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How did Oxford become so lame? Saltburn's world of flamboyant aristocrats is dead

Suck it up. (Credit: Saltburn/Amazon Studios/MGM/ Warner Bros.)

Suck it up. (Credit: Saltburn/Amazon Studios/MGM/ Warner Bros.)


November 17, 2023   7 mins

When I was 17, the schoolmaster tasked with overseeing my moral development frowned at my show of indecision about the future direction of my education and, as if letting me into a trade secret, carefully explained: “Look, clever people go to Cambridge, and pretty people: they go to Oxford.” This reflection — very poorly corroborated by the fact that I knew he’d been at St Hilda’s — baffled me enough to reoccur to me many months later, when, looking around at my fellow Oxford freshers, it was all too plain that a number of us had not got the memo. There were of course individuals whose uncomplicated beauty, charisma and self-possession made them a very natural fit for the city. But, there were others too, whose relationship to their surroundings was altogether more tormented.

Oxford has always offered sanctuary to the socially maladjusted and chronically ill-at-ease. At first glance, Emerald Fennell’s new film, Saltburn, might be an attempt to dramatise the resulting long-lived demographic tension of undergraduate life: the modus vivendi that must be established between those who effortlessly belong and those who find they can’t. Fennell is herself the Oxford-educated daughter of a multi-millionaire London jeweller, perhaps giving some indication of which side of the university’s social binary might have claimed her allegiance. Much like her first film, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is propelled along by an enjoyable, rather unhinged, spirit of social paranoia. It is a film that is rather evidently entertained by itself and its own excesses. In fact, the film is so enjoyable that many of the curious errors and misconceptions that underscore its depiction of Oxford undergraduate life occur to one only as afterthoughts.

The film’s elevator-pitch is simple enough: the psychodrama of The Talented Mr Ripley imposed on the charmed setting of Brideshead Revisited. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is gormless and poor; Felix (Jacob Erlordi) is gorgeous and rich; both are first-years at Brasenose. After a few run-ins, Felix generously befriends Oliver, many rungs his social inferior, and invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s country seat. Ripley-style, Oliver is revealed to be in the grip of an opaque desire at once to pursue, destroy, and in some sense become Felix, the object of his dark obsession.

He embeds himself in Felix’s life like a parasite, his fascination all the creepier for having a sexual dimension while lacking any straightforward sexual explanation. In one scene, having spied Felix masturbating in their shared bathroom through a crack in the door, Oliver waits for him to leave, then climbs into the tub and sucks the inseminated water out of the drain. But worse than this — much, much worse — is that Oliver is later discovered by Felix to have lied about his social background. He is not in fact working class, but a middle-class person engaging in “oppression cosplay”: a very Oxford touch. Fennell has correctly noticed that among today’s undergraduates, misleadingly playing down one’s privileged background might well be a more profitable form of social camouflage than playing it up.

That aside, the more one thinks about the fast-blossoming relationship between Oliver and Felix in the first act, the less sense it makes. Why exactly does Felix allow Oliver to penetrate his life to the degree that he does? Pity — the explanation the film seems to want the viewer to accept — is, as Oliver must know, not a very promising model for manipulation within the socially ruthless undergraduate circles in which Felix seamlessly moves. There are half-hearted attempts to suggest that the frisson of playing the role of saviour, or perhaps an acquired taste for the exoticism of poverty, might motivate Felix’s adoption of Oliver. (“I can see why Felix likes you,” his sister tells Oliver when meeting him — Yes? Please tell us! the viewer thinks — “you’re so… real”). But none of those interpretations of Felix’s motivations can be properly sustained for the reason that Felix, perhaps against the grain of our expectation, turns out to be consistently decent, sane and straightforward.

