The Real Beauty of Ugly Art- Saltburn Review

TLDR: Tries to evoke the intellentsia of Melvyn Bragg/Radio 4 but actually just milks a metaphor about the film being both like a relationship AND a break up for a couple of hundred words.

I think the reason Saltburn is so divisive is because watching it feels like a good relationship gone bad, and when it ends, it feels like a bad break up, because it stays with you. Like, really stays with you, even though the very thought of it now repulses you. Like a breakup, you go over it, again and again in your mind trying to pinpoint the exact moment it started to unravel, the precise spot they turned into the ‘bad guy’, the fatal moment of repulsion in the bathtub. OH, THAT BATHTUB SCENE. Where they watched you shaving your pubes before they got in after you and tugged out a particularly long and thick one out the sinkhole, as they bemoaned your middle eastern hairiness. BRRRR….

The reason Saltburn is such a talking point is it touches so viscerally on the essence of the human condition; love, hate, obsession… But I’m a comedian so I’m not going to do a poor imitation of Melvyn Bragg, instead I’m going to continue this relationship metaphor. Because there’s nothing a comedian (and a writer) love more than a metaphor.

BACK TO HACKY METAPHOR:

 So, the end of Saltburn is like the end of a relationship. When it was all over, I text my girlfriends incessantly about the horror that I had put myself through. They answered back, rather too casually, that they didn’t ever understand why I was so interested in the first place. They had heard the putrid rumours and had warned me from the start.

“Why don’t you rebound over to ITV2 and binge watching the entire series of Love Island. Its REALLY funny and you know, you like comedy, don’t you, because you’re a comedian and everything…you like funny things…”

BREAKS OUT OF METAPHOR:

Ok so…I don’t like watching Comedy**. I am a comedian who never watches comedy. I only like to watch things that are ‘darkly comic’. Is this the equivalent of a girl who says she only likes bad boys and not nice guys? Have I done the impossible and brought another dimension to this completely milked metaphor because I had severe writers block about what to write about in my newsletter this week? Possibly.

BACK INTO METAPHOR:

You’ve now lost the will to live so you actually do flip over to ITV2 and start watching Love Island, but you can’t get past the first seventeen minutes and instead find yourself on BBC 2 where you are drawn to a documentary on body dysmorphia. Possibly because Love Island has made you want to remind yourself that not everyone thinks that their God’s Gift. But then you still can’t really concentrate on it because you’re thinking, yeah this is dark, but it’s nothing like you’re one true love, SALTBURN.  

So, you text your Mum to tell her it’s over and she comes round to mop your brow, (except she can’t really mop them because you’ve recently had them laminated-it’s a break up makeover) and you nestle into her bosom while you rock back and forth and re-live the trauma. She tells you they certainly are a vampire if they did that, and they definitely are a moth because you are the flame! Yeah, she looks quite pleased with herself with that one. Then she says that you have to bat away a lot of moths before you find your butterfly or something like that and you realise that getting metaphors wrong runs in your family. Then your mum sighs picking up the crusts of your half-eaten Domino’s pizza like they are the pieces of your heart, and she tells you over and over again, as she lets them fall into your overflowing bin…

“I told you so…always sounded like a wrong ‘un to me and why don’t you take your mind off it all and watch the lovely Mrs Browns Boys like I told you to do. You like comedy, all you need a lovely Irish jolly man to make you laugh.”

Even though she knows that you are not attracted to any man that would be described as, ‘jolly’.

So, instead you start to reminisce about happier times.  The trailer was your first date. They had you at Jacob Elordi. (PWHOAR). You then made embarrassing inuendo about a coming (!) of age drama and said that films set at universities were, ‘so your type’, because they always give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. Like Starter for Ten, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Girls Gone Wild. *

Then you start reminiscing about the honeymoon stages of the relationship. The beautiful sunny day where you met their mum and dad. And yes, he’s got a slightly mad family, but you reminded yourself that parents always love you. You’re like Rachel Bloom, you Give Good Parent. So, you can handle his kooky mum and his rambling dad and even find his crazy Aunt Pamela quite adorable. Then you start to recall how the first few cracks started to show, as you realised his family aren’t just kooky but full-on bat shit crazy/ mad as hell, and his mother definitely needs to be ‘dealt’ with using some form of psychological warfare.

But then….

Half- way through the film you realise you have been a victim of gaslighting (and it’s got nothing to do with the aga in the kitchen)

COMES OUT OF OVERUSED/TIRESOME METAPHOR:

I think the best thing about Saltburn is you realise the people you think are mad are the sane ones and the people you thought were sane are actually the mad ones.

BACK INTO METAPHOR:

Towards the end of the relationship, you realise their family are the last thing you need to be worrying about, when actually the problem aren’t his ridiculous relatives, and it’s definitely not you, its them, or it is you, or some other cliché line that ultimately ends it all….

I think I may have milked this metaphor to death and am dancing on its grave now. (OH MY GOSH THAT GRAVE SCENE WAS GRAVE)

FINALLY BREAKS OUT OF METAPHOR:

Back to imitating Melvyn Bragg…

The reason why Saltburn is so divisive is that so many people expect art to be not only completely and utterly beautiful but expect it to fill them with warmth and fuzziness at all times.  However, I believe that art reflects life, and life is often disgusting and tragic and messy and gross and that’s still beautiful in its own right. In fact, it’s more so, because its real.  

The difference between ugly art like Saltburn and so-called beautiful art like Love Island is that its like taking the red or the blue pill in The Matrix. In The Matrix, the red pill represents a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth or remain in the contented experience of ordinary reality with the blue pill.

This ‘unsettling or lifechanging truth’ is also talked about in one of my favourite plays, Comedians by Trevor Griffiths. In it, Griffiths’ talks about jokes having to have a hard kick rather than be ‘candied sweets to rot your teeth with’.  It’s also referenced in Germain Greer’s The Female Eunuch, where Greer talks about conformity hindering creativity and how this pressure to conform is present more so in women than men. I believe that women, present this conformity by wearing a constant veil of ‘niceness’ but perhaps that’s a topic for another newsletter. What Emerald Fennel has done, which is significantly commendable being a woman, is remove this cloak/strait jacket/veil of niceness/conformity and instead push the envelope of messy creativity. As a result, she has created what I believe to be a true work of art. In my novel, Daughters of the Nile, I comment on the concept of art and beauty through the character of the Muslim feminist Doria Shafik coming second in an Egyptian Beauty Contest. Her best friend, Fatiha comments:

‘I reminded myself it is not the most beautiful woman that wins Miss Egypt but the most average. A face too striking threatens the status quo. Men want ordinary, traditional beauty, a bowl of fruit rather than a futuristic work of art.’

What we are reminded of here, like Saltburn’s love/hate reception proves, is that great art doesn’t appeal to the masses it often divides people in its nonconformity to the status quo and its ability to create art that honours harsh truths rather than acceptable aesthetic surface level prettiness.

By revealing the ugly truth of the human condition, we do in effect also reveal the depths of its beauty. For isn’t it Keats who says, ‘Truth is beauty and beauty, truth’. Or was that Melvyn Bragg?

*This is a joke I’ve never seen a Harry Potter film.

** Yes, I am aware Love Island isn’t a Comedy.

Now here’s a thing I did about Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim, another creator who has no cares for conforming.