanchett at the top of their game the similarities are so apparent that if you watch salurn having already seen The Talented Mr Ripley You can predict every moment of the story beat for beat a grifter lies and charms his way into the world of a wealthy man his interest in the wealthy man is addled by an obsessive and dangerous Fusion of love and Loathing a dubious friend sees through the grift immediately and threatens to unmask it an impressionable tragic woman is gaslit until the very end the grifter murders the wealthy man once he's found out and plucks off those around him one by one until there is no one left but himself of course there are obvious differences in the settings and characterizations as well as in the film's endings but the presence of The Talented Mr Ripley in salurn is unmistakable like this Mar you like everybody but darling you're kind about everyone you can't be trusted or this it's always the same whenever someone new comes into his life Freddy F Peter Smith Kingsley he's wonderful if you met him I think I like you even more than last year's one or this you can be quite boring your politeness is so greeting do you know that or this you don't have to clean up really yes I will I said I do it later stop I'm not a child I can do it myself or this you have Dicky rings I can explain name is that off shave or even this it's right there in your face Emerald fennel has spoken openly about her many references for the film she even made a list that includes the goet and Rebecca for their languid English Countryside settings and Gothic themes Cruel Intentions for its poor person Tangled in the web of the rich storyline A Clockwork Orange because she wanted viewers to quote feel complicity with all the characters when they do something icky she also mentioned Bri's head but when asked whether The Talented Mr rley was something she was thinking about when writing salurn she said this was that something that you were kind of thinking about while you were writing you know actually wasn't really know she wasn't really I'm sorry that's insane and to me very damning confirmation of what I already suspected about salurn one particularly adoring critic Christy poo argued that the comparison of salurn to Ripley is as thin as comparing Anna Kendrick's woman of the hour to fennels provocative previous feature perhaps the problem is that in a cinema landscape overrun with superhero movies and other kid-friendly films Cinema for grown-ups is so rare that it shocks us into clumsy comparison actually many people defend the film with this very notion that its success proves a much needed opposition to our current big budget IP driven franchise Laden industry and to that I partially agree but when we put films in opposition to these big budget IP movies we're usually talking about mid-budget original films soulburn is certainly mid-budget but while it script is not part of a franchise or beholden to any pre-existing IP I still have no problem putting its originality up for questioning I love movies that are clearly inspired by and referential to movies that came before them the other month I made a video about May December and the fact that it's a Pastiche of many other films and genres which is a testament to Todd hanes's strength as a filmmaker but when I look into the references of Todd Haynes I see creativity cultural critique and either refence or a playful irreverence to the reference when I look into saltburn I see the ghost of a better movie in a time where it's becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between Which films are good and Which films look good I think it's important to break down why salurn is not only an extremely derivative film but emblematic of a frustrating Trend in movies these days that I think is the product of this social media riddled age so to put it crossly why does Sul and [Music] suck why is it that when men play they always play at killing each other the two major themes of both salurn and The Talented Mr Ripley are class and identity and the ways that they often overlap so let's start with Ripley the film is about a young man named Tom Ripley who was sent to Italy by a wealthy shipping magnate named Herbert Greenleaf to persuade his philandering son Dicky to come back home dicki is on vacation in a fictional Seaside town called Mello with his girlfriend Marge and Tom manages to lie his way into their lives gaining their trust and becoming a close friend that is until Dicky's equally wealthy friend Freddy arrives who sees right through Tom now with a distraction from Tom Dicky also starts to see through him during a violent confrontation in Rome Tom kills dicki and assumes his identity keeping up the illusion to Marge that Dicky is still alive but has gone off her Tom kills Freddy after being confronted by him about Dicky's mysterious disappearance and under dicki's name he becomes suspect to the Italian authorities he reassumes his identity as Tom and