Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” and P.G. Wodehouse’s “Blandings”

Saltburn, the recent film by Emerald Fennell, caused a stir when it debuted on Amazon Prime this past December. It’s been criticized, praised, and meme’d, while simultaneously re-popularizating Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s early-2000s hit song “Murder on the Dancefloor.” In short, the film has caused something of a sensation.

As part of this – as happens to all movies – comparisons to other films, more famous or popular, have been made. The biggest comparison has been to 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel. That comparison, however, is a surface reading and does disservice to both The Talented Mr. Ripley and Saltburn. 

Fennell herself has downplayed the comparisons and rightly so.

The real core of Saltburn is one of inversions. Saltburn is in conversation not with Highsmith’s work, but with that of P.G. Wodehouse. Specifically Wodehouse’s long-running, and self-dubbed, “Blandings Castle Saga.” Saltburn takes the idyllic, laconic world of Wodehouse and turns it into its sinister, suspicious opposite. 

Blandings Castle, the home of the delightfully bumbling Lord Emsworth and his extended family (and servants and various guests, invited and otherwise), is idyllic. Evelyn Waugh, whose Brideshead Revisited is also cited as an inspiration for Fennell’s Saltburn, said about Wodehouse’s creation: “The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden from which we are all exiled.” Blandings is Eden without the snake. 

Parties, fetes, and other assorted aristocratic get-togethers are on offer at both Saltburn and Blandings Castle. | Photo by MGM/Amazon Studios.

The titular country house of Saltburn is Blandings in reverse. While seemingly idyllic, it is lapsarian – the Fall of Man has happened and there are serpents everywhere. Both deal with the kind of out-of-touch, gossipy, goofy aristocracy we (sometimes) find endearing. The difference is that Blandings Castle is a safe space to be so, but at Saltburn being a clodhopper will get you killed. 

The Archetypes of the Blandings set — the bumbling lord of the manor, the indefatigable butler, the no-nonsense wife, the heartsick Lothario, the ridiculous aunt — are also at Saltburn, if a bit more cutting. At Blandings, everything is very serious to them, but to the reader it’s all a veritable laugh riot. The rich are funny, amusing, ridiculous in their spats. At Saltburn, the characters are serious in their unseriousness. Their affectation is to be forcibly relaxed, which makes about as much sense as wearing a pair of starched swim trunks. 

And Fennell? She would know a thing or two about the world of Blandings. Before her turns as Nurse Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and Camilla Parker Bowles (the current Queen Consort of England) in The Crown, Fennell was intimate with the Blandings Castle set. Far back in the pre-Covid world of 2013, Fennell was Monica Simmons in Blandings, the most-recent BBC adaptation of Wodehouses’ Blandings stories. She saw the Garden from the inside, and Saltburn is an expose on how easy it is to take down.¹

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1. The title of this essay is an homage to the P.G. Wodehouse story “The Crime Wave at Blandings” which deals with “crime” of a particularly silly nature. I recommend it and “Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend” as exemplary Blandings Castle stories. ↩︎

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[This essay first appeare in Desert Dispatch on January 19, 2024.]