There’s a reason that Saltburn became one of the most talked about films of 2023, and it’s not the reason you might think. It has little to do with how much Jacob Elordi looks like a Greek god or what Barry Keoghan drinks out of his bathtub. It has much more to do, I think, with the confused messaging of the film itself. Saltburn, first in cinemas and then on Prime Video this Christmas, lured its audiences into a false belief that it would be a movie about X (now Twitter)’s favourite adage: eating the rich. Or if not that, at least giving the rich a taste of their own medicine.
Without spoiling it too much, Saltburn is not that. Instead, it’s been criticised for being a muddled critique of the working classes, and their implied inherent untrustworthiness and greed, told from the perspective of a director with much in common with the wealthy Catton family featured in the film. We’ve talked about Saltburn so much over the past weeks perhaps because we – the unwashed masses of the consumer internet – love hating things. Because we love hating films. But also, perhaps because it allowed us to talk about what I believe was 2023’s defining topic: poshness, who has it, and who, if anyone, is allowed to like it.
Saltburn is a period piece, of course (no pun intended for those who have seen that scene with Venetia and Oliver in the garden), set in the mid-Noughties, a time of Jack Wills, Livestrong bands, Abercrombie models, the Bullingdon Club and the faint belief that a rugby initiation might kill you during freshers week. Roughly 15 years ago, in the halcyon days of Emerald Fennell’s movie imagines, it was still cool to be posh. This was the early-Twitter era, back when people still posted gap year photos with captive wildlife on Facebook, or shot them and posed with them afterwards, and didn’t feel awkward about this. Tony Blair, bizarrely, was still prime minister. It was another time!
In the decade and a half since, those gap yah girlies have hidden their signet rings and Zimbabwean trophy kills and started saying things like “separate the art from the artist” and “yeah, we went to private school, but my parents scrimped and saved and we had absolutely no money throughout”. Nepo babies despaired over being called nepo babies, but then embraced the label and printed T-shirts. For a while posh was out, and then 2023 hit, and it was in again.
Vogue has just introduced their new “etiquette column”, the Tatler-adjacent titled Oh Behave. Daffyd Jones’ famous photography of the debauched upper classes found new life and new, younger fans, on Instagram, who delighted in luxe, black-and-white images of young politicians and celebrities in white tie, as well as posting pictures of their own “caviar bumps” (it’s back in fashion, too, supposedly).
After years of logomania championed by the likes of Balenciaga and Fendi, the fashion world pivoted on its posh axis too: suddenly conspicuous consumption was gauche and so-called “quiet luxury” was trending instead. Gucci belts were discarded for “yah jumper ties” and Loro Piana baseball caps. And if you couldn’t afford them – can anyone except Kendall Roy afford Loro Piana? – then millions of TikTokers, barely old enough to be sentient back in 2007, are there to educate us all in the world of “doops” [dupes], the perfect way to look “old money aesthetic” even if you don’t have old money aesthetic bank statements. As former British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman extolled in a recent column, there’s no escaping it. However much we might hate it, somehow “posh is back”.
What changed? Or rather, what brought us back to this decidedly Noughties way of thinking and consuming? Once upon a time it was easy for posh kids like Elordi’s Felix Catton to pretend not to be posh. Back when times were not hard – or at least, not as hard as they would become years later. And it was, once upon a time, also easy to look the other way and let the posh kids have their win and pretend they were all struggling artists.
When everyone feels they’re doing okay, it’s natural to think about class delineation less. In a cost of living crisis and a housing crisis, this falters slightly. Perhaps we become more likely to want to steal someone’ estate simply because they have an Aga when we’re scared of our gas bills. And when most people are struggling, the pretence is more obvious. So why bother trying to hide it? Why not, by this logic, just embrace the posh?
In spite of, or perhaps because of the present moment being a difficult one, Saltburn isn’t the only rose-tinted example of nostalgia we’ve indulged in in 2023. We brought back Big Brother (good) and David Cameron (less good). We thrive on nostalgia, as a culture. It’s why D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better” plays at Labour conference and why teenagers constantly rediscover Skins. It’s why indie sleaze and Sophie Ellis Bextor’s “Murder On The Dancefloor” captivate us. These things remind us of less complicated times, so perhaps it’s natural we try to replicate them by imposing that culture and what we once considered collectively cool on the present moment, even if it doesn’t work.
Maybe poshness is thriving again because of the quintessentially English idea of what writer Cyril Connolly called in his memoir “permanent adolescence”. This is, he writes in his memoir, “the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development”. The greater part of the ruling class therefore remains “adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly”, and “sentimental”. Posh kids, essentially, never stop being poshos. They just grow up and funnel it into film and fashion and food and media instead – and feed it back to the rest of us through the things they create.
Saltburn has captivated us because it’s stylish, even if we can see that it doesn’t have much substance. It’s pretty to look at, as long as you don’t think about it too hard. By definition, it’s luxury incarnate. It’s pretty and empty. It’s posh. Like Oliver, the culture has been, regrettably, drawn to bright shiny things over the course of 2023, like a moth. Stylish things with little substance. Things that glitter and entice us as long as we don’t think about them too hard. Maybe we should think a little bit harder.