travels to Venice to visit Mar's friend Peter who Tom has kicked up a romantic relationship with eventually he evades the authorities and gets Marge off his Trail by teaming up with Herbert for some good oldfashioned misogyny and gaslighting Herbert who believes dicki took his own life bequeaths Dicky's trust fund to Tom and thanks for being such a good friend and then Tom escapes on a boat to Greece with Peter things are looking good until Tom runs into Meredith a woman he met on the way to Italy and who he briefly dates in Rome under the pretense that he is Dicky this is bad because if Meredith and Peter who run in the same Social Circles run into each other Tom's lies will be exposed Tom kisses Meredith to a piece or questions but Peter sees asking Tom Tom about it later that day in their cabin Tom assuages him but while they're embracing in bed he strangles Peter to death returning to his cabin afterwards alone and looking tormented so that was movie Tom the Tom of the book is a bit amoral and generally less sympathetic especially emphasized in the ending of the book where he gets away with Freddy's murder and simply takes off on a boat to Athens alone to live off of Dicky's inheritance Patricia heith a lesbian herself vehemently denied throughout her lifetime that Tom was gay instead she said that Tom had no sexuality at all with him saying in the book I can't make up my mind whether I like men or women so I'm thinking of giving them both up and because he's this aoral killer the books come under a lot of scrutiny for perpetuating the Trope of the gay or bisexual psychopath which I talk about at length in my killing eeve video but there's actually a lot more going on thematically in the book then this criticism gives it credit for Tom is definitely coded as bisexual or gay he shows up on a beach wearing a yellow g- string Speedo and later sees a group of acrobats wearing similar swimsuits who he refers to as fairies he R plays killing Marge while wearing Dicky's clothes and stating to himself that he does not have feelings for dicki back in New York he was being housed by an older man who is implied to be gay and he has a man over at his place in Rome and this coding intersects with elements of class as well Dicky's boat is literally called pee PE and his wealth affords him a lé fair attitude that people around him find extremely Charming in his article for American literary history Patricia heis Smith's method Michael tras finds that it's precisely Dicky's wealth that allows him to much more effectively conceal his potential sexual identity he says by performing dicki's role Tom acquires the trappings of taste that allow him to become fluent in the sort of social distance and occlusion of motive that Dicky has naturalized for tras class becomes metaphor for a life lived in the closet he calls Tom's covetousness a sort of opportunistic identity management heith herself flip-flopped on being open about her own sexuality so this unclear presentation of it in Mr Ripley could very much be a reflection of what it was like living as a queer person in 1950s America Tom's coveting of Dicky's life is that classic convergence of not knowing whether you want to be someone or be with them as Kelly Wagers puts it Tom denying his feelings for Dicky is perhaps less due to shame and dishonesty than because the idea of a romantic relationship fails to capture all he wants of Dicky and what is very much coded in the book Anthony mangela makes explicit in his film mangela had been hired to adapt the screenplay for Ripley while he was waiting for his previous film The outrageously successful English Patient to get off the ground and having grown up in a working class Italian household from a tourist town in the aisle of man not so different from monello he related so much to the class Outsider perspective of material that he decided to direct it as David Carr writes manga's filmography uses a careful eye for cultural and historical detail to explore ways in which the Dynamics of class often push people into Corners that they had to fight or scheme their way out of this project was perfect for him and he made a lot of changes we have an enlarging of the Peter character who is explicitly gay and who Tom dates mangela changed Dicky from a painter to a sax player so he and Tom could bond over their love for jazz music when he dances around in Dicky's clothes he does it very effeminately raising the stakes when he's eventually caught doing it in their confrontation Tom says this I've been absolutely honest with you about my feelings that evening when we played chess for instance it was obvious what evening oh sure no no it's too dangerous for you to take on and the confrontation comes out of Tom learning that Dicky intends to marry Marge mangela moved the time period up from the early 50s to the late 50s to mimic one of his Inspirations lul Vita and the sexually liberated postwar boom that took place in Rome at that time