This is an online edition of an article written for the UCL Film Journal Print Edition
Few recent films have prompted as much discussion as Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which has driven column inches and tweets faster than it has Sophie Ellis Bextor’s early noughts hit ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ back into the charts. Specifically it is the film’s treatment of class, that prickliest of topics, which has prompted the most gripes. This includes from The Standard’s Alexandra Jones who was “repelled” by the film’s “profoundly anti-upward mobility”, and Simran Hans of the New Statesman who derided its treatment of the “lower classes as punchlines”. Hans even blamed it on Fennell’s privileged upbringing as daughter to one of the country’s wealthiest jewellers.
I also found the film’s treatment of class at best problematic, but don’t attribute it to Fennell’s personal politics or background (the fact that she shares her name with a precious gemstone and a posh herb should not be lost on anyone though), as much as a worrying trend of screen fetishization found across cinema and television.
Saltburn is achingly gorgeous to look at, but its wildly lurching narrative offers little substance beyond its style. The film instead relies on supposedly shocking scenes of cum-based bath beverages, Dracula-esque eating outs, and graveyard carnality to try to disguise its messy nature. Fennell appears to adopt the mantra of Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) in the film that ‘It’s not what you argue but how’. She gets lost in Saltburn’s visual world and reduces a story of inequity and hereditary privilege into a Jackson Pollock of bodily fluids.
Such superficiality risks dissuading the audience from interrogating any of the film’s themes, and to instead gaze passively, and oftentimes vicariously, at the orgy of hedonistic onscreen pleasure. For all the negative reception to the film, there is equally praise for its surface-level silliness, including from The Times’ Susie Goldberg and The Independents’ Ella Kemp who respectively found it an “irresistible comedy” and “enjoyably ridiculous”. More anecdotally, many reactions I’ve encountered follow this trend, as they view the nastiness and grotesque consumption of the Catton family as an anachronism of oblivious excess which can be gleefully peered at as some distant curiosity.
The Riot Club (2014), inspired by Oxford University’s real-life Bullingdon Club, displays similar issues. The film is better intentioned than Saltburn, and goes to great lengths to display the cruelty of its toffed-up students. One pivotal dinner scene proves an especially gruelling watch as it descends into wanton vandalism and utter viciousness. However, the film is drenched with style (not least due to it starring some of British cinema’s most handsome stars- Sam Claflin, Max Irons and Douglas Booth- all of whom flaunt perfectly coiffed hair), and before it gets to any unpleasantness the film finds an awful lot of fun in its elitist students’ gregarious debauchery.
At one point Max Iron’s Miles says Oxford is ‘like being invited to a hundred parties all at once’ and, as we are treated to scenes of speeding Aston Martins and post-fencing blowjobs, one can’t help feeling the film invites audiences to think the same. At the very least it provides avenues for them to gawk at the spectacle of the Riot Club rather than simply be appalled by them. The issues are compounded when their cruel acts are filmed from behind shelves and peering through doors. This allows audiences to again see the film’s subject matter as a distant misanthropic oddity rather than the pressing concern it really is.
Even when their storylines seem frivolous, cinema and television have always played important roles in shaping social and political outlooks.
The worlds of Saltburn and The Riot Club, for all their circus-like theatrics, are not mere entertainment. They are the real-life breeding grounds for politicians and executives, alongside a whole host of insidious figures, who promote cronyism and corrode public discourse in their own interests. Yet, they are clandestine and deliberately shy away from the public eye. The apoplectic rage at a few TikTok ramblers expressed by the owner of the state where Saltburn was filmed says all you need to know really. It is only through onscreen depictions that many have access to their sealed-off existence, and yet almost all these depictions are mired in the fetishization seen in Saltburn and The Riot Club.
From Downtown Abbey to White Lotus to Barry Lyndon to Cruel Intentions, all engross themselves in worlds of extravagant wealth which are presented to be gaped at rather than critically examined. Thought pieces and critiques may be written about them, but these are coming from a niche of esoteric cultural thinkers rather than their primary audiences. How can one expect a casual viewer not to be sucked in by such stories’ arch narratives and overpowering opulence?
I was surprised when later seasons of Netflix’s wildly popular The Crown, a show I enjoyed, were attacked as melodramatic soap operas. Setting aside the under appreciated merits of melodrama, was it ever anything but that? A show whose classic soapy storylines of affairs and scandal, dressed up in a frock of wealth and royal ornamentation, displaced any potential questioning of the interplay between hereditary influence and political power. The Crown has always been Coronation Street– just with an actual coronation.
While privilege, inequality, and hereditary power have been perennial issues, AI is more of a white-hot flame which has the potential to set our world alight.
Even when their storylines seem frivolous, cinema and television have always played important roles in shaping social and political outlooks. The rabid American consumerism of the 1920s was buttressed by Hollywood’s golden age and stars like the original IT girl Clara Bow. Similarly, the neo-liberal consensus of the 1980s was accompanied by the industrial behemoth of the blockbuster. Today there is certainly a link between the simplistic dichotomies of good and evil, and the explosive solutions offered to them, found in most superhero films and people being drawn to the one-dimensional politics of strongmen like Trump.
This current trend of fetishisation likewise risks flattening out nuanced and important issues. We have seen this in our nation’s highest elites, whose decadent depictions render them so outlandish as to seem outside the realms of our daily reality, and it is proving equally worrying regarding depictions of Artificial Intelligence.
While privilege, inequality, and hereditary power have been perennial issues, AI is more of a white-hot flame which has the potential to set our world alight. It promises so much reward yet so much risk, and its application in society requires a deft and careful hand. However, AI is a flame being played around with by a select few whose isolation from the rest of us, and lack of oversight, may as well leave them on the Saltburn estate themselves.
AI already affects our daily lives, shaping our cultural tastes, what news we see, and even influencing who we vote for in elections. As its capabilities grow its impact will to, and its concentrated possession amongst a few technocratic elites has the potential to produce social and economic imbalances outsizing anything we see today.
This enormity of AI’s potential, combined with its secretive development, leaves popular culture again vitally positioned in fostering more nuanced and comprehensive public understandings of it. However, Hollywood and others remain steadfast in telling theatrical tales of AI gaining consciousness, rebelling against its human masters, and launching into existential wars against apocalyptic backdrops.
Artificial Intelligence is far less exciting than how it seems in the movies. It is encased in rows of databanks, rather than the sleek form of Alicia Vikander’s AVA in Ex-Machina or a muscle clad Arnold Schwarzenegger. The wars over its future will be fought in boardrooms rather than on battlefields.However, it is still one of the most pressing issues we face today, and one which requires an active and engaged citizenry. The glut of exaggerated and fetishized images of AI that people receive are priming them not to see it as some contemporary concern but, much like with our hyper-elites, as some far off issue that has no bearing to our own reality.