Quick note: This post was written a month or a month and a half ago and, for some reason, I hadn't looked it over and edited it until today. Now I'm putting it out. There are spoilers ahead.
People used to ask me why I was the way I was. My answer was a quote from Reboot. “I come from the net.” It was an easy enough answer to explain how I had been on the Internet for so long. Not specifically like pictures and stuff on the Internet. I wasn’t a celebrity or anything. I grew up with the Internet. Forums, text-based games, MSN messenger… Stuff like that.
Over the past year I’ve kind of pulled back on how much time I spent on the Internet. Sure, if you count streaming and watching YouTube, then I’m on the Internet just as much. But I’m not on Twitter anymore. I am not on Bluesky or Threads nearly as much as I was on Twitter. All the other Twitter replacements I haven’t really done. Or they haven’t stuck (I’m looking at you, Hive). I’m still using Instagram, but that’s kind of it.
I’m not completely gone from them. I still check in on some of these social media apps. And near the end of last year into early January there’s one thing that came up a lot. People were watching Saltburn. They were talking about Saltburn. They were sharing videos using Murder on the Dancefloor, which was featured in Saltburn. And there was one major takeaway that rose above the rest. Oliver was one fucked up dude.
Things kept coming back to the bathtub scene. If you saw the movie, you know which one. There were technically two bathtub scenes but one of them went above and beyond what would normally be shown in a movie. He licked the drain and slurped up the dirty water Felix had jerked off into. Factor that in with the rest of the movie, people were going to jump to conclusions. They were going to say the movie was about Oliver’s love of Felix, and he killed the entire family when Felix threw him aside.
I don’t believe that’s the case. I don’t think the movie was about this fucked up romance. Yes, there was romance. Yes, Oliver loved Felix in some fucked up way. But I don’t think it was his love of Felix that caused Oliver to do everything he did. I believe it was simply a result of Oliver’s initial motives. It just happened to prolong his plan. In fact, it almost prevented everything.
Maybe it’s because I can be a petty person. Not petty in a “murder an entire family to steal their wealth” way. But petty in a way that when people try to be smart asses, I will completely play into what they’re doing in spite of them. That’s what I think Saltburn did. It told a story about Oliver‘s pettiness.
Why do I think that? Look at an early scene in the movie. Oliver and Farleigh were in a meeting with an academic advisor. Oliver presented an essay he wrote to which Farleigh replied that Oliver’s writing sucked. He said that Oliver didn’t sound like a real person. He sounded like he was trying to be something he wasn’t. (Hey, look! It’s the theme of the movie!) Most of Saltburn involved Oliver pretending to be someone else so that he could get into Felix’s family.
What if we look at the scene a different way? What if we look at the scene as the inciting incident to the entire story? All of Saltburn hinged on this scene. Oliver was arguably the worst character in the movie. He was a serial killer who obsessed over his victims to the point that he had a one-way romance with one of them. He seemingly chose the family for their wealth. He wanted to gain the status that they had, which he worked his way into by pretending to be within the same level of status. Yeah, he was the protagonist. And every protagonist needs an antagonist. That’s where Farleigh came in.
Farleigh was the antagonist. He was the one character who constantly picked on Oliver. By the end of the movie, it was revealed that Oliver narrated a story about how he committed the murders. If Oliver had planned this out from the beginning, as he said he did, then the entire motivation for killing people was to take Saltburn. He didn’t kill Felix because he was spurned. He didn’t kill Venetia because she knew about the Felix stuff. I think he planned to kill everyone because Farleigh insulted his writing. He chose to go after Saltburn because it was Farleigh’s family estate.
This level of pettiness might seem like a stretch. What kind of person would be petty enough that they would murder a person’s entire family and take over the house because of a small insult? My answer is that Oliver would. That, to me, is the only reason to include that scene early on in Saltburn. That’s not my only evidence, though. If you’ve seen Saltburn, you know that Oliver killed the entire family living in the Saltburn manor. Everyone except Farleigh, that is.
Here's the thing. If you get into the mind of someone petty and exaggerate that to the most diabolical extents of where that pettiness could take them, the best revenge wouldn’t be to murder the person who wronged them. Not at all. The punishment would be too quick. It would relieve the victim of the torment being inflicted. The better revenge would be to take everything that person cherished. It would be better to take everything from that person and leave them alive, wallowing in their own realization that they no longer had anything.
Oliver gave Farleigh that punishment as revenge for the insult about his writing. Oliver took everything from Farleigh. First, he took Felix’s attention. Felix and Farleigh were like best friends before Oliver came along. Then, when invited to Saltburn by Felix, Oliver began getting the attention of the rest of the family. He basically inserted himself into Farleigh’s role in the family. Oliver did a little bit of trickery to get Farleigh kicked out of Saltburn. When Farleigh returned, Oliver killed Felix. Then Venetia. Oliver got Farleigh permanently removed from the family. When James passed away, years later, Oliver married the widowed Elspeth so that everything would be placed in his name when he killed Elspeth. Oliver concocted a royal family (another theme!) sort of coup where he took Farleigh’s family and his fortune. Farleigh would live out the rest of his life knowing he had nothing.
That is the kind of pettiness that only a sociopath like Oliver would have. Rather than properly deal with his own emotions after Farleigh made fun of him, Oliver decided he would take everything from Farleigh. My only bits of evidence for this were the inclusion of the early scene with the essay (which, otherwise, was just a scene showing how Farleigh was a jerk to Oliver), the protagonist/antagonist relationship in storytelling, and Farleigh being the only member of the family living in Saltburn to survive the film. You could easily read the movie this way. Yeah, there’s much more to the movie with the Oliver/Felix romance, but I think the Oliver/Farleigh stuff was what really drove the plot. It also made the dark comedy and satire work even better because it truly showed that Oliver was no better than the Cattons. In fact, he was worse because he raped and murdered his way through the line of succession.
I haven’t really seen my theory being thrown around online. Mind you, I’m not super active on social media anymore and I haven’t been seeking out any Saltburn discourse. This was simply something I thought about after watching the movie. Other people might agree with me. They might wholly disagree. I’m going to stand by my reading, though. It honestly elevated the movie for me beyond the edgy satire it would have been, otherwise.
Saltburn became a huge movie at the end of 2023 and into the beginning of 2024. It wasn’t because the movie was some massive success at the box office. It was because the internet latched onto certain things. They latched onto the bathtub scene. They talked about Jacob Elordi. And they got Murder on the Dancefloor trending again, after being originally released two decades ago. People ate the movie up. So did I, I guess. So did I.