and he studied Memoirs from Gay and bisexual writers of the 60s to to get a sense of the American gay Mila from the time and this was all very lucky because he got Matt Damon to sign on to this riskier role for a Hollywood heart robob before Goodwill Hunting the film that launched Damon's career came out same goes for gwenth ptro and K lanchette and it was certainly a risk there were quite a few reviewers who didn't take well to the changes Peter Bradshaw for the guardian called it a dismayingly unth thriller and bafflingly unconvincing character study Janet Maslin of the New York Times did not like the inclusion of Peter at the end and said these concluding events are far less meaningful than the ones that sent Tom on his Odyssey of self-invention in the first place and Charles Taylor wrote for Salon though mangela is more open about Tom sexuality his presentation of it still feels held back he's hesitant about making it just one more part of Tom's splintered psyche as someone who absolutely loves this movie I actually think mela's choices elevated the material rather than diminished it this film is much more interested in trying to pull out what I felt was at the heart of her book book and and I think that the whole business of adaptation to me is just to try and find a way of walking into a room having been the ideal reader and saying this is what I thought I read this is what really excited me this is what interested me this is what I want to argue with as a playwright very preoccupied with adapting difficult material mangela was transfixed by the theme of identity in the book and wanted to bring it to the four at the heart of Ripley I think there somebody who's hiding and giving up on who he is in order to be accepted by a world he'd like to belong to too so I think that's something which is common to many people I think not just to him and me he was aware of the controversy surrounding the book and said I'm desperate that no one infer a connection between his actions in the film and his sexuality but it's a sorry State of Affairs if you can only write about a homosexual character who behaves well that's another kind of tyranny I think the minute you try to pull back from what's sensual you're losing your nerve and I just didn't want to shrink away from the romance of it it's very tender to me it seems to me so much the fabric of the story not so much that Tom was gay but that he was in love with Dicky and with Dicky's life and that's quite sad and I think this sadness is conveyed really well Jude Law plays dicki as this person who just commands an orbit around him he's quite vacuous but he's someone who you can't help but crave their approval and you can read the hatred and the Love on Matt Damon's face whenever he looks at Dicky whether that's headon or stolen in glances through doorways and mirrors Damon is the perfect choice for this part like Leisa Schwarz bomb has this great quote in her review where she says he has Eagle Scout eyes fixed just a blink more than the calm gaze of any non- murdering young man and in that opacity we see horror but she also remarks on Damon's boyish appearance which makes him a bit more gentle in the first half of the film especially we're planted firmly in Tom's head the camera work is frenetic and dizzying we get a lot of fast-paced jazz music were given musical motifs that underscore when Tom is fantasizing all of which drive home this feeling of being swept up by desire mangela also uses Reflections to signify the splitting of Tom's identity and its merging with tickies one of my absolute favorite shots of all time is when Tom decides to flee for Venice we see his face in the reflection of the piano and as he closes it the reflection splits and then joins together again as Tom puts his glasses back on releasing Dicky and becoming Tom again there's even a Persona reference when they're on the train to roam together and their two faces overlap in the window Tom is definitely frightening at times there's this incredible moment where Freddy is playing the piano in Tom's suite and Tom is about to tell him to stop and then all of a sudden starts smiling like the exact moment he's decided to kill him it's bone chilling or at the end where we hear him murdering Peter in total voiceover as the camera passes across his face from the side illuminated by light to the side that's in Shadow when I first watched this film I was really unsettled by the time it ended but Tom is portrayed very sympathetically as well at one point he tries to tell Dicky about his identity but Dicky's short attention span interrupts him dicki on the other hand is clearly someone who likes to be worshiped he definitely leads Tom on and is extremely cruel to him when Tom makes his feelings clear Tom kills him because he's kind of pushed to the brink emotionally and while Tom is quick wited and Charming this has a limit most of the times he kills people it isn't out of sheer deviousness or