Stop Asking Whether 'Succession' and 'Saltburn' Are Mean Enough to Rich People
Chiabella James
Succession picked up four Golden Globe wins on Sunday, including best dramatic TV series and acting wins for Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, and Matthew MacFayden, who beat out many of their own co-stars in the process. Golden Globe wins make for easy (if notoriously flawed) evidence that people care about a show, but I probably could’ve said “people love writing about Succession” and left it that, so obvious is the truth of that statement. Succession’s thinkpiece-to-ratings ratio must be 20 times that of, say, Yellowstone. People love it, love awarding it, and love writing about it, myself included.
Meanwhile, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which hit streaming December 22nd, has become another favorite topic for culture writers—though “target” might be more accurate. The Huffington Post clarified that Saltburn “isn’t an eat-the-rich movie. It’s also not great.” The Guardian wrote that it “could be an advertisement for Oxford.” Critic Patrick Sproull of Dazed wondered, “Can posh people write good class satire?” and said Saltburn “fails to truly criticise the elite.”
Of course, some of these pans were spiritual subtweets of previous raves, such as Britt Hayes at the Mary Sue writing that Saltburn “makes a salacious meal of eating the rich and savors every bite.”
As with The Menu last year, much of the Saltburn criticism and even some of the praise seems to focus on whether it is or isn’t too nice to rich people. Meanwhile, there’s the much-praised Succession, another story about rich people, which—we’re left to infer from the constant stream of thinkpieces and awards—is sufficiently mean to rich people. (My sense is that a lot of the discrepancy in criticism is actually more of a referendum on how individual viewers reacted to Barry Keoghan sucking spent jizz out of a bathroom drain or having sex with a freshly dug grave than it is on wealth satire; critics mostly just had to couch their feelings about the former in a higher-minded discussion of the latter, as wealth satire is generally considered a more acceptable topic for discussion in arts criticism than bathtub jizz, and critics’ reactions to it less visceral and thus more articulable. But that’s a discussion for another time.)
To ask whether either of these works are “mean enough” to rich people is to miss the point. I love both Succession and Saltburn, and neither are about whether or not rich people are bad. That rich people are mostly assholes is a truth both of them mostly take as a given. And anyway, moral referendums don’t generally make for good art. Citizen Kane wasn’t about how William Randolph Hearst was an asshole (though he was)— it was a well-told tale of how power corrupts even the well-meaning. Likewise, Saltburn and Succession aren’t eat-the-rich romps, they’re both strivers-vs.-swells dramedies. They both pit social climbers against pseudo-aristocratic nepo-baby frenemies and come away with nearly equal but opposite conclusions. And they actually complement each other wonderfully.
It’s easy to see why Matthew MacFayden won the Golden Globe for Succession. He got many of the best lines, and his character, Tom Wambsgans (his comically stupid-sounding name instantly marking him as some dweeb from the sticks, no matter how hard he tried to shed his origins) and cousin Greg (“the Disgusting Brothers”) were arguably the heart of the show. While the Roy children (Kendall, Shiv, and Roman) were constantly knifing each other in the back, Tom and Greg’s bromance was often genuinely touching, even when they were doing ruthless or awful things together (with Tom schooling Greg in all the things elites need to know, like cocaine etiquette and expensive wristwear). Tom’s caustic yet older-brotherly mentorship of clueless, gawky Greg was usually hilarious, sometimes even sweet.
In the end, Tom becomes CEO and Greg is rewarded for his broship with a cushy position near the king. Tom seals their partnership by placing a sticker (the ones the Roy children were using to mark their father’s stuff as theirs while they divvied up his assets) on Greg’s forehead. “I choose you,” Tom says, affixing the sticker, a gloriously heartwarming rom-com moment leavened by louche Tom treating dopey Greg like his favorite lamp.
In the end, The Disgusting Brothers essentially ride off into the sunset together, Tom having solidified his position through grit, determination, and ruthlessness, leaving the Roy children to accept that they probably never deserved it anyway. We could debate how tongue-in-cheek the ending is meant to be (is being CEO of Waystar-Royco an enjoyable job any normal human would actually want?) but it is, essentially, a repudiation of heredity. The winner of the crown was the usurper, who got there through his own merit (or whatever passes for “merit” in the amoral fraudulence of corporate power), rather than by accident of birth.
Like Tom Wambsgans in Succession, Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) in Saltburn is another striver who ultimately defeats his toff adversaries in the end, but it’s even more obvious in Oliver’s case that he doesn’t win by being more moral, deserving, or nice, but by being a more despicable son of a bitch. Succession is somewhat up for interpretation (probably part of what makes it good and why we love to write about it), but still fairly clear in its relative depiction of Tom as the babyface and the Roys as the heels.
Emerald Fennell is certainly more “heavy-handed” in depicting her lead striver as a murderous, calculating, jizz-and-menstrual-blood drinking demon, but there’s a power in letting the viewer know in no uncertain terms that we are (or have been) rooting for the worst person in the story. She gives us a traditional up-by-the-bootstraps, Great Expectations-style fairytale about the proverbial scholarship boy getting over on the aristocrats in the beginning of the story, which we were perfectly content to enjoy no matter how many times we’d already seen it. We loved watching Oliver sheds his outsider status through his homoerotic friendship with the handsome lead aristocrat Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), to see Oliver blossom in the glow of attention from Oxford’s Sun King (Fennell deepens the symbolism by constantly depicting Felix shimmering in morning sunlight).
It’s only halfway through that she twists the knife, by revealing that Oliver isn’t the son of penniless alcoholics he’s depicted himself as, but rather just a covetous upper-middle-class kid who dreams of inheriting an even bigger house. His tragic home life was just a well-calculated tale designed to appeal to all of the Cattons' noblesse-oblige instincts. He literally murders the entire Catton family and fucks their graves, and by the end of the film he's wound up with a huge empty estate and no friends, running through the cavernous hallways with his dick and balls flapping happily in the wind.
Whether Fennell was “too nice” in her depiction of all the rich kids at Oxford (she certainly portrays them as snobby, entitled pricks, though she also probably could’ve been meaner) is a little beside the point. And the point wasn’t Gosh, aren’t rich people jerks? but rather to ask the question of who’s worse: the idle, entitled wealthy who are blithely unaware of the suffering of their inferiors, or the ruthless strivers who, even knowing all that, still desperately want to be them? Is it worse to be born terrible, or to aspire to it?
It’s a salient point — after all, isn’t deliberately, calculatedly turning yourself into a rich son of a bitch kind of worse than just being one by accident of birth? — but even more so than that, it’s a clever conceit that puts us in the position of rooting for the pervert. And so then it also asks us the question of whether we want art that stimulates our most humane ideals, or art that allows us to vicariously indulge our most craven impulses within the safe confines of entertainment. Wouldn'st we like to live deliciously? Perhaps we, the viewers, were the real “disgusting brothers” all along, and so forth.
Both are satires of wealth, comedies of class, and explorations of strivers vs. swells. Saltburn is just more open about thumbing us in the eye. And maybe the fact that it asks for a little more self-examination in the end accounts for its much-less-universal acclaim.
Originally Appeared on GQ
