Reverse Saltburn and The "Boy Kate Middleton" Genre

Over the Christmas holidays I had occasion to watch Saltburn, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. It’s always a pleasure to watch Richard E. Grant having a good time onscreen!

Saltburn is part of a genre (let’s call it male social climbing fantasia) I can’t think of many counterexamples for. The movie invites comparisons to Brideshead Revisited, but of course there’s also The Secret History, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Teorema, Visitor Q, The Line of Beauty, and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, etc.

Most of the following elements are usually present in an MSCF:

• A middle- or lower-middle-class striver as protagonist; he is catastrophically bent on being loved by a son of the gentry or light aristocracy, although a wealthy bourgeois will do in a pinch

• The striver is from somewhere comically unimportant. Not Bakersfield, but Plano, California; not Merseyside but Prescot. He has no origins, comes from nowhere, is free of both family expectation and legacy.

• What residual family he may have (Tom Ripley’s overbearing aunt, Oliver Saltburn’s inconveniently affectionate parents) he strives to cut ties with; he wants to become even more of a blank slate than he already is.

• The striver may break pathetic (The Secret History) or vicious (Teorema, Visitor Q, Honourable Defeat) but exists somewhere along a pitiable/violent axis (Tom Ripley falls square in the middle)

• Subtlety is out, stageiness is in; characters in this genre often come right out and name their social positions, their assessments of one another’s motives and chances of success (“You’re not like us”/”We’ll always be _____”/“You’ll never be ______”)

• Which may or may not be to your taste as a viewer, but it does mirror reality in an important way. There was nothing subtle about public perception of Kate Middleton’s slow, determined run at the Royal Family (“Wisteria sisters,” “Waitey Katie”). The discussion was always explicit!

• The middle-class striver is horrified by outright dismissal, but it cannot slow him down; emotional rejection affects him in the same way bullets affect Michael Meyers. They tear holes in him, but nevertheless he keeps on coming.

• The middle-class striver’s primary love-object is a carelessly beautiful male scion of something or other; his rejection comes last, after a series of warm-up rejections from the other, more established hangers-on

• Homoeroticism is upward mobility is violence

• Bonus points for incorporating a slightly offbeat rich-guy sport: sculling or jai alai or something

• Sometimes the striver has sex with the more established hangers-on (who may or may not be relatives of the carelessly-beautiful scion); sometimes he does this in an explicit attempt to sow chaos and division in their circle, sometimes he does this out of panic and last-minute desperation

• The carelessly beautiful son of privilege should have as little sex as possible (perhaps an establishing shot or two of casual sex with an attractive woman who subsequently disappears from the action), since his primary vector is being withholding. He is more sexually available than sexually active; the striver is more sexually active than sexually desirable

• Sometimes the narrative takes a moralistic tack against the aristo victims of the middle-class striver, which is inevitably undercut by the perfect passivity of their collective victimhood (if not too good for this sinful world, certainly too good-looking)

This genre does not, as far as I can figure it, have an opposite, whereby a carelessly beautiful son of privilege becomes desperately enamored with slumming it. The closest example I can think of is The O.C., where Marissa Cooper is a sort of Oliver-in-reverse (which would make Ben McKenzie the Jacob Elordi equivalent), but that falls apart pretty quickly.

I do hope someone changes this and kicks the mirror-genre off soon: Two boys meet at Princeton or Moon-Cambridge or somewhere, and the catastrophically-wealthy Avincal Rulenblot becomes dangerously obsessed with Jeff Harris, a B-student from Madison, Wisconsin, and follows him home (a split-level three-bedroom) where he becomes so enamored with Mrs. Harris’ Royal Doulton Christmas Figurines and the family tradition of butter burgers on Thursday nights that he vows never to be separated from the Harris estate again…

Quotes include:

“This is the mud room…you can take your shoes off here…that’s the kitchen. The bedrooms are upstairs. Yours is on the left.”

“Everyone loved Jeff — everyone wanted to be around him.” [Cut to magazine subscription-seller ringing the doorbell.] “It was exhausting.”

And so on. You can take it from here, I should think. I expect a finished copy on my desk Monday morning.

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