malice it's because he can't charm his way out of being backed into a corner he's a victim of his own Lies We often see him clearly exhausted and tortured by what he's done mela's change to the ending emphasizes this in their exploration of the film teren Patrick Murphy and Kelly s Walsh praise the inclusion of Meredith and Peter they say that reuniting Meredith with Tom who she still thinks is Dicky both prevents closure a happy ending in the union of Tom and Peter and forces Tom to permanently be Dicky and identity it seemed he had at last escaped they argue that manga's insertion of these story lines enables him to to structure the film like tragedy and in the process Forge a distinct moral Vision mangela once said in an interview that The Talented Mr Ripley is a story about what happens when someone loses faith in themselves if I could take a giant eraser and rub out everything starting with myself he felt that Tom was someone crippled by self-loathing whether that's through his lower class status or his culturally stigmatized Identity or both and so to have the final scene be Tom ask asking Peter to tell him something good about Tom Ripley and for Peter the only person in the film who really loves Tom for Tom be snuffed out while doing so through Tom's anguish sobs ends the film on a note very different from high Smith's book Tom is not a cold-blooded killer who got away with murder he is a tragic lost soul Tom doesn't have to be someone we morally agree with but I think manga's changes to the story pull it away from accusations of perpetuating the gay serial killer stereotype and instead make the themes lying within High Smith's book much more definitive we sympathize with Tom and in doing so we identify with him and the way he's been brought to this point by the society that outcasts him Mark Harris observes the ending of mela's version of Patricia heith The Talented Mr Ripley in which he attempts to look briefly inside the heart of a killer bravely risks opening a door that heith herself either wouldn't or couldn't acknowledge was even there mangela tragically died of a hemorrhage in 2008 much before his time and what I think he brought to the world during his Too Short career was a very powerful visual poetry as Sydney Pollock his producing partner remembered about mingela nowadays everyone making movies wants to get the clothes off fast and the guns out quick he was just the opposite he was interested in the Poetry lavishing the viewer with story and scope and richness look at what you got for your $12 ticket with Anthony and I think that's exactly what we got with Mr Ripley a steady but Lush story that fills you with questions as mangela himself responded about making Tom sympathetic he said there's so much nihilism in film right now if I'm going to tell a story that's so Bleak and so much a journey of a soul if in the end Ripley was just going to go about his business what's the journey and you know that's a great question he'll get bored of you excuse me boot liquer when Roger eert saw The Talented Mr Ripley he too was taken off guard by how much he identified with Tom saying he is the protagonist we see everything through his eyes and Dicky is not especially lovable that means we are a co-conspirator in situations where it seems inconceivable that Tom's deception will not be discovered he's a monster but we want him to get away with it and quite recently Emerald fennel said the same thing about saltburn she said I wanted people who watch salurn to feel complicity with all the characters you should definitely completely understand where Oliver's coming from and not be able to resist let's just say I resisted sturn is about an awkward nerdy guy named Oliver who befriends a goodlooking posh classmate named Felix at Oxford Felix's cousin Farley another classmate immediately sees through Oliver and makes fun of him for being lower class but by pulling on Felix's heartstrings with a story about his troubled home life and a recently deceased alcoholic father Oliver gets an invite that summer back to Felix's luxurious family home in the countryside called salurn Almost from the gecko we watch Oliver slowly lie manipulate and seduce his way into being trusted by Felix's Ecentric Mother Elizabeth father Sir James and listless sister of Anisha Farley is also staying at sturn because it turns out his mother is in Dire Straits back home and he's become reliant on Felix's family for support he's vocally suspicious of Oliver but is quickly thrown out of the house when it's discovered that that he tried to sell some of their valuables to SES Oliver now seems to be in the clear and elsabeth is even planning a lavish party in his name but one day Felix decides it's time to reunite Oliver with his mother only to find out that Oliver is not in fact the child of a workingclass alcoholic Widow but actually a middle to upper middle class kid from the suburbs with two loving parents and some siblings Felix is