For similar reasons, it isn’t at all clear why Felix’s family seem so desperate for Oliver to stick around at Saltburn once he’s been invited up. Likely explanations as to why this berth might be made available to him — for instance, that Oliver is a sparkling conversationalist or accomplished social performer — are ruled-out by the film’s premise. Were he to have these qualities, Oliver wouldn’t have needed to trick Felix into friendship in the manner in which he turns out to have done. In general, the film suffers from a kind of uncertainty about how attractive a figure Oliver is supposed to be. He manipulates boldly but haphazardly, leaving the viewer wondering whether anyone capable of even occasionally pulling off the feats of seduction and role-playing he sometimes succeeds in would really be stuck in such a social rut to begin with.

If the degree to which Oliver succeeds at Saltburn is under-explained, the degree to which he fails to at Oxford is more so. In his first few days as a fresher, Oliver is mocked by his tutor for having read all the books on his reading list, and at dinner is shown to be a solitary loner adrift in a sea of convivial, urbane and already intimately acquainted others. The message seems to be that he is an isolated loser. But as anyone who has been there will know, and anyone who hasn’t should be able to guess, there are in fact countless Oliver Quicks at Oxford. For the most part they are fully-integrated, albeit lame, members of the community. Oliver would fit right in!

A conscientious but neurotic loner, the prototypical Oliver is probably a PPE-ist (rather than an English student, as Fennell imagines). He types away loudly in lectures and pulls a reliable 9 to 5 at his favourite desk in the college library; he may have been liberated by student life to the degree of making some inadvisable fashion choices and has perhaps even got a daring earring, all the while holding his underwhelming personality fixed. He goes on a few forgettable nights-out a term, prizes the limited social recognition he receives on the basis of fulfilling some thankless administrative role like being JCR secretary, and spends most of his evenings cooking enormously elaborate meals with his boring girlfriend in the staircase kitchenette. I encountered Oliver dozens of times at Oxford.

Saltburn may of course not intend to draw any deeper moral about Oxford’s social scene. Few of the satiric touches in the film seem to be operating in the service of a wider background political theory. Of course, that aim — to make a film about social inequality at Oxford which is just fun — may strike some as subversive enough in its own right. All the same, any film that did aspire to be a credible satire of contemporary Oxford would have to reckon with the fact that Oliver is not now, nor likely ever was, the canonical villain of undergraduate life. At best, he is a hapless accomplice. The real baddies are a subtly different social type.

Generations turn over quickly at Oxford, and the spirit of the age changes with them. It didn’t take me and my contemporaries long to notice that, in the latter half of the 2010s, we had contrived to come up at a time when a detectable atmosphere of lameness hung about the place. This was doubtless true of other universities too, though the combination of Oxford’s fragmented and parochial institutional structure, as well as the high concentration of intelligent weirdos, seemed to amplify its effects there. “Lameness” is admittedly a frustratingly non-specific label, but seems the right kind of impressionistic diagnosis to get some traction on the problem. It was after all often a little tricky to put one’s finger on what lay at the root of this lameness, though the dispositions and reactions associated with it were quite obviously expressions of the same underlying phenomenon.

It wasn’t, to be clear, just that there were a number of visible malcontents in the social mix — that, I had obviously been fully prepared for — but that, somehow, they seemed to be in charge, and moreover ruling by consent. Everyday college life was kept in check by their many wildly unpredictable and exquisitely-honed sensitivities; a casuistry of safetyism provided the method by which almost all communal decisions were taken. The mood was censorious, retributive, and moralistic. The de rigueur attitude was a kind of performative insecurity, though lapsing into this mode was often nothing more than an implicit double-bluff: a way of announcing one belonged by insisting that one didn’t.

An extraordinary coup had clearly taken place at some point, comparably diabolical to the one which Oliver pulls off. Many of those in power behaved with a kind of wounded officiousness that suggested they had been bullied too much at school, or perhaps not enough. Now, as if taking their cue from certain progressive political causes, they seemed to be attempting to “reclaim” their lameness as something to be celebrated, or at least uncompromisingly imposed on other people.

