How dare you! How dare you say the mother is the true monster!
peanut gallery
Let me prefix this with saying my take being true doesn’t make Oliver a victim. It just exposes the deeper goth story trickling through the whole thing that went over everyone’s head due to the lazy eye with which certain things in this culture are looked at.
But as something that it is improbable ever existed- a 90s Black Goth chick who is the reincarnation of one once married to a misunderstood man named Vlad & has had a twisted global mythology kink her entire current life, down to being the daughter of Zeus & precociously learning to read this life from d’aulaires’s Greek myths by the age of five to survive amongst the deposed gods who sired her- I ask to be humored.
The rest of this will be short. Let us get to it, shall we?
What has been utterly overlooked is Emerald herself. As a director. The tales she tells.
This culture is ready to champion Greta Gerwig. Her subversion is wrapped up in mindfucking culture with all the cloying white woman tropes that have that segment of society in a chokehold by patriarchal nonsense. Barbie was the perfect vehicle for her mayhem.
Emerald’s craft…is the devil this culture doesn’t realize it has sowed in the hearts of all the women run roughshod over by that same patriarchal gridlock. Promising Young Woman showed the lengths a woman went to to get her man, in this case the monster who killed her friend, exposing the women who enabled him along the way.
They are not opposites. They come from the shadow & the shine in splendidly different ways, but Artemis loves them both.
1 What has been gotten, yet subsequently wholly missed that opens this up from a completely new direction is the true tale of the Minotaur…before the maze.
LONG STORY, SHORT…the Minotaur was born due to the fuckery of the Gods.
Poseidon has always had shall we say…fleshy mouthed reactions to slights that led to some harrowing, twistedly hilarious shit. It’s why I love him so, across the planet when it’s obviously him going off.
But very often, you see why he was …miffed. As in this case.
See…King Minos married a literal God.
Poseidon, being cool… gave them a gift to sacrifice. One of his bulls. To prove he was worthy of marriage to a goddess/ becoming a king.
It may not have even been a trap lol.
Okay, prolly was… but if he was a con on the make for the crown, everybody on Olympus needed those deets.
Conners gonnA con, Graspers gone grasp…
The throned MAN… with all of Crete as his already won purse, a literal goddess at his side that would’ve made him the father of fucking demigods…got stupid greedy. They often do.
“Nah~imma keep this bull. It’s fucking Poseidon’s. Off another bull! Kingly decree!
King Minos, sizing up the the Aston martin/rolls royce/spaceship to Mars his uncle in law Poseidon gave him to sacrifice to prove his worthiness marrying into the Godly family as basically a commoner, comparatively speaking.
So did…a shall we say sensitivized Supreme being known for drowning civilizations destroy Crete to traditional spec due to the insult?
Not at all.
But what he did was so elegant, was so much of an absent, pithy aside that…in my fair (ly dark) Opinion …it scared the shit out of the entire universe at that time. & has yet to be outdone, frankly.
No rage. No rainy, tempestuous calamity. But instead, the most Virgoan spring… watery response in the annals of the Gods:
Hmph….You like my bull so much you’d defy me? Everyone is Going to watch your wife clamor to fucking fuck that bull instead of you~
Poseidon, showing where certain ethereals get it from…
That’s Right. The root of the tale of Cicciolina (Elected to Italian parliament on the grounds of surviving being railed by a horse giving her street credibility amongst Italian men. Look it up. 70s/80s.) was seeded into the human subconscious by the Queen of Crete lusting after a bull of Poseidon so badly that she called a guy to construct a way for her to fuck it. Then she gave birth to it.
That dude? Pretty sure it was Icarus’s daddy.
Same dude who built the labyrinth the minotaur lived in.
Human hubby couldn’t kill a God or demigod.
…Of course, this could get messier if you take the tact that Poseidon’s Bulls were actually well endowed sacrificial Black boys… which would explain how the entire insanity devolved to Theseus coming in to end that story arc after generations of Crete killing kids (pairs of boys & girls) annually to appease initially Poseidon but then transposed onto attacking the mainland to supply the chattle to keep their kids alive …but let’s keep it clean. This is already alot to take.
oh. Don’t take my word for it.
(By the way…your doubting need for a source in this retelling is pure racism🤗. You should unpack that.)
…Back to Saltburn…& The mother wanting to be fucked by a bull that was brought in as a sacrifice…theory.
Another motif that underscores all that imagery…is the field scene. Him having to take off his pants to lie naked in the wheat like the other kids quietly on the slab & revealing he was hung like a fucking bull.
…5’7, am I right!? Sheesh lol.
BDE, or…What is “why do Leggy Angels often frolic so rambunctiously with satyrs, Alex(Trebek)?”
If you think…mother was not …informed of that in that energetic cesspool, ya missed the movie.
They talked alone under a statue of the minotaur bending someone over about to rail them, for cripes sake.
One more element, a bonus…to show which angle Emerald was really mindfucking everyone from.
…The red herring Shelley poet conversation over breakfast.
on Doppelgangers seen before the real one died.
Felix’s doppelganger passes the window as his sister tells the tale. Everyone’s hairs stood up due to that.
also the angle of the mirror was falsified.
They did not sit Oliver there like Franklin on a folding chair. But in the mirror it looked like everyone was on the other side of the table. It was shot with the parents just out the frame in an impossible way to get the horror nerds to be like “vampires! Some sort of vampires!”
But the girl houseguest’s response…to the hint that she’d be found it a river lobbed by Ms. Window in herself…was perfect…if you saw it.
& That they sucked her dry is in the mother’s talk of nothing being there as she groused about going to the funeral.
but what makes all the doppelganger shit more creepy(replacements for offing their kids to keep the curse from devouring their wealth) is the mother finding her God she could fuck enmeshed& enfleshed the body of a purported sacrifice brought to save her son who she could not fuck.
Many mothers seen as bad boy moms fuck up their sons & discard them or any concerns for their wellbeing for…well…dick. Plainly stated. & guys who live through the psychological carnage of that shit often incessantly attempt to destroy women trying to right that balance.
Another few things…
It feels like the cousin’s mom was sent away not for the reason given but because she fucked & got knocked up by a footman of the family, possibly related to the one that looks very similar to him shown in the next scene.
Felix was not a sweet little boy. He was the familial honeypot. Motherfucker was taking baths with the door open jerking off into his own bathwater…as his f i n a l r i n s e on a daily basis , then dressing & layering all…. that… with his cologne… knowing Oliver was… besotted.
That’s a specific, pointed…kink pointed directly at dudes who love the smell of cum in the morning before coffee. Not that there is anything wrong with that lol.
But I am pretty sure it lowkey doubles back …to the title of the film.
Oliver yanked the ventilation tube out of her throat like she’d been sucking the dick of a giant bull to keep her alive, another visual metaphor for worshipping the God of her clan til the end.
There’s not much else to say except…
Theseus! Prove me right!
Zeus, in IMMORTALS