Quick thoughts on Saltburn

What I thought before I watched any analyses:

I read multiple layers to this film, or rather, two parts of one layer. The first is dynamic, the actual plot of what happens, which seems obvious enough: a middle class striver plots his way into the upper class by destroying and taking the house and title of one such family, and, through patience and the laying of groundwork, he eventually succeeds... because, even after years have passed since he was exposed to them, he never takes his eyes off his singular goal. The major part of his achieving this is using sex to first dominate each family member on a subconscious level before killing them.

And then there is the static part, which is the worldview the film it set upon. It becomes very easy to identify who everyone really is (according to the movie) at Ollie's birthday party. The Kattons and all of their invited friends are angels and fairies (elves, if you will) having fun and taking drugs at what looks like a fairy garden party. Ollie and even Farley, who thinks himself an insider, are both identified as outsiders by their costumes with cranial protrusions: Ollie wears antlers, Farley wears a horse head that, when seen from afar by the roast pig, looks like it has horns. And the servants are pigs: the pig roasting a pig for them to eat.

After watching a review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0dAGXixsck

This reviewer gripes that the Kattons aren't presented as sufficiently wealthy, that other than having a bigger house their decor is not so different from a family like Ollie's (this of course isn't true because 1) look around you, all we have left to us is IKEA and 2) their castle is filled with magical and historically significant objects). Even when Felix and Ollie visit Ollie's family, Felix makes no fuss; he is the same whether he is at Saltburn or in the suburbs, and doesn't appear to come from another reality. And Ollie's parents, interestingly, though they presumably know where Ollie's been staying, conduct themselves the same way. Only Ollie sees the gulf between these two worlds and is tortured by it. His suburban middle class home looks very nice, and sunny, and neat. A very good life, everything someone could want from a life. Those scenes are very light. The way Saltburn is shot is somewhat darker and gloomier, less "normal", less sunny, with far more range in shadow and light.

This portrayal is reality. You would not immediately recognize someone like Felix on the street by their clothes or their Jeep Wrangler, but by their history - something priceless which most people do not have and which no amount of money can obtain (cue the sad irony of a leftist everyman hellbent on wiping out his own history (however insignificant to it he is, he's a part of it, and of nothing other than it), if such people actually do exist and aren't only paid opps. If only people knew that we pay with time, that time facilitates transactions and accrual whether we like it or not, that attitude and awareness multiply that accrual, or reveal channels to.... All that's a separate topic.). Farley, though blood, doesn't know or care about the history, and he's American and part black. Ollie knows all of the history, but is a nobody. His knowledge is his burden.

This movie's not queer-coded. The sex in this movie has nothing to do with being straight, gay, or any true sexual feelings. It's rather lust for power transmitted, initiated, through the most powerful medium of transmission we have: sex. And specifically, the way to steal power from someone is first through a move that sexually overpowers and humiliates them. I think what she's saying is that this is how a class of imposters comes and steals from the true aristocracy, and that this is what's happening, though not in a way most people can see as they are not involved in it. It's an illustration of method. What a snake in a den might look like. He makes Venetia eat her own menstrual blood, makes Farley cum after saying he'll be a good boy, and interrupts Felix when he's in the middle of sex, embarrassing him. In each of these he overpowers them.

Encouragingly, many on YT are broken off from the ranks of "queer-coded" analysis and see it along the lines I do. This YT comment said some things better than I could and I basically agree with their view:

My only addition is that it's not so much fear the middle class as it is fear those outside who are in the circle of Baphomet. Could you call them the sub-elite? The almost-elite? The would-be elite? Is there any way other than sex? Before he interrupts Felix with a girl up against the Baphomet statue he's watching them, and you see one of Ollie's antlers outlined against the sky where the statue's horns also stick up, letting you know who he is.

(Then again, why do they have the statue in the center of the maze in the first place?)

I don't watch enough movies to say this is derivative or bad; I watched it naively. Even if a movie is derivative of others, it was made in its time, this one definitely for its time. But I don't think the right way to look at this movie is through movies that came before it. If a reference can add meaning it can also distract from and mask meaning, like small talk. It seems more like a message wrapped in a film than a piece of art.

My one gripe is that the Kattons were so gullible and trusting, beyond any reasonable measure, that they were barely believable as people. But that's just further evidence that this movie shouldn't be treated at all as a character study, even though it sort of plays on the trope of the gay serial killer. It does so almost mockingly. That's not really, to my mind, what it wants to say.

Maybe it's a warning to the true elite not to be stupid, not to have sex by the Baphomet statue lest all ye have be taken from you, not to tell outsiders about your family traditions of throwing stones with the names of the deceased in the river so that they can dig them back out and set them upon your voodoo likenesses like a trophy.

I'm sure there is a lot I missed, and a lot broader of a context to put these thoughts into that I don't have. These thoughts were a quick initial reaction I've spent now too much time unraveling, and I probably won't watch this movie twice. But I don't think references to other movies - especially when there are so many of them - necessarily means that there is a spiritual likeness to them, that by containing the same images they are about the same things. That's just comparing forms.