Perhaps the most violent outlet for these strange urges was JCR politics, which some of its leading practitioners seemed to conceive of primarily as a mode of social revenge — using it to terrorise their fellow students and police their activities, though invariably under the guise of promoting kindness, the collective mental wellbeing, or some equally sinister objective. In the manner of modern day Lord Chamberlains they would turn up to the university theatres and hammer lists of trigger warnings to the doors; satirical college magazines were shut down; each term brought with it a cause of outrange more unimportant than the last. The rule seemed to be that no gripe could be too manifestly unserious to fail to count as a veto on any collective enterprise. It was often difficult to know how far to be amused and how far disturbed by the strange ascendant mood.

A shrewd choice to simply side-step these unwieldy contemporary developments may be why Saltburn is set in 2006: long enough ago that recent history’s political and technological trends hadn’t had a chance to warp the character of campus politics, though still recent enough to pass for the present in certain crucial respects. Still, the effect is to trap the film with a somewhat ersatz image of Oxford — the dreamy crane shots over the Rad Cam, the oddly managed homoeroticism, the remote aristocratic estates. The view from the dreaming spires manages to not quite bring into focus certain notable developments on the ground.

As a result, and whatever its other successes, Saltburn fails to skewer what is distinctively worth skewering in undergraduate life today. It’s a shame, as that would be well worth doing. Undergraduate life is funny, even though it takes itself seriously. Some properly trained derision would reveal its excess self-seriousness to be compensating for a gross lack of seriousness; its overweening moralism disguising an untoward parochialism; the pretence of imposter syndrome concealing the existence of the real imposters.


John Maier is an UnHerd columnist and PhD student at the University of Oxford

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Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago

Oxford graduates are like Guardian readers. Within three minutes of making their acquaintance you’ll know all about it: ‘when I was at Orksford …’, ‘did you see that thing in the Guardian…’. Same thing.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Whereas you don’t have to wait for a Telegraph/Mail/Times reader to announce their allegiance.
Most of the “cool” oxbridge graduates I know are conscious of its lameness as described in the article and now prefer not to mention it. You’ve just encountered the lame ones.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

‘Cool’? Oxbridge graduates? Hmmm.

Pip G
Pip G
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

How very true. Decades ago someone told me that an Oxbridge graduate would say this (without the Guardian bit) on meeting a new person. It is uncannily correct.

Lorna Belkin
Lorna Belkin
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Not entirely true- it depends which set you are talking about! The smarter posh lot are likely these days to be the LAST ones to mention their Oxford creds!!!

Mike Downing
Mike Downing
1 year ago

Oooh; Oxford hasn’t changed a bit on the basis of this article.

An overlong, self-indulgent bit of navel-gazing about himself and his chums purporting to skewer the place for ‘lameness’ (how lame) while revealing, as usual, the Oxford set’s preoccupation with itself.

J Bryant
J Bryant
1 year ago

As a result, and whatever its other successes, Saltburn fails to skewer what is distinctively worth skewering in undergraduate life today.
Of course. If Saltburn took aim at current campus politics, it would be resoundingly cancelled.
The author convincingly describes Saltburn as a sort of cross between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited. In fact, it seems impossible to watch this movie without thinking of Ripley, his duplicity and social climbing–so why watch Saltburn at all?
I was also struck by the movie’s title, Saltburn. Apparently, it’s the name of an English country estate, but, for me, that doesn’t quite ring true. Brideshead is certainly the name of an English country estate, just as Manderley is certainly the name of a mysterious country house. But Saltburn sounds much more modest. Is the director trying to tell us something about the parvenu owners of that estate?
The author has written a fine review, imo. So convincing, in fact, he’s persuaded me not to watch the movie. I will stick to my non-politically-correct Korean horror movies for now. The directors of those movies could probably describe current Oxford student life quite convincingly.

Last edited 1 year ago by J Bryant
Nick Bryars
Nick Bryars
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Saltburn is a town in the North of England between Middlesbrough and Redcar.

