So... Saltburn Is Not A Romcom And Emerald Fennell Has Explicitly Said That We're Meant To Read Felix

So... Saltburn is not a romcom and Emerald Fennell has explicitly said that we're meant to read Felix as an awful person, yet there's so much talk about Oliver's frankly shoddy manipulation that worked 99% only through luck and Catton hubris, and so little talk about Felix's sketchy as hell behavior.

By which I mean, how Felix Catton displays a number of deliberate emotionally manipulative tactics towards Oliver and waves massive red flags all over the screen throughout the movie.

He love bombs Oliver in their first meeting, which is a deliberate manipulation tactic designed to overwhelm the victim with affection and positive attention early on - with out of the gate love declarations and overly effusive praise among the hallmark love bombing examples - and often is a precursur to nastier manipulative tactics down the line such as extreme withdrawal of affection when angered even by minor things (like when Felix ghosts Oliver after Oliver pretty accurately calls him spoiled for letting his room get so disgusting), and attempting to control the victim's appearance and behavior (the first that come immediately to mind include things Felix does when Oliver first arrives in Saltburn, such as: failing to inform Oliver in advance that the staff would go through his suitcase while he was occupied elsewhere and inform Felix's mother of anything they found noteworthy without Oliver's knowledge or consent; failing to inform Oliver that he would need dressy atire for dinners at Saltburn, and thus locking Oliver into wearing Felix's old clothes; even the razor Felix gets Oliver without any advance warning, under the excuse that Elspeth requires all the men in the house to be clean shaven).

Felix is also the one to initiate the oversharing of personal information during their first real conversation, in which he shares a bunch of very personal and likely traumatic details from Farleigh's past (in spite of knowing already that Farleigh and Oliver already know each other and don't get along), after which he badgers Oliver into divulging private details of his own past. Oliver even initially tries to offer a more true but less satisfying answer that, "there's not much really to say," about his life, which is a perfectly reasonable way to answer personal questions from someone you barely know. People are allowed boundaries around when and to whom they divulge personal information, whether or not that information involves trauma, but Felix keeps pushing until Oliver gives him an answer he finds more satisfying, at which point he rewards Oliver with more love bomb-y praise and attention.

And then Felix promptly turns around and proves exactly how right Oliver was not to trust him with anything private and true, by sharing Oliver's private confessions with all of his friends - including Farleigh, who, as Felix is still aware, already knows Oliver and doesn't like him.

(It's not unreasonable, either, to read this as part of his isolating Oliver, when he shares all of Oliver's private 'confessions' with his friends at Oxford, classist kids who wind up looking down on Oliver for his supposed poverty, only to then get mad at Farleigh for sharing the same information with Felix's family - specifically Felix's mother, from whom we can infer Felix gets his voyeuristic interest in lonely people with troubled pasts - and prove with his comment to Farleigh of, "that's private!" that he knew the whole time that he was sharing information that should have been private behind Oliver's back.)

Then Felix takes this shiny new friend of his, a guy who supposedly grew up in a house full of drug and alcohol problems that destroyed his parents' lives, promptly invites him to all sorts of parties and bars and clubs full of rampant alcohol and drug abuse, and convinces him to develop an addiction of his own when he gets him to start smoking.

And of course, to top off the big red flag behaviors of a controlling manipulator, there's Felix's massive boundary violations when he feels entitled not only to answer Oliver's phone without even telling him about it, but then plans a surprise visit to Oliver's mother in spite of knowing, at that point in time, only that Oliver supposedly did not get along with his mother and viewed her only as a toxic and traumatic part of his childhood that he wants nothing to do with anymore. In terms of Felix's behavior there, it does not matter that Oliver was lying, because Felix did not know that Oliver was lying. He simply saw no issue with forcing Oliver into what he only had cause to believe would be a stressful and traumatic experience, one that Oliver had explicitly stated he did not want before even getting to Saltburn and then repeatedly asked Felix not to do on the drive to Prescot, because Felix does what Felix wants even when his supposed best mate is literally terrified and begging him to turn around in the car next to him.

Oliver displays his share of toxic behavior and makes a series of increasingly terrible choices culminating in murder, but Felix is very far from an innocent victim.