obviously weirded out and tells Oliver that he has to leave salurn after the party that night the morning after the party however Felix's body is discovered in the garden and the family falls into disrepair Oliver points blame at Farley who's been welcomed back for giving Felix drugs and Farley is thrown out again visha allegedly takes her own life and Oliver leaves salurn after James bribes him to years later though Oliver is in a cafe reading that James has died when he runs into eleth elth welcomes him back to salurn but quickly Falls ill and then it's revealed that the framing device of Oliver's narration is actually him talking to a dying eleth this is where he tells us that he planned everything from the beginning right up until eleth dying so that she would bequeath him all the family's assets and he would be the sole owner of saltburn when asked about salurn themes fennel echoed a pretty similar sentiment to mela's notion of being on the outside what our relationship is with the things that we really want but will never love us back so similar to Ripley we have this idea of alienation coming through the themes of class and identity Oliver pretends to be poor and kills off an entire family to get their Fortune the film is bookended by a montage of Felix with a voiceover from Oliver saying he loved him Oliver also I'll say romantically desecrates Felix's grave so I think we can assume that there are some queer undertones here but let's do some comparisons in how these themes play out in each film when it comes to class commentary salurn doesn't do a very good job at helping us understand the class Dynamics in The Talented Mr Ripley uber wealthy characters like Dicky and Freddy are kind of awful philandering and pompous Dicky impregnates a poor woman from the town and refuses to give her money to support the baby and when the ambulance takes a long time to retrieve her body after she takes her own life he then remarks about how Mello is culturally backwards on the boat he calls Tom a third class mooch and mocks his sexuality in that scene Jude Law's beautiful face twists into something really ugly Dicky's Charming but he sucks Felix's family the cens on the other hand are at worst a bit rude unlike Dicky Felix's worst trait is that he has a bit of savior complex but who wouldn't if their friend was supposedly in that situation he takes a massive interest in Oliver too where Dicky was mostly dis interested in Tom outside of Tom's worshiping of him fennel tries to drive home eleth and Sir James's obliviousness to the lower classes by having them not know where Liverpool is which I was pretty dubious about so I called in my friend Drew this Channel's British correspondent to get his take on it hello I'm Drew uh I'm English you might describe me as Posh but I'm I'm here more importantly to answer May's question about would Porsche people know where Liverpool was generally Porsche people are from the south of England and don't have much knowledge about the north of England uh Liverpool is a northern city but crucially it's known to be a port city and it's known to be on the western coast of England and 2third of the western coast of England is Wales so if you know where Wales is you know that it has to be north of Wales and if you know where Scotland starts basically everyone knows it's the northwest of England on the coast but unlike let's say Nottingham or Doncaster or Sheffield which you know you might not know where exactly in the UK in the north of the UK those cities are Posh people by and large would know that Liverpool is in the northwest of England because they know it was a it was a big uh coastal city of Empire a lot of shipping um and Empire trade went went through Liverpool as well as Portsmouth clouth was another big one and obviously London I had a business line so I've had a few points but uh in conclusion I don't know because the thing is my ear you do have these very stupid uh Posh people who think they're Posh you aren't actually Posh who sort of relish in knowing nothing about Society like a true Posh person might be a snob but they appreciate the history more so than someone who's may be described as nvo who just has a disdain looks down their nose Okay lots of love miss you L bye thanks Drew I think fennel was attempting something similar to get out by having this eccentric liberal ended aristocracy family be the bad guys but it just doesn't work because they never do anything bad after a time you actually start to feel like there are parasites leeching off the cens they're rich and quite useless but the movie doesn't do much to convince us that they necessarily owe any of the people staying with them anything at all Farley has it bad but no one is ever downright cruel to him and they even forgive him after he tries to sell their stuff eleth is callous about Carrie Mulligan but I think that's more a testament to a fraud friend friendship than anything Venicia is perfectly nice