On The Heels Of My More Serious Felix Catton Post, I Would Also Like To Take A Step Back Into Lighthearted

On the heels of my more serious Felix Catton post, I would also like to take a step back into lighthearted hilarity and appreciate Felix's claim to Oliver early on that he takes more after his dad than his mom.

Truly an iconic line, said with all the unshakable confidence of bone-deep misogyny by a man whose personality is basically a carbon copy of his mother's.

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.

Writing slow burn "getting to know you again" dialogue between a compulsive liar with deep insecurity issues and a wealthy Brit who was raised with a core value for strict avoidance of any subjects that make him the slightest bit uncomfortable...

This Groundhog Day loop might need lower standards.

Maybe the loop should actually end when they manage to get through one whole Meaningful Conversation without any lies or hedging or one of them bursting into flames from stress.

*Or hypothetical partner.

"Stories should teach us [x]," "Stories should teach us [y]," "Stories should teach us-"

No. Wrong. Incorrect.

If you are old enough to choose the stories you engage with for yourself, then you should be choosing stories with the lessons you need and staying out of other people's business when they choose to engage with the stories that weren't right for you.

kind of obsessed with this comment from the aoteaora nz subreddit….