Oliver thought Felix genuinely liked him, and he wanted to give Felix what he wanted in return. The problem with that, and one of the big reasons things went so badly for them both (in, honestly, such a narratively satisfying way!), is that the things Felix wanted from a 'friend' were unhealthy things from the start.

imaginary friend

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Don't you worry about my pronouns. My pronouns are pretty standard. Worry about my adverbs. My most frequent ones are "omniously", "haphazardly" and "obliviously".

The older I get the more I admire people who are earnestly, genuinely into whatever their thing is. I know it sounds like an annoying cliche but unless you're being cruel or hurtful there is really no need to be normal about things. The dude with the bad fake accent at the renaissance faire is having the time of his life. The people having photoshoots with their fashion dolls are loving it. The old lady with a yard unreasonably full of tacky ass lawn ornaments is having a blast, HOA be damned.

Don't waste your time being too cool to have fun, y'know?

Oliver Quick wanted friends. He struggled to make friends, and his mom told him it was because he was so clever, and so he threw himself into academics and got into Oxford and discovered that even in a place that was supposed to value Clever People he still didn't fit in.

But Oliver wanted friends. He wanted friends who wanted to be around him, and he didn't want to be around people who took pleasure in tearing him down or people who were determined to label him as a friendless loner who should give up on wanting anyone else to like him for him.

He wanted to connect with other people who wanted him to be happy, and who he could make happy in turn.

And too many people seem to think the message there is that a person who wants friendship but struggles to find it must be inherently creepy. That Oliver deserved to be made fun of, deserved to be looked at with suspicion or labeled a creep who all the Cattons should have been more wary of from the start, just because he was a weird kid whose social skills lagged well behind his peers.

That is not, in fact, the message of Saltburn. Oliver does not represent the inherent creepiness of the average weirdo loner who dreams of being liked instead of loudly proclaiming their pride in not fitting in, anymore than Farleigh or Venetia are meant to send the message that being mixed race or a woman turns people into bullies or predisposes them to cruelty in response to rejection or their own personal pain.

The message is that hurt people often wind up hurting other people, no matter who they are or where they come from. That hurt in any form can lead anyone to lash out as a way to cope with feeling small and angry, but all that does is perpetuate a cycle of further violence and make more people hurt.

That no matter how real and unfair the source of your pain, no matter how valid you are to be angry at something or someone who hurt you, there is no pain or valid anger that grants anyone immunity from lashing out too hard or at the wrong people and becoming one more cruel person who just wants to drag others down too.

That wanting friends, wanting connection and community and enough social power that no one else can make you feel small or afraid, aren't inherently terrible things. That if you don't own your own choices anyway and take responsibility for the outlets you find for your anger no matter how unfairly you've been treated by the people around you, these things can very easily turn into justifications for doing some pretty terrible things of your own.

Fighting back against oppression is not the same thing as committing oppression, and it is not hypocrisy not to tolerate intolerance from others.

That is not what a lot of supposed activism on this website actually does.

Guilt-tripping total strangers based on unfounded assumptions about their lives and experiences? Demanding attention and validation from strangers, as a way for said strangers to prove that they aren't Bad People, by demanding that what amount to personal vent posts be treated as meaningful educational resources on incredibly complex and serious issues? Trying to claim moral high ground over the fictional interests of strangers based entirely on some people's feelings of disgust as the only evidence of harm?

Wanting people around you to feel angry, or small, or ashamed, with no goal besides making someone else feel bad when it makes you feel better about the unfair hurt you've endured?

These aren't examples of activism or progressive ideology. They are examples of hurt people lashing out at easy targets with misidirected anger. They are examples of people engaging in the cycle of harm, when someone has made them feel small, and they chose to look for someone else they've decided should feel smaller as a way to make themselves feel big again.

I'm sure most tumblr users can think of at least a few posts they've seen like this, if not dozens or more.

Not just isolated posts, either, but posts with hundreds to thousands of notes worth of validation from other strangers.

That shit is harmful. Absolutely no one is ever obligated to engage with guilt-tripping, directionless anger that focuses mainly on punching down at one's peers, regardless of the source which originally inspired that anger. No matter how sympathetic someone's pain might be, it is not kindness to validate random cruelty as an outlet for genuine pain.

Engaging in meaningful activism is hard work. Hurting easy targets in the name of righteous causes is easy.

Being a decent person means being willing to ask yourself which one you're doing, and then being willing to step back and disengage not only when the answer is, "causing more harm," but also when the honest answer is, "I don't know."

Activism is not the same as causing harm. The corollary to that is that causing harm is not the same as activism, either.