and then there's the twist that Oliver isn't even poorer he's middle to upper middle class Jordan Teresa has a great video about sturn where she explains the specific class dynamics of England which I suggest you check out but essentially fennel may have been trying to get across this idea of the middle class coveting and attempting to mimic the lifestyles of the upper class in order to distance themselves from the lower classes but in a dinner scene with the family's wealthy friends you don't really get a sense from ol's conversation with one of them that he even really likes this culture in Ripley a huge aspect of Tom's alienation stems from his class standing where Oliver gets into Oxford on scholarship Tom isn't even a classmate at Princeton he was a piano tuner for the music department it's giv goodwi hunting Oliver even says at one point un like you I actually know how to work but we aren't given much indication of that he's a grifter but he's not poor so unlike Tom he doesn't need to be as as resourceful to survive overall I think fennel is taking part in this smug class allegory Trend that's been riding off the coiles of parasite and is thus very much relying on audience assumptions that rich people bad but at least a class allegory like triangle of sadness for example uses its characters and situations to highlight the intricacies of class disparity like by having a role reversal once the characters are Shipwrecked where the poor character becomes the leader and the rich characters become followers to show the way skill sets are arbitrarily valued in our society in Ripley Freddy can immediately spot Tom's class status for how over-the-top his sweet is decorated calling it bis in salurn we don't get any display of the class differences between the rich characters and the less rich ones other than how big their houses are Farley is just as rude as the catton and Oliver is just there and then there's the question of identity fennel said that the concept for saltburn began with her idea of someone slurping someone else's bath water and said that that kind of image is the thing that starts everything for me usually I knew it was immediately about schmecks and immediately about wanting something you couldn't have because you're not going to lick the drags of someone's bathat if they're your partner but in sturn other than the bathwater the I loved him lines and the grave desecration the queer subtext is more like Subterranean and that it's barely there fennel loves a montage and so because of this we don't really get to see Felix's and Oliver's relationship develop and because of that it's very hard to understand what exactly Felix sees in Oliver in Ripley Tom charms his way into their lives and uses the shared connections of Princeton and Jazz to bef friend dicki Oliver doesn't really do any of that and instead just hovers around awkwardly the jump to him being invited to salurn feels very quick we also see Dicky flirt with literally everybody around him so we know that Tom isn't actually special but in saltburn Felix just zeros in on all ofer this could be likened more to the character of Sebastian and R head but Sebastian seems to actually have clearly romantic feelings for Charles and from the time we get to salurn Felix more or less disappears from the movie other than getting spied on by Oliver in the bath and getting mied with Oliver for hooking up with his sister which I think anyone would ultimately Felix being angry at Oliver for lying about his dad dying is so reasonable and I think he treats him with a lot more grace than Dicky gives to Tom for simply existing so when Oliver kills Felix that night and later confesses to planning it from the start it's hard not to feel like there were no feelings there at all when Felix tells Oliver that he makes his blood run cold Oliver's hurt expression later means nothing when we learned that he planned this murder Tom's murder of Dicky is the violent culmination of so many feelings desire hatred envy and humiliation but what is the purpose of Oliver murdering Felix other than to steal his fortune when he was adapting Ripley mangela wanted to focus on letting us see Tom's scheming from the beginning he said if it's a Journey where you recognize every step that the character takes then it becomes a kind of moral Fable that's the only reason to make any movie I don't know if that's the reason to make any movie but with this particular story seeing Tom's eyes from the get-go allow us to watch him spin a web that he can't get out of when it came to saltburn however fennel was so focused on the two twists all of her not being poor and all of her planning things all along that there isn't much of a message to take away other than that we just watch this guy from beginning to end carry out a plan and succeed what's worse is that right from the time we get to salurn Oliver out of nowhere starts to behave like a seductive calculated operator so the twists