Rich Gen Zers slammed for tone-deaf ‘Saltburn’ TikTok trend: ‘Didn’t understand the movie’
TikTokers, gonna burn this godd–n house right down!
Rich Gen Zers are being accused of being tone-deaf as they dance around their mansions and show off their extravagant stays as the “Saltburn” TikTok trend takes off.
“Saltburn,” the movie everyone seems to be talking about, follows dorky Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as he begins Oxford University in 2006 and befriends the fabulously rich Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites him to stay the summer with his family at their extravagant estate, the film’s namesake.
The movie’s memorable closing scene follows Oliver as he dances around the mansion to “Murder on the Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis-Bextor while he’s coked out and completely naked, giving viewers one last tour of the spectacular estate that is practically a character itself.
Since the movie was released in theaters on Nov. 17, presumably wealthy Gen Zers have posted TikTok videos dancing around their mansions and expensive hotels showing off their “Saltburn” aesthetic, but some viewers claim they missed the movie’s whole point.
“POV: you applied to Oxford University 3 years ago and now every weekend is something straight out of Saltburn,” Caitlin Darby captioned a TikTok video.
Her video flashed between scenes of students dressed in tuxedos drinking at fabulous parties, strolling through the university grounds, enjoying extravagant dinners and lounging around rooms filled with antiques.
The video gathered 2 million views and about a thousand comments, but not everyone was impressed.
“Bro did you watch saltburn,” one TikToker asked. “You do NOT want to recreate that.”
“Not so confident that we watched the same Saltburn,” another TikToker commented.
One TikToker pointed out, “Saltburn is an eat the rich movie tho.”
But Anastasia Graff still wanted to show off her luxurious stay.
“When Saltburn hit a little too close to home,” Graff captioned her TikTok video — which has apparently been deleted — showing off a beautiful estate in the south of France that easily could have been the Cattons’ French getaway.
“The audience hated the rich [people] in Saltburn lol all the rich kids showing off their big estates didn’t understand the movie,” one person commented on TikTok.
“It’s amazing how many people didn’t understand the point of Saltburn,” another TikToker said.
However, some TikTok commenters seemed to be the ones missing the point, themselves being a bit too quick to supposedly call people out.
A TikToker named Mari amassed 4.4 million views on a video of herself grooving to “Murder on the Dancefloor” in a massive beautiful room with high ceilings, huge windows, stone walls and wooden chandeliers.
“Me after watching Saltburn,” she captioned the TikTok video inspired by the final scene of the film.
Many were quick to comment how the movie seemed to go over her head, but several others noted that the young girl was dancing around the Fairmont Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Canada, and not showing off her home.
Critics and viewers alike have been divided over the movie’s commentary on class and race as some have claimed that the alluring aesthetic overshadowed the warnings presented by the supposedly self-conscious satire.
However, “Saltburn” writer/director/co-producer Emerald Fennell has defended the film as both a critique and an explanation of capitalistic class conflict.
Rather than “eat the rich,” Fennell told Polygon last November, she considers the slogan of the movie to be: “Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them.”
But at the same time, Fennell, who was born into the British high class, explained that the film is also about sympathy.
“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell said. “They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist.”
“It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”
