In A Universe Where The Performance Was Good Enough.

In a universe where the performance was good enough.

I find it hard to see interpretations of Oliver's story in Saltburn as tailored to any audience besides himself, because I don't think Oliver is actually speaking to any audience besides himself.

Yeah, he's got Elspeth's body there in the room and addresses her as though he's telling this story to her. However, everything about Oliver in that room reads to me like Elspeth's body is little more than a prop he can use to justify telling this story out loud, when the only person it's really for is himself. Elspeth is completely comatose, and I find it hard to read Oliver as a character who imagines an audience who isn't really there when he talks. Oliver is a very reserved person, and he tends to do best in one-on-one conversations where he can focus his attention on analyzing and tailoring his words to a single person at a time.

He's also a person who leans heavily on what people actively tell him out loud to supplement his understanding of their actions and motivations. And he's a people pleaser, one who is constantly seeking out instructions from other people on how to act and what kind of person to be.

At the end of Saltburn, Oliver has retreated from the world, just waiting almost in stasis for the chance to return to Saltburn. Since Elspeth is his greatest chance to get back, he banks on remaining the same person that she clung to in the wake of her children's deaths as his way of winning her over again. And it works!

Once Elspeth's illness has reached the point that she is no longer conscious, however, there is no one left for Oliver to act for. She has put him in her will to inherit Saltburn upon her death, which accomplishes the one goal Oliver has clung to since he was 20, of finding a way back to Saltburn permanently; he won't need to perform for the staff when he's the one they all work for.

Thus there is no one left for Oliver to please, no one left to seek instructions from on what sort of person he should be, except himself. The only important person Oliver has left to please is himself.

At this point, he sets himself up in Elspeth's room with her comatose body as a prop to justify his conversation with himself, and he goes about telling himself who he is, so that he can finally become a person who makes himself happy.

He's not keeping bits of Felix back from an imaginary viewer. Any pieces of Felix he keeps back are the ones he doesn't want to remember... and yet, in spite of his best efforts to convince himself that he wasn't in love with Felix, that he was a mastermind who only wanted Saltburn the whole time, the memories that stick and linger and dig themselves in all through the edges of his monologue tell a different story.

He can cast away details about Felix, the intimate conversations he can't bear to remember and the moments that made Felix human beyond Oliver's love, but he can't get rid of everything. All those dreamy, sun-drenched moments when he stared at Felix through the eyes of a lover, the flashes of time when Felix looked back like maybe he felt the same, like they were the only two people in the world - those are the moments that carved themselves most deeply into Oliver's heart, the moments that can't be excised entirely from his story no matter how much he might wish to cast them aside too when he steps into the last persona that he's finally created to tell himself that he's happy, that he's won.

Rule one of fandom: there are some things that only exist for us.

Don’t send actors fics

Don’t give them explicit art ever

Don’t tag them in rpf questions or theories

Don’t try to bring them into fandom drama of any kind

Don’t hold them responsible for what the producers and writers decide

They’re still people.  They have private lives, which do not include fandom.

SALTBURN (2023) dir. Emerald Fennell