don't even land because we've spent half this movie watching him be bad anyways again outside of a quick flirtation with elith or saying that he likes the same ceramist as Sir James or the moments he's seducing Venicia and basically assaulting Farley we rarely see Oliver actually be quick witted or charming his presence is mostly off-putting he's also never really humiliated unless you count social Death By karaoke if that's a crime then consider me guilty no one is ever as vicious with their words to him as Dicky and Freddy are to Tom so we never get to the bottom of his insecurities we never know him at all as Richard Brody writes Oliver remains a blank his activities remain a blank his ideas remain a blank this effacement leaves the movie a kind of decoy an elaborately decorated amusingly written enthusiastically performed simulacrum of what might have been mingela said of The Talented Mr Ripley of course I'm interested in the suspense of the film of course I'm interested in the energy that a thriller gives you but most of all I'm interested in these people and you can see that in the way he lets us peer into Tom's mind fennel on the other hand has no interest in why Oliver would drink the bath water like who is Oliver he's someone who connives his way into people's lives uses his sexuality as a weapon perpetuating a homophobic Trope and kills people out of sheer greed and that's fine if that was the purpose of saltburn which many people seem to be arguing but I don't think it was ultimately saltburn is using the exact same narrative structure and themes as Ripley but what does it say about being in the closet what does it say about class nothing and I think the main failing of this movie is that Oliver is not a sympathetic character and that's why I couldn't not resist that ending I resisted it because I thought I had zero payoff and frankly I thought it was stupid in his review of saltburn which he says is brid's head for the incel age Brody says that there are two movies within salurn the implied film the film it's trying to be and the film we got and he says the implied film is better than the actual one and the implied one is the movie I found myself imagining with Fascination as salurn unspooled in that version Oliver is directorial conceived in a way that integrates his exceptional abilities and his exceptional personality the planning and executions of of his schemes are given time and attention and his hunger to eat the rich is not generic but arises from a complex inner life that may be as troubling as it is troubled and Richard Brody I have some news for you that implied film is The Talented Mr Ripley she wasn't really so while salurn may have been fun for a lot of people it's a deeply unoriginal film a vapid amalgam of every image line and cin atic cliche you've ever seen online at close glance you ask yourself wait didn't I just see these bisexual lighting party scenes in euphoria that conjoined bathroom right for tension and call me by your name those angel wings a thousand times and reblogged stills of borman's Romeo and Juliet on Tumblr even the scene where Felix's father is saying just need to get him warmed up Felix darling where's your jumper where's your jumper made my eye twitch because what why oh yeah and where is his glasses he can't see without his glasses it's not that filmmakers can't reference other films and shows it's just that these references are tired lifted from films that are already so popular already quoted often in everyday life cycled for years through the Tumblr and Instagram circuits that seeing them in a new film touted by so many is groundbreaking just feels lazy and ultimately meaningless even the choice to set saltburn in the year 2006 seems to have no purpose other than an aesthetic one other than to point to the ugly headbands and layers Felix's eyebrow piercing super bad on the TV which by the way would only have come out in theaters about a month or two after it's shown in the film or the presence of a Harry Potter book and say hey remember this fennel said in an interview that this Choice was meant to humanize the characters and make them more Down to Earth but for a movie movie about the outof touch Rich I'm just not buying it I think she said it in 2006 so we could get that MGMT Montage salt bur's twist ending is not only obvious it also misrepresents the themes of the films it's attempting to reference or in the case of Ripley ripoff ingred Goes West is a film that also works within the Ripley tradition of doppelgangers envy and Persona and has a very similar plot but it transforms the genre by using its themes to explore something fresh in this case the Dilemma of coveting the Lifestyles carefully constructed for us on social media salurn on the other hand is a spawn of the social media age it's filled with trendy imagery and references that are made to pollinate social media boards rather than serve the story it's trying to tell people have