Movies as Discourse Generators

Notes on Recent Films

Barry Keoghan as Oliver Quick in Saltburn

Catch-up service:
- My Year In Reading
- Seduced By The Machine
- Notes on Succession
- Barbearheimer

In this post I discuss Saltburn, How To Have Sex, Anatomy of a Fall, Maestro, and Killers of the Flower Moon.

• Saltburn. The poet John Ashbery said, “The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about it.” Saltburn is very easy to talk about. This is a film that pretends to meaty themes - class, power, sexual obsession - but in truth it doesn’t know what it’s about. Insofar as Saltburn has a guiding purpose it’s to generate discourse. The “shocking” scenes and “big ideas” are just memes and talking points ready-made for social media iteration.
  
  What makes for good discourse doesn’t make for a pleasurable two (felt like three) hours in the cinema. I kept wondering what the point of everything was. Why is it set in the mid-2000s? Why is Keoghan’s body filmed so lasciviously? Is the main character meant to be an ice-cold psychopath or someone so emotionally invested in Felix he gets a weepy hard-on while lying on his grave? Honestly, I wouldn’t waste your time coming up with answers; there is no ‘there’ there. The film’s fundamental aimlessness is most apparent in the last third of the movie, a flatulent and affectless series of twists in search of satisfying resolution. In one of these many final scenes, Richard E. Grant’s character writes out a cheque to make Keoghan go away. I felt that Grant was on the viewer’s side - Whatever it costs, just make the film stop!