When You Lash Out Because Someone Else Or The World Hurt You First - Tumblr Posts
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.