likened Emerald fennel to Sam levenson which I think is a great comparison since both filmmakers seem unable to imbue their talent for visuals with any real language their shots are beautiful but empty and derivative and worse there work work bombards us with visual stimuli and shocking subject matter in a way that depressingly reflects the time we're living in in an article about Euphoria scholar Anne pmar posits that the Aesthetics and pace of euphoria mimic the Contemporary engagement with social media and digital representations the virtualization of reality and instant communication that characterize the Contemporary world of Snapchat messages Instagram stories or Tik Tok videos she finds that despite all the entertainment at their disposal Millennials and genz are more bored than any generation before them exactly because of this entertainment for her Euphoria is stuffed full of visual stimuli and jumps from one shocking scene to the next at break neck speed in a way that attempts to satiate its viewers who were inundated with so many distractions on a daily basis that this is kind of like a misguided way to stand out from the crowd I think something similar can be said for saltburn fenn's last film promising young woman came under scrutiny back in 201 20 for a jarring surprise ending that for a lot of people undermined the entire message of the film and misunderstood the genre it claimed to be subverting Adam non called back to this in his review of salurn saying as anyone who saw the acclaimed but incoherent promising young woman already knows fennel is not exactly an auster satirist and there's a difference between skewering smug decadence and indulging in it salurn is fast film making like the film equivalent of fast food it provides short-term pleasure but it'll probably taste Terrible by tomorrow morning it's been years since I watched The Talented Mr Ripley for the first time and that ending snuck its way into my mind and stayed there ever since same as other shows and films that take care to let their themes unfold slowly and have enough faith in their material to not be concerned about audiences getting bored but as my friend Nick put it Emerald fennel put the card before the horse and jumped at the chance to have her viral moment she got it but I'll put money on it now that in a couple years salurn will be old news something that's also become subject to the attention economy is the news which is why I'm partnering with a very trusted company for today's sponsor ground news ground news's app and website aggregate related articles worldwide and thus offers a diverse array of perspectives and context for a more accurate grasp on a given current event one such event is the latest Taylor Swift conspiracy involving Joe Biden and an allegedly rigged Super Bowl game basically ever since Travis Kelce and the Chiefs played the Super Bowl wild conspiracies have emerged suggesting the game was rigged to benefit Taylor Swift's potential influence on the 2024 presidential election a recent Monmouth University poll revealed that about 1 in five Americans with 32% of respondents being Republican believe in this conspiracy this overview is based on the original study and over 120 articles found by ground news mainly from left left and Center leaning sources and they're categorized by political leaning with tabs highlighting reliability and ownership to help identify potential bias sorting It by High factuality ensures that I'm reading the most reliable news possible so what does ground news tell us about reporting on the conspiracy well left leading articles are calling the conspiracy baseless noting Believers are the same people who think the 2020 election was stolen and then a lot of Articles like this one talk about Donald Trump's perspective we all know and Endor from someone as influential as Taylor Swift could sway her millions of Die Hard fans but ultimately who we vote for should be based on factual information not Sensational conspiracy theories and ground news makes knowing all the facts from every perspective really easy so go to grounds. news/ brashell to subscribe plans start at less than a dollar a month but my link gets you 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan the same one I personally use to understand how pop culture and politics influenced my life special thank you to Lou osta Sayad Hassan Mel pery Morgan Cooper Stimson Nadia C Nick Jenny Eller J Frost mcfinnigan Gabriel M The Whiz Daniel Edward U Andrew nuan Connor O'Keefe Sharma Daniel sardonis Jenna Scott Barnett Julia compana Alexis nafis Bullock Carrie Gavin RSS freeof Holstrom Alex short and Kelly wolf for supporting this channel

Channel: Broey Deschanel

Views: 1,067,772

Keywords: saltburn, jacob elordi, barry keoghan, emerald fennell, matt damon, gwenyth paltrow, cate blanchett, jude law, talented mr. ripley

Id: y0dAGXixsck

Length: 40min 24sec (2424 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024