This story was originally published on November 21. Be sure to also read Alison Willmore’s review of the film, our interviews with the bathtub scene’s foley artist and the final dance scene’s choreographer, and Roxana Hadadi’s analysis of the ending.
Jacob Elordi is a lot of man, and in Saltburn, his character, Felix Catton, often wears things that emphasize his bigness. A tiny pair of boxer shorts as he complains about the heat in his Oxford University dorm room, an open robe that exposes his chest while he lounges around his family’s estate, a tank top and Romeo + Juliet–inspired angel wings to show off his shoulders at a Shakespearen costume party. His face, body, charm, and affluence make obsessive admirer Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) go feral, and costume designer Sophie Canale highlights all of Elordi’s mass so well that Oliver’s motivations are understandable, even if his methods are detestable.
Yet nothing tells you so clearly what you need to know about who Felix Catton is — his bad-boy affectations, his seeming sexual fluidity — as the little stud in his left eyebrow. It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much desire and so much madness for such a little thing! Yes, I’m paraphrasing what Boromir said about the One Ring, because I’m pretty sure Felix’s piercing has done similar damage on all our sexual psyches as that gold band did on Frodo’s sanity. We’re all mortal, aren’t we? And we’re all weak before that eyebrow stud, and all the rakishness and nonconformity it suggests.
Saltburn begins at Oxford University in 2006, which syncs up with when director and writer Emerald Fennell studied English there. Very little of the outside world makes its way into Saltburn, aside from the music of the time — including a singalong to the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside†— and the fashion. But because Felix is presented as the most popular first-year at Oxford, he serves as the film’s contemporaneous embodiment.
He’s got the floppy, shaggy hair that every member of the Strokes had in 2006, the preppy-with-an-edge style of Vampire Weekend, and the left-ear hoop that boy-band members normalized for teens in the aughts. He’s impossible to ignore (again, that height!) but also unassumingly cool, not as strait-laced as Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), his eventual best friend who falls in love with him, or as image-obsessed as his cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). The first thing about Felix that hints at him being unrulier than expected — and smuttier and smugger, a destabilizing-ly hot combination which Saltburn amplifies by making Elordi lean on things a lot — is that eyebrow stud.
Consider what an eyebrow stud accentuates: a raised eyebrow, which can be flirtatious; a wink, to communicate a shared secret; eye contact, an important pre-kiss step. Felix offers all of these to Oliver, and look, wouldn’t we all get the wrong idea? During those Oxford days, when Felix allows Oliver into the warm glow of his inner circle, he’s always wearing the eyebrow stud, and its presence becomes a teasing kind of promise. As long as the piercing is present, so too is the possibility of something happening between Felix and Oliver — on the stone bridge they visit together in the middle of the night, or in Felix’s air conditioner-less dorm room. So when Felix removes the piercing at his family estate, Saltburn, where he’s invited Oliver to spend his vacation, its absence is the first chink in the fantasy that Oliver imagined about their future.
The eyebrow stud has to come out, Felix explains to Oliver, because his mother Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) thinks it’s unhygienic. It’s a moment that feels homophobic-coded, like Elsbeth understands what the stud reflects about Felix’s spontaneity and worries it could also signal queerness. Its removal marks Felix’s increased conservatism while at home. The landed gentry keep to themselves and wile away their days with lazy mimicries of decades-old traditions that Felix understands, but doesn’t always explain to Oliver, ones that require cufflinks and ball gowns, tennis rackets and Champagne coupes. There’s generosity and hospitality, but only to a point: When Felix learns that Farleigh plans to ask his parents for more money, he bristles at being taken advantage of, and when he finds out that his sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) and Oliver fooled around, he poutingly calls the pairing “awkward.†As Saltburn continues, the eyebrow piercing seems more and more like an affectation — a desired perception instead of an actual persona — and without it, Felix reveals himself for who he actually is: privileged, defensive, and doomed. It’s a tiny detail that has more character-development impact for Felix than almost anything else.
Saltburn is dotted with big moments that, like the penis on the minotaur sculpture at the center of the Cattons’ hedge maze, are crafted with a winking vulgarity and crassness. Oliver licks and tongues the drain of the bathtub in which Felix just masturbated, then calls himself a vampire before gleefully diving into period sex (including cunnilingus!) with Venetia. Farleigh mocks Oliver’s dependence and crush on Felix at a family karaoke night by forcing him to sing the Pet Shop Boys’s “Rent,†with the lyrics “I’m your puppet/I love it/I need it/I feel it†— but later ends up having sex with Oliver. It’s all youthful impetuousness, free-floating lust, and malevolent vibes, like a scene where Oliver gets naked and humps the dirt that’s been freshly thrown over Felix’s grave. Earlier in the film, when Oliver fantasized about Felix, the young aristocrat was shirtless in a field, smoking a cigarette, wearing a huge watch, and staring directly at us: a combination of the physicality, wealth, and attention that Oliver so coveted. And that eyebrow stud is the icing on the cake, the cherry on the sundae, the final stroke before a little death. It symbolizes everything Felix is and isn’t, and it endures in Oliver’s (and our) dreams.
More on Saltburn
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