“saltburn
and the curse of the uninteresting”
by Chisom Nwaezuoke
When Saltburn was released in fall 2023, it quickly became a hot topic, and deservedly so. Written by Emerald Fennell and starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi and the bodacious Rosamund Pike, this film has a little bit of everything: compelling narrative, strong characters and their accompanying vicissitudes, gothic cinematography, and to crown it all, just before the credits roll in, Barry Keoghan dances naked around the saltburn estate to Sophia Ellis’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” wearing a celebratory look on his face as his balls swing in accordance. It is hard to watch but harder not to.
The story starts out simple —boy meets boy—serendipity or whatever. Oliver, the socially awkward student from a drug-abusing family who has only managed to get into Oxford on a scholarship, has a crush on Felix, who comes from a wealthy family. Then Oliver gets news of his father’s death, and Felix, in an attempt to lighten his grief, invites him to his family’s summer estate, Saltburn.
At Saltburn, things get weird. Oliver watches Felix masturbate in the bath and then sneaks in to drink the bathwater. He also has sex with Felix’s sister and cousin on consecutive nights.
The weirdness of this movie is almost unbearable.
But it is worth bearing for the big twist where we learn that Oliver’s father is very much alive, his mother does not abuse drugs, and he is in fact from an upper-middle-class family.
I often think about how Oliver made his life seem interesting, and caught the attention of Felix by fabricating pain. He lied about being poor, about dealing with drug-abusing parents, and to really seal the deal on Felix’s attention, he lied about his father’s death. To Oliver, there was nothing remarkable about being well-cared for by parents who loved him, so he cooked up a traumatic backstory that could win him the attention he desired.
Pain invites pity, and to an extent, Felix who seemed to have it all, pitied Oliver who seemed to have nothing at all. It isn’t the only theme that carries the story. Yes, he pities him, but as the story unfolds in dramatic displays of love, hate, and jealousy, we see clearly that Felix is intrigued by Oliver.
He loves him in a way that little girls love their dolls; something to care for, to imagine himself as, but still relish in the power of being better than.
Knowing what he knew about Oliver, or at least what he thought he knew—Felix found him interesting.
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When I started doing research for this essay, I wanted to see what had been documented about interesting people and the way they live. I found myself down a rabbit hole regarding the expression “may you live in interesting times“. This expression is a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. It is understood to be an ironic statement, because interesting times are usually times of trouble. If a person ever says it to you, know they do not mean you well.
But I am hardly the first to speculate a connection between trouble and interest. In many ways, modern art reflects the belief that troubled times are interesting times, and troubled people are interesting people. Some artists even insist that the best art can only come from interesting times.
In the first half of Charles Bukowski’s poem, “The Secret of My Endurance,” he expresses a kinship with his readers who are mostly, “cracked up men in tiny rooms with factory jobs or no jobs…no hope, just booze and madness”. Truly, Bukowski was no stranger to the lowlife—his father, who was often unemployed, was abusive, and this drove him to alcohol very early in life. By his mid twenties, he had been arrested and worked odd jobs to survive. In his lifetime, he wrote thousands of poems about the life of poor Americans and performed these poems to drunken crowds in lowbrow areas.
Despite his past, Bukowski was a successful poet, and went on to live a life of abundance. He affirms this himself in the second half of this poem where he wonders if they realize that their letters of solidarity are now dropped off in a paid-off house with a two-car garage, and most importantly, a young boy who now writes his poems. He concludes, “I keep him in a ten-foot cage with a typewriter, feed him whiskey and raw whores, belt him pretty good three or four times a week. I’m 59 years old now and the critics say my stuff is getting better than ever.” In his characteristically cheeky way, Bukowski is saying that to keep producing interesting art, it needs to be borne from pain, even if it’s no longer his pain.
With fewer words, Florence + The Machine tout the same belief in their song “No Choir”… “[a]nd it’s hard to write about being happy, cause the older I get I find that happiness is an extremely uneventful subject.”
I know that beauty can come from pain—critics agree that Van Gogh’s mental instability played a big role in his creative expression. So, there’s no use wondering if Bukowski could have written without inspiration from his trauma or if Florence + the Machine would someday write ‘happy’ songs. However, I question the idea that only pain can create something beautiful or spark interest, that there is nothing to be felt from the experience of joy or ordinariness or the status quo.
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Saltburn is fictional, and Oliver, the fabricator, does not exist. The concept of trauma being interesting and people longing to be interesting, at any cost, is real.
It’s not always a direct longing for suffering, but instead, a desire to have more ‘depth’ which is associated with suffering: like the white man who told me he wished he grew up on the streets of Africa, like the friend of a friend who wished they could relate to a song about abuse, like rappers who grew up in nice neighborhoods but spend their whole careers writing lyrics about gang violence. I can’t help but wonder what it is that these people really want.
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Pain is real, and demands to be felt. Emily Dickinson wrote, “I like a look of agony, because I know it’s true. Men do not sham convulsion nor simulate a throe. The eyes glaze once – and that is death, impossible to feign. The beads upon the forehead by homely anguish strung.”
What I have observed is that the endurance of pain can easily become an identity.
We have names for that; victims, survivors, oppressed.
I have also observed that surviving pain can take away the prison of self-consciousness, and cause a person to embrace who they are. When life takes everything else, a person is only left with themself. Either way, I wonder, maybe it is this sureness of self that people seek. Maybe it boils down to identity—to be something, to know what that is, and to live in the confidence of being—I also wonder if maybe it is about attention… like the women in the 18th century novels that swoon to get the attention of a prospect.
Whether with pity, care, or admiration, maybe people just want to be looked at? So maybe it’s not just about knowing oneself, but also about being known, about belonging, about community?
I wonder if the alleged Chinese curse has evolved. If the real tragedy has become an ‘ordinary’ life, a modern-day curse of the uninteresting, a desperate search for identity and community—to be somebody, and to be recognized as a part of something.
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In many ways, I have lived an interesting life, yet in other ways I have felt uninteresting, plagued by this curse of not knowing who I am or where I belong. When I write, I often find myself reaching for the ‘interesting’ parts of my story, but I’m learning that the world, more often than not, isn’t my greatest enemy.
In Saltburn, Oliver finds Oliver uninteresting. It is me who first—and fervently—believes my stories are only worth telling if there is pain, and it is me who first finds my simple experiences lacking.
Identity is slippery, and not always ours to define. Do whatever you want with your experiences, good or bad, but what would become of us if, societally, we agreed on something else entirely? Being is enough.