The Symbolism of ‘Saltburn’ That You Probably Missed

The Symbolism of ‘Saltburn’ That You Probably Missed

Writer-director Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn is that rare film that has the internet in a chokehold while simultaneously digging up references to Shakespeare, Evelyn Waugh and Greek mythology. It’s been a while since I’ve watched a film that centers on a group of friends at Oxford and turns into a country house thriller. Set in the mid 2000s, Saltburn, follows a lonely and outcast first year student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as he is drawn into the inner circle of the wealthy and beautiful Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). While comparisons to other novels and films abound (some directly referenced and others not) and certain scenes have simultaneously revolted and intrigued viewers, unsurprisingly, I find myself thinking about the symbolism from Greek mythology.

Major spoilers for Saltburn follow.

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Perhaps Oliver’s quasi-heroic turn happens when he murders Felix or perhaps it takes place during the cemetery scene. In the most disturbing moment of the film, Oliver strips and penetrates the soil atop Felix’s fresh grave. Legally speaking, the cemetery scene would most likely be categorized as a form of necrophilia. Morally, it is the most corrupted scene in Saltburn — even the Ancient Greeks shirked at the idea of disrespecting the dead. What the Greeks did sanction, however, was the notion of the link between death and spirit possession rituals. If we interpret Oliver as indeed partaking in his own symbolic rebirth or some other kind of ritual at the cemetery, we gain a clearer picture of his diseased mind. Katherine Boris Dernbach notes that Greek cult ritual and possession “blurs the line between living and dead, being and not being, self and other, corporeal body and ethereal spirit”. These lines are precisely the ones Oliver seeks not just to blur to remove entirely. His actions in the wake of Felix’s death prove this desired endpoint.

If it is difficult to accept Felix as anything other than beautiful, kind and enigmatic — we must ask ourselves: what do we even know of Felix? He is only ever shown to the audience through Oliver’s eyes — so it’s a rose-tinted view to say the least. The Minotaur demanded human sacrifices and Felix has a history of bringing home pleb friends who are easily replaceable and fulfill his desire of playing saviour and being adored. They in turn sacrifice themselves for him — Oliver does not.

Picasso’s interpretation of the Minotaur also lends support to this analysis. More than any of the other artists of his time, Picasso had a unique fascination with the Minotaur but he made sense of the myth in profoundly personal terms. His depictions of minotaurs bear little resemblance to Greek mythology. Instead the monstrous hybrid was to be found on the sunny Mediterranean coastline frequented by the wealthy. Picasso describes:“That’s where the minotaurs live, along the coast. They’re the rich seigneurs of the island. They know they’re monsters and they live, like dandies and dilettantes everywhere, the kind of existence that reeks of decadence in houses filled with works of art by the most fashionable painters and sculptors. They love being surrounded by pretty women. They get the local fishermen to go out and round up girls from the neighboring islands. After the heat of the day has passed, they bring in the sculptors and their models for parties, with music and dancing, and everybody gorges himself on mussels and champagne until melancholy fades away and euphoria takes over. From there on it’s an orgy.”

Picasso’s minotaurs certainly mirror the Cattons but the sharpness of Fennell is evident. Although she centers the English country house and names her film after it, Saltburn cannot be dismissed as perpetuating genteel and aristocratic privilege nor can it be reduced to a statement about class. A recent string of ‘eat-the-rich’ movies make it easy to categorize Saltburn as just another example of horrific and karmic violence befalling a group of terrible, wealthy people. That would be boring. If anything, Saltburn is a literal eat-the-rich story whereby semen and menstrual blood are consumed by the protagonist in an effort to inhabit the world and inner life of his hosts.

In this instance, the stately home of the Cattons can be identified with a type of Arcadia, “a partially realized equivalent or reconstitution of a system of physical and metaphysical relationships understood or felt in some sense as prior to and authoritative over culture, and therefore ‘natural’.”

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‘Arcadia’ first appears in the work of the Greek historian Polybius who describes a stretch of the Peloponnese where the inhabitants cultivated the art of of song as a distraction from their toil. In Virgil’s tenth Eclogue, the frustrated lover, Gallus, retreats to a paradise called Arcadia where he finds gratification which compensates for “the wild and barren emotional landscape of unsatisfied love”. William Alexander McClung describes Arcadia as “a state of wish fulfillment, where nature and psychology cooperate, an image of the ideal but also, like the objects of nostalgia, of the unattainable”.