While pop culture has been eager to put a spotlight on a number of real-life millennial villains (including Mark Zuckerberg via The Social Network, Elizabeth Holmes via The Dropout and Anna Delvey via Inventing Anna) in recent years, Emerald Fennell decided to create an “evil” millennial to outdo them all (even, perhaps, fellow fictional millennials Danni Sanders from Not Okay and Dory Sief from Search Party). His name, of course, is Oliver Quick, and he’s portrayed with razor-sharp villainousness by none other than current millennial golden boy Barry Keoghan. Fashioning him in the dual role of protagonist/antagonist, Fennell’s ode to Evelyn Waugh, Saltburn, commences in fall of 2006, when Oliver is just beginning his tenure at Oxford.
An outcast from the get-go, his only “comrade” by default becomes Michael Gavey (Ewan Mitchell), who calls Oliver out as a fellow “Norman No-Mates” when he sits down across from him at that first posh-looking dinner in the dining hall. Michael’s social ineptitude and obsession with showing off his mathematical prowess, however, makes Oliver have a Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald) in The Breakfast Club epiphany when she says, “I know it’s detention, but…I don’t think I belong in here.” Nor does Oliver feel that he belongs with someone so lame and unglamorous as Michael. Thus, by Christmas, it seems he can endure no more of this bullshit, this social exile and decides to take matters into his own hands to deviate from the outsider path he’s on.
This, indeed, is what the viewer unearths by the third-act reveal. That his entire “happenstance” encounter with the ultra popular and privileged Felix Catton (Jacon Elordi) was just the first in a series of his machinations to cut Felix and his ilk down to size. After all, as he later admits to Felix’s mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), on the deathbed he created for her, “I hated him.” He then adds, “I hated all of you.” This statement seeming to apply not just to the Cattons specifically, but all rich people in general. Particularly for their lack of hard work (because, needless to say, it’s not that hard to “inherit”). Whereas, as Oliver points out to a comatose Elspeth, he actually knows how to work, and did just that in order to procure the palatial Saltburn residence. Hence, all that preplanning and manufacturing of scenarios to get into Felix’s good graces so as to be invited to Saltburn in the first place. And for the entire summer no less.
A summer that would initially seem so carefree not just because Oliver found himself living as a courtesan in a modern-day Versailles scenario, with Felix acting as Louis and Marie rolled into one, but because it was the summer of 2007. An idyllic period (unless you were Britney Spears) right before the financial crisis of 2008 that would not only affect millennials freshly graduating from college for years to come on the job prospect scene, but also force rich people to “rebrand” in a way that has been the gold standard ever since: highlighting how hard they work for their money. This despite everyone, Oliver included, knowing full well that one does not actually “work” for generational wealth (no matter how many cookware lines Paris Hilton puts out to prove she does “so much,” ignoring the fact that, yeah, in order to do so much, you need some fuckin’ startup capital). It’s simply the fortunate boon that comes with having one family member many decades back who happened to be at the right place at the right time, getting in on the ground floor of some enterprise that was then new and managing to monopolize the industry by any forceful and unjust means necessary (see also: the railroad barons known as the Big Four). This is what clearly vexes Oliver to no end, and the reason why he feels no compunction for his long game con.
In fact, he even blames Elspeth and her rich kind for their “misfortune” in coming across a “predator” such as him by taunting, “You made it so easy. Spoiled dogs sleeping belly-up. No natural predators.” Then correcting, “Well, almost none.” And oh, how well Oliver played the part of “prey” himself. Or at least “innocent” and “wayward” poor boy. Allowing himself to blend in even if still standing out as a graceless member of the “low class” (and, despite the Cattons not knowing Oliver is actually an upper middle classer, they would undoubtedly still view that category as one and the same with all the rest of the rabble).
The significance of the mid-00s time period, for Fennell, isn’t just about the fact that she’s a millennial who lived through its heyday as well, but about showcasing the dawning of an era wherein the “millennial grift”—consisting primarily of building one’s identity on a house of cards—first began to form (as it did for Elizabeth Holmes circa 2004). This being founded on the bedrock of pretending to be someone you’re not. Of posing as something or someone that will appeal to a surprisingly naive mark. And in the germinal age of social media (hell, for most of 2006, Facebook was still reserved solely for college students with Harvard email accounts), “becoming” someone else, Mr. Ripley-style (and, obviously, Fennell owes a great debt to The Talented Mr. Ripley, in addition to Waugh, for this story, too), was a cinch. Or, at the bare minimum, much more facile than it is now.
So sure, the summer of 2007 was a carefree one. Not just for a little millennial grifting, but overall as well. ‘Twas the summer of Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad, Justice’s Cross, Kate Nash’s Made of Bricks and M.I.A.’s Kala. And, of course, the entirety of the film is steeped in other millennial pop culture of the day—from Felix’s cousin, Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe), wearing a “Dump Him” t-shirt à la Britney in 2002 (right after her much-discussed and speculated-upon breakup with Justin Timberlake) to the entire band of youths on the premises (Farleigh, Felix, Oliver and Venetia [Alison Oliver]) reading the final installment in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, that was released in July of that summer.
Alas, as the adage goes, “Nothing gold can stay.” Or, more to the point, nothing gold-tone can keep its shine. This means Oliver. Though it is only Felix’s sister, Venetia, who really comes to understand what her family hath wrought in choosing to allow an interloper like Oliver into their home. So it is that she points her finger at him and announces the millennial mantra, “Stranger danger” (or, in her case, “Stranger fucking danger”) while talking to Oliver drunkenly in the bathtub. This being the phrase oft repeated by parents and other authority figures during millennial childhood that it’s an ironic wonder that so many services of the present are contingent upon trusting total strangers (e.g., Airbnb, Uber). As Felix so blindly trusted Oliver and his pack of lies wielded manipulatively to gain access to the precious Saltburn castle. Almost as though he had no idea that just because someone is a member of your birth cohort doesn’t mean they won’t fuck you over as badly as the older generations have already.
As for the final, now illustrious scene of Oliver swinging his dick (not fake, by the way) around throughout Saltburn to the tune of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s apropos “Murder on the Dancefloor,” some might take issue with the flagrancy of such “nefariousness.” But the point, of course, is to emphasize that the rich themselves never felt a shred of guilt about how they amassed their own wealth, so why should someone like Oliver, who knows there’s no such thing as getting rich “honestly” (or without bloodshed-filled exploitation)? What’s more, the intensification of lusting after wealth without “working for it” was a phenomenon that crested as millennials came of age. Suddenly faced with the bleak reality that their own hard work, and the bill of goods they were sold by baby boomers about how it would ensure “prosperity” (or at least home ownership), was for nothing.
And since that proved to be the “reward” for “obeying,” why not just take what one wanted by force and through any means necessary? The same way the forebears of the currently wealthy already did (and what the currently wealthy still do to ensure the proliferation of that wealth down the generational line). This, ultimately, is why Fennell succeeds in making her “millennial villain” come across more as a byproduct of the failure of capitalism than anything else. In which case, one must ask: villain or victim?
