If you haven’t yet seen Saltburn, I recommend you watch with a sick bucket, because this is one uncomfortable ride! It’s funny, camp, dark, and very aesthetic, apart from that one shot of vom which lingers for way too long.
The first part of the film takes place at the University of Oxford, with our main character Oliver (played by Barry Keoghan) studying at the film’s stand-in for Brasenose College.
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(A quick explainer: Oxford is broken up into over 30 smaller colleges, which are more akin to boarding schools in size and vibe. You often sleep, eat, study, and have classes within your college, and only go to a generic university department building for lectures.)
Brasenose is one of the older, fancier colleges. It faces the famous domed library, the Radcliffe Camera, and alumni include former prime minister David Cameron and former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. I – a pleb who is not a current nor former prime minister – went to St Anne’s College outside the city centre, which only became a college in 1959.
Brasenose, on the other hand, became a college in 1509. There’s a very sweeping and probably inaccurate rule of thumb that goes: The older and more centrally located the college, the higher the number of landed gentry in attendance. Notice how Saltburn the castle is reminiscent of Brasenose the college? It helps the toffs feel at home!
So how accurate is Saltburn in its portrayal of Oxford and its students? I broke it down with the help of some graduates, all of whom asked to remain anonymous as they are now high-ranking civil servants, City bankers or MI5 agents (kidding!!).
Posh people
Saltburn is a film about a scholarship boy (Oliver) who befriends an aristocrat (Felix, played by Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi). This aspect of the film is accurate, in the sense that there are a lot of rich people at Oxford, many of whom are from very privileged backgrounds. In 2006, when the film is set, fewer than half of the students from that year’s intake came from state schools in the UK – this is now more like 60 percent.
“There are loads of posh people at Oxford, and it doesn’t feel like there’s as much social pressure for them to hide it as there is at other unis,” points out Mark, an alumnus who came to the university from a “decent” state school in 2014. “I definitely related to that feeling of seeing a big group of people who already knew each other really well in week one, then realising they all went to Eton or wherever together.”
Elordi, whom I assume learnt how to speak posh from hours of studying Made In Chelsea, says that breathy “mayte” a lot, which private school boys love. His character is also portrayed as pretty much the only nice-ish person at Oxford, which feels a little unfair. The reality is that most Oxford students are fairly insecure people who were probably never very cool or attractive in high school. There’s definitely a good number of rude, tactless snobs, but – at least by the time I arrived in 2013 – they were very avoidable if you stayed away from Oxford Union elections.
One thing Mark thought was pretty unbelievable was the joking about Oliver’s rental tux and Oxfam clothes. “Yes, that kind of snobbery obviously does exist, but it’s way subtler in real life. They simply don’t get to know you, or don’t remember your name,” he says. “There is some mingling, and I made a lot of good friends who went to private school, but that’s probably just because when you meet someone at Oxford there’s a 50:50 chance of them having gone. Some of them had black tie 21st birthday parties, which is obviously bizarre.”
Tutorials and studying
One of the earliest scenes in the film features Oliver having a two-on-one class with a professor and his tutorial partner. This is fairly accurate – you typically write two essays a week at Oxford, then dissect them with your tutor and another student in an old room full of dusty books. Historically, you would have to read them out loud as they do in the film, but nowadays you just email them beforehand.
Oliver mentions he’s read the whole reading list for his English degree, including the King James Bible. This is accurate – the reading list is enormous and it does include the Bible, a nice detail added by Saltburn writer and director Emerald Fennell, who also studied English at Oxford. Unlike the professor in the film, though, your tutor wouldn’t be shocked to hear you’ve read it all.
You also do have to wear formal academic clothing and a gown (known as sub fusc) for exams, and get “trashed” (have stuff thrown at you by friends) when you finish. His red carnation is deliberate, too – at Oxford you wear a white carnation for your first exam, pink for the ones in the middle, and red for your final.
“You never see anyone studying, which is accurate,” says my uni friend Jack when I ask him for his thoughts on the film. Speak for yourself, Jack!
Social life and partying
OK, I get that it’s the whole set-up for the film, but the idea that Oliver would just walk into his college and get the cold shoulder from everyone is silly. Like every other uni, Oxford is full of freshers reps who bound around helping you “settle in”, asking you to buy tickets to “bops” (college discos) and sticky student club nights. My friend Michael also points out that the people in the film “went to the King’s Arms [pub] way too much. And they would never call it that – it’s the KA.”
At Christmas, the rest of Oliver’s college is seen heading down to an “invite-only” party. Just wrong. Remember the enthusiastic reps? Oh, they love Christmas! The only invite-only event I was aware of while there was the Piers Gaveston Society Ball, where a bunch of teenagers are driven to a field to get fingered while queueing for a drug dealer. I was NFI.
Grounds, meals, locations
Oxford being pretty is entirely accurate. Felix and Oliver sitting on a bridge outside Magdalen College looking down into the River Cherwell is the kind of magical moment you dream about when applying. Although, as Michael says: “It’s nonsense that they’re walking on the lawns. You’re not allowed to do that.” He also points out that “we didn’t have any silly banners” and “no one is referred to as the ‘Class of 2006’ or whatever”.
In one of the early scenes, Oliver goes to dinner wearing his academic gown over his clothes. You have to do this at some of the older colleges, but not the more modern ones. Also, it’s obviously to make Oliver look like a loser, but no one would wear their college tie to dinner on the first day.
Money, scholarships and being northern
Oliver is portrayed as a scholarship student from Prescot, near Liverpool. He doesn’t fit in because he’s not rich like the other boys and has a funny accent! Boooo classism!
Not to sound like a cuck for my problematic alma mater, but I do think the whole “Oxford hates poor people” narrative is quite reductive and discourages people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds from applying, whereas one in four students at the actual university these days are on an annual non-repayable bursary. But to be fair, I am not northern and I was not on financial aid, so I spoke to two people who were.
“I don’t want to be seen as shitting on the people I now work with,” says Jim, from the North East. “But I think the worst part is interviews, as you have a bunch of private school wankers trying to intimidate the state school kids. They’ll ask where you went to school and make a point of not having heard of it. But the lived experience once you’re there is different, as a lot of the knobheads don’t get in.”
Jim had a broadly positive experience of the university itself and didn’t feel excluded or looked down upon because of his accent or financial status. “I do remember repeatedly being asked to say different words. But I think they were mainly interested from a linguistics perspective rather than taking the piss,” he says.
“I think my experience was less about people trying to be mean because I was northern or on a scholarship, it was more about total obliviousness to people’s experience of living on a budget,” he adds. “A lot of people at uni just did not have to think about money, and it was very obvious when everyone was going to £200 balls all the time.”
Jill, from the North West, ran into more explicit class prejudice. “One guy, who went to a very famous private school, once put a bow tie around my neck and said, ‘Northern people don’t know how to tie bow ties!’” she says. “He’d just necked a bottle of wine. He did later apologise, though.”
“Someone else told me she couldn’t invite me to her 21st birthday because I wouldn’t ‘fit in’ with her friends back home,” she continues. “She also asked me why my parents couldn’t buy me a Mac when my computer died.”
Conclusion
For overall accuracy it’s 8/10, but I’m knocking it down to 7/10 because no one as hot as Jacob Elordi would be studying at Oxford. And sorry, but you can’t have spent enough time studying to get in when you’re as much of a himbo as Felix. Also, isn’t this film set in 2006? Where’s all the Jack Wills?
@iamhelenthomas
