Saltburn (2023) and the Modern Cinema of Attractions
In Saltburn (2023, dir. Emerald Fennell), a tension is created between David Bordwell’s classical Hollywood narrative filmmaking structure and that of Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions. The film presents itself as a traditional narrative feature, produced within the Hollywood blockbuster system, but there are many scenes included that do not serve a clear narrative purpose and instead serve only to shock the audience. While Saltburn is largely considered a classically narrative film because of its adherence to principles of causality and other narrative pillars as laid out by Bordwell, it ultimately subordinates story substance to cinematic attractions via the inclusion of these many exhibitionistic “shock value” scenes, displaying one way the cinema of attractions manifests itself in modern filmmaking.
In David Bordwell’s article “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” he outlines various components that make up the traditional Hollywood film. Bordwell emphasizes the importance of causality in this type of storytelling, stating that “in classical fabula [i.e., story] causality is the prime unifying principle” (19). All events are based on a cause-effect structure, where the resolution of one event leads to the beginning of another, repeating throughout the film. The beginning of Saltburn is governed by this structure of causality, with each scene building directly on the next and leading up to something bigger. The first section of the film takes the audience along with the main character Oliver Quick as he befriends the wealthy and well-known Felix Catton and gets invited to his family home for the summer, and the events happening in Oliver’s personal life all have bearing on the relationship he develops with Felix. Causality also governs the mise-en-scene of the film and helps construct character dynamics. Bordwell states, “spatial configurations are motivated by realism…and, chiefly, by compositional necessity (the desk and typewriter will be used to write causally significant news stories, the phones from crucial links among characters)” (19). There is a scene where Oliver has to pay for everyone’s drinks but does not have enough money; Felix notices this and pays the tab. The “spatial configuration” of the bar–which allows the audience to see Oliver’s interaction with the bartender as well as Felix’s reaction to it–is necessary for this moment (which gives the audience key details about how Felix sees Oliver) to unfold.
Connected to Bordwell’s emphasis on causality is the plot structure of the classical narrative film, which is composed of four main parts. These parts are “an undisturbed stage, the disturbance, the struggle, and the elimination of the disturbance” (19). Generally, this problem or disturbance is “clear-cut” and the story ends with “a resolution of the problem and a clear achievement or nonachievement of the goals” (18). In Saltburn however, the goal is not extremely “clear-cut,” and even what can tentatively be called the central problem is not introduced until the middle of the film. At the midpoint, Felix finds out that Oliver has been lying about his family and financial situation. Though it is still unclear what exactly Oliver’s goal is, it is obvious that Felix is the disturbance. This turning point leads into the climax of the film, where Oliver kills Felix. In discussing causality, Bordwell mentions the classical narrative use of time, specifically the deadline as central to the climax (19). A deadline is created as Oliver must get rid of Felix, the only person who knows of his lies, before he tells the rest of his family.
One way that Saltburn deviates from Bordwell’s classical narrative structure is that the main goal is not revealed until the end of the film. The last scene shows Oliver dancing around the Cattons’ mansion in the nude, after he has killed Felix’s sister and both of his parents–though not before getting them to sign the estate over to him. From this ending, the audience can ascertain that taking the house was Oliver’s mission throughout the entire film. In a more classical film, this goal would have been at least strongly hinted at throughout the earlier stages, especially during the struggle. To retcon this lack of foreshadowing, the film breaks with the classical narrative tradition of unselfconsciousness, showing the audience events that have already occurred but from a different perspective. Bordwell defines classical narration as “omniscient, highly communicative, and only moderately self-conscious,” in that it “knows more than any or all characters, it conceals relatively little, and it seldom acknowledges its own address to the audience” (22). In hiding the main goal of the film until the very end, the narration of the film becomes less communicative, and in providing this montage of Oliver’s actions, the film addresses the audience directly and becomes much more self-conscious.
Despite this diversion in terms of introduction of the aims and consciousness of narration, the ending of Saltburn still contains some of the issues Bordwell discusses as being characteristic of the classical narrative film. He states that, “at times, however, the motivation is constructed to be inadequate, and a discordance between preceding causality and happy denouement becomes noticeable as an ideological difficulty” (21). This question of “inadequate motivations” leading to “ideological difficulty” appears saliently in the film’s conclusion. Because Oliver’s “goal” of taking the Saltburn mansion from the Cattons was not introduced until it was completed, there is no understanding of his motivations beyond the surface level desire for wealth. This in turn makes the audience question what the film is saying in terms of an ideological message about class differences.
Alone, Saltburn’s deviation from classical Hollywood narrative structure does not make it a modern example of Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attractions.” If only the relationship to traditional narrative is considered, the film would just be a slightly less classical work of narrative cinema because of the ambiguity of its main goal and its use of a more self-conscious narration style. The film can be understood as a cinema of attractions through the inclusion of certain scenes that serve only to shock the audience and add little to the plot, character development, or larger themes of the work. In his article “The Cinema of Attractions,” Tom Gunning defines this type of cinema, characteristic to early film, as “directly [soliciting] spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle–a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself” (73). Saltburn contains many scenes that fall under this framework; that is, scenes that are individual spectacles separate from the narrative of the film.
The plot of Saltburn is arguably subjugated to scenes that have no other intent but to shock, creating a modern equivalent for the “trick” in the early work of filmmakers like Melies. Quoting Melies, Gunning writes: “I can state that the scenario constructed in this manner has no importance, since I can use it merely as a pretext for the ‘stage effects,’ the ‘tricks,’ or for a nicely arranged tableau” (71). In these early “trick films,” the scenario or plot is subjugated to the effects that are the true spectacle and purpose of the work. While watching Saltburn initially, these moments of spectacle may be interpreted as having some greater meaning later on, but they are but disruptions to the actual story. As Gunning discusses, the cinema of attractions prioritizes “theatrical display… over narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe” (73). Showing a scene that is shocking is more important than showing a scene that advances the plot, even when this shocking moment may directly inhibit the development of meaningful plotlines and/or audience understanding. An example of this in Saltburn is the scene after Felix’s funeral where Oliver masturbates over his grave. It has already been implied through other scenes that Oliver was sexually interested in Felix, and his pathological lying and murder have shown that he is immoral. This scene serves no real purpose except for the pure–and shocking–fact that it is being shown. The runtime is also quite lengthy compared to other scenes that are more crucial to the narrative, trapping the audience in a moment that feels unnecessary and gratuitous.
This scene as well as others emphasize Gunning’s idea that the cinema of attractions is also an “exhibitionist cinema,” one that seeks to “display its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator” (71-72). This relates to the self-conscious narration discussed previously, putting the cinema of attractions in contrast with classical methods of storytelling. Saltburn asserts itself as an exhibitionistic film rather than a voyeuristic one: it contrasts with films that want the audience to identify themselves with the primary character, and instead the pleasure in looking comes from simply watching the shocking images being shown. In the grave scene, Oliver is depicted in a wide shot that shows his full body, the camera remaining static for the entire three-minute long take. There are no close-ups or zooms to display the emotions of the character; identification becomes difficult for this very reason, because the goals and motivations of characters are not shown clearly. The meaning is instead found in the spectacle, which emphasizes the idea of “exhibitionist confrontation over diegetic absorption” that Gunning discusses (73).
Saltburn presents well the tension between classical narrative filmmaking and the desire for shocking scenes that are more in line with the cinema of attractions. Many viewers did not go see (and certainly did not continue talking about) the film for its narrative or as a “message film,” but instead because of the select “attractions” within it. This makes Saltburn similar to the early cinema discussed by Gunning, where film was more about the experience of “witnessing” rather than a taking in a story with developed characters and themes. However, there are still many elements of the film that are in line with classical Hollywood narratives as Bordwell describes them, such as the importance of causality and the ending that must tie everything up, even if it is not quite clear how. The film balances these two different approaches to filmmaking and narrative storytelling in a way that makes it impossible to simply place it in one category or the other. It should be noted that this film is most likely not intentionally a “cinema of attractions,” but rather that poor execution of classical narrative elements make it so. The tension of the cinema of attractions in modern filmmaking comes from the fact that while films like Saltburn are mostly successful because of the “spectacle” they present, they purport themselves to be narrative films with true depth. Perhaps as these two methods continue to converge in the blockbuster film, a new theory of narrative filmmaking will emerge.
Works Cited
Bordwell, David. “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 17-34.
Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pp. 69-76.
Hannah Smith is a senior in Columbia College majoring in Film and Media Studies and East Asian Studies. When she’s not at the movies, you can find her listening to music, dancing, or reading.