the horny tory agenda

saltburn... rivals... you won't get me!

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My artistic diet consists of:

• things I forage

• things others introduce to me

• things that float into my online sphere

All require trust; in my own discernment, in the taste of my loved ones or in the algorithms of my curated virtual bubble. It’s a delicate, planetary ecosystem that has served me well in discovering diverse creativities—films, television shows, art exhibitions, (substack) essays, comic books, anime & manga, audiobooks, podcast episodes, even brand strategy documents—and provided me a net-positive sum of artistic inspiration.

There are times, however, where my sphere is breached—usually by the gravitational pull of some pop culture superstructure that becomes too massive to ignore. A Charli XCX Album. Taylor Swift’s new boo. Stanley Cups. One of the memorable incursions of the last year was Saltburn (2023).

Emerald Fennell’s previous film, A Promising Young Woman (2020) impugned my senses for reasons that only Ayesha A. Siddiqi has been able to articulate so surgically in her essay:

Review: A Promising Young Woman and the End of the Girlboss Era

Knowing Fennell’s work had a tendency to be philosophically incoherent, I was reluctant to watch Saltburn but it got to the point where all the nudging from friends and acquaintances were starting to leave an elbow-shaped sore in my ribs. And honestly… I regret caving to the peer pressure.

I loathed that film, man. I loathed it so much it made me loathe the society that conceived it and saw it worthy of any sort of praise, conversation or hype. So many had recommended it to me that I started looking at people funny on public transport, wondering if they were the sort of soulless husks who liked Saltburn. It’d been quite a while since a film made me construct a whole new lighthouse of prejudice.

It is not so much that Saltburn is bad, more that it goes out of its way to avoid any moral effort altogether—the jumbled enjambment of meme-fishing, aimless vulgarity as viral-bait and hollow plot-twists all cluster together to make a visually pleasant film that stands for absolutely nothing. There is, perhaps, some intention to articulate a kernel of the human condition; making every character a tad despicable, unclearly motivated or bizarrely hypocritical in order to boldly say, “people are just weird and greedy, actually”. Saltburn resolves as a sort of grotesque void of a film, aggressively centrist in its fabric, taking its quasi-memorable place in the cinematic canon as that one film where that one guy drinks that other guy’s bathwater.

I loathed Saltburn so much that when I cautiously tuned into another film that had snuck its way into my worldview, The Substance (2024), I sat back as the credits rolled, in total awe of the unhinged masterpiece I had just witnessed and whispered to myself: Emmie Fennell wishes she could make a banger with a social commentary as robust as this.

Shit had me pitting white women directors against each other like a grudge match.

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Rivals has been the latest pop culture superstructure to breach my bubble. I’m a simple man – I see David Tennant in a TV show, I say “let’s give this a whirl”. I’d seen rave reviews and was curious about this Rupert Campbell-Black fellow I’d been seeing the twitter girlies lust over.

For the uninitiated: Rivals is set in 1986 Britain and follows Rupert Campbell-Black, a 38 year old British nobleman/MP with a voracious sexual appetite and Lord Tony Baddingham, the nouveau-riche businessman savvily married into old money, as their long-standing rivalry seeps into the world of television in (the fictional county of) Rutshire, The Cotswolds. Baddingham attempts to strengthen Corinium, his independent commercial TV station, by poaching Declan O’Hara – the ambitious interview host stifled by kiddy-gloves at the BBC and Cameron Cook – a visionary producer from the mighty U.S of A (and the only Black woman in The Cotswolds for miles).

Rutshire is teeming with steamy entanglements and none are meant to be more riveting than the romance of Rupert Campbell-Black and Taggie O’Hara, Declan’s 20-year-old daughter. The show wants us to whoop for team Taggert (Ruggie?) but it feels pretty obvious to me that Rupert just wants to be Taggie’s dad.

Of course, the last thing I want to do is psychoanalyse a fictional character’s salacious womanising and neatly package it into a reductive diagnosis that I’m not qualified to administer but I’m Inigo Laguda? When has that ever stopped me? This posh motherfucker is not in love with that girl, my darlings. He just wants to be her father.

In the obligatory Christmas episode, Rupert