David Giles
David Giles
1 year ago
Reply to  Nick Bryars

I’m afraid nobody is planning on setting their film there any time soon.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

If it did so skillfully and with great good humor, it would probably be watched by many and publicly celebrated by quite a few, and not just on the Dark Web or cultural fringe.
*And yes, a simultaneous and ultimately unsuccessful cancellation attempt would also occur.
More and more people refuse to be silent about campus follies, which is better than nothing. This NYT article by David Brooks (a moderate, anti-Trump conservative, a Jewish-born Christian and perhaps a “classical liberal” too) and the balance of the comments on it support my impression:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/opinion/college-university-antisemitism-crt.html

Last edited 1 year ago by AJ Mac
Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

What is your favourite korean horror movie?

Fiona Hook
Fiona Hook
1 year ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Me too. It sounds like the director is trading in derivatives. Has she nothing new to say? I lost interest in reading the review halfway through. I definitely won’t be wasting money on the film.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
1 year ago

Candidly most of British culture is “lame” at present. We have lost our nerve and with it our inventiveness. Few experiment, preferring the shallows of repetitive memes.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 year ago
Reply to  Susan Grabston

If my landlord would accept experimentation as payment I might be a bit more inclined to experiment.

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
1 year ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

As a landord I might run a mile

Archibald Tennyson
Archibald Tennyson
1 year ago

I went to the “other place”, but this sketch also rings true for my student years. I was at Cambridge until 2016, and the latent culture was a sort of wincing neuroticism, with humour (such as it was) most commonly manifesting as bigot bashing or navel gazing about mental health. There were notable exceptions to this culture, of course, but the overall atmosphere was sorely lacking in rambunctiousness. Instead of encountering joy for life and learning, as I had hoped, I found myself surrounded by the tacit acknowledgment that such emotions were a function of small mindedness, a sign that one had not yet perceived our world as the prison that it truly is. Misery was a fact of life to be “normalised”, not a sign of spiritual emptiness.
We should call this nonsense out for what it is: a Gnostic heresy.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 year ago

It became lame when it stopped being a finishing school for the elites and became a degree factory training the post-Thatcher broader middle classes whose entire being is motivated by angst about status and jobs.

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
1 year ago

Thanks to the author for unconsciously giving me a hint about how unwatchable ” Saltburn” is! Sounds like a 21st century and rather OTT version of ” Brideshead Revisited”, with none of the gravitas the latter brought to a seemingly frivolous pair of Oxonians, whose dissolute existence mirrored the socio- cultural angst of sections of the privileged.
Hopefully a positive effect of this movie would be that some high- minded, aspiring students from my part of the globe would be suitably put off an Oxford education( and not bankrupt their parents by forcing them to acquiesce to these plans).

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
1 year ago

397-4! Mr Kohli has set a new standard.
Oxford certainly in the preference to ‘the other place’, otherwise known as Cambridge.
One Priyamvada Gopal has been a a very divisive figure there.Do you happen to know anything about her? I gather she is/was a Brahmin.

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
1 year ago

Let us await the clash of the Titans on Sunday!!! Fingers crossed but we should be world champions!!
I donot like that person you mention. I don’t think she abides by any generic other than “Woke ” shrillness.
Divisiveness is in the nature of Woke imho.

Geoff W
Geoff W
1 year ago

Sorry that Mr Head et al. spoiled the party!

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
1 year ago
Reply to  Geoff W

Australia was superb. Bad luck on us for crumbling after 10 wins.

Geoff W
Geoff W
1 year ago

All that stepping to leg to hit spinners off the stumps. I’m not sure if Head is very talented, or very lucky. Funny game, and all that.

Sayantani Gupta
Sayantani Gupta
1 year ago
Reply to  Geoff W

Luck did count. But Aussie fielding was flawless. Cummings was the better skipper and KL Rahul, Yadav and Siraj flopped badly.
It was sweet revenge to see off both teams which won against them earlier – us and SA. The latter fought more bravely on Thursday than we did.

Last edited 1 year ago by Sayantani Gupta
Sophie Duggan
Sophie Duggan
1 year ago

I love the way “putting in a reliable 9 to 5 in the library” creates an added focus for contempt. Yes, it’s true: in Oxford, even studying – unless it’s done with the proper degree of poised nonchalance – can make you a target for bullying. Completed my degree there in 1996 and have never known such unpleasant people. Life got much better after leaving.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
1 year ago

Thanks for the review. When Douglas Murray was a 19-year-old Oxford student, he wrote a masterly* biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, “Bosie”. He followed it with a play, “Nightfall”, about Raoul Wallenberg. I’m sure I don’t need to list the numerous award-winning books and articles he’s subsequently produced. Nothing lame about that. Also, Murray proves that one can be both clever and pretty at Oxford.
*The late Christopher Hitchens’s description.

Last edited 1 year ago by Allison Barrows
David Giles
David Giles
1 year ago

This article should come with a trigger warning for undergraduates. It is an outrage that it hasn’t and I don’t think anybody should read another UnHerd article until a full editorial apology is issued.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
1 year ago

Saltburn is a town deep in the eastern coastal marshes of Essex where the descendants of George Pickingill & the beings dropped off in The Rendlesham Incident live. A repeater station broadcasts Nadine Dorries’ ‘The Plot’ on endless loop, out into the North Sea.

By night churchbells peal under the waves, heralding a nameless being that sucks down boatloads of refugees.

All the residents wear Tunisian clothes that they didn’t buy. And don’t fit.

Pip G
Pip G
1 year ago

Oxford U sounds horrible; it must have been even more unpleasant in the 1960s. I had a lucky escape in a dull Midlands post war U.
To anyone thinking today about going to a U, or their child/ grandchild going to a U, think carefully about 1. For what benefit? 2. Where, avoiding Oxford (unless you are an (I) an ‘upper’ in society & (II) have money).
More seriously, after graduation I worked for 6 months in a factory then 6 months in an office, to see what I wanted to do; and wish I had done this on leaving school. I would recommend that to anyone.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
1 year ago

A rather sharply written reflection in review form that persuades me to give Saltburn a look, and to try and suffer though it. I did note that Mr. Maier, a doctoral candidate, calls undergraduate life funny, as if PhD students were impervious to satire and ridicule.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
1 year ago

Ahh, that explains AC Grayling.

Tony Kilmister
Tony Kilmister
1 year ago

Is the film entertaining? Came away none the wiser after this piece, which seems largely to be the author writing about himself.

Indeed, enough material to write a review of the author, if I could be bothered.

Last edited 1 year ago by Tony Kilmister
Dengie Dave
Dengie Dave
1 year ago

See You Tube appearances by Ben Shapiro at both the Oxford and Cambridge Union debates. Boy, the Oxford undergrads really are hilariously super-thick, as the Cambridge undergrads took considerable glee in pointing out. Trouble is the Cambridge crowd weren’t that much smarter.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
1 year ago

Sounds repulsive. Pass.

Matthew Duggan
Matthew Duggan
1 year ago

I was at Oxford (sorry, Hugh Bryant) in the early 80s. The JCR institution was lame then (although nothing was as lame as the OU Students’ Union). How could it not be? Most of us had come to Oxford with expansive visions, keen to mingle with fellow citizens of the world, for intellectual or social ends. Only those who were pitifully parochial bothered with JCR trivia, or perhaps too lazy to do anything more ambitious. So I wonder whether Mr Maier should not use the JCR as a means of calibration, and get out of his college more.

Andy Coughlan
Andy Coughlan
1 year ago

I saw a preview of Saltburn a couple of weeks ago. It’s a very good film, but quite quirky and dark in places. I suspect Barry Keoghan will be up for a BAFTA at least.

The action in Oxford is only about the first 20 or 30 minutes, and I think Emerald Fennell does some really good visual storytelling to whip us through the main character’s first year and set up his relationships with the various people he’ll interact with at Saltburn.

The only downside to the film is if you’re a Sophie Ellis Bextor fan – you’ll never hear Murder on the Dance Floor again without the final scene popping into your head.

Last edited 1 year ago by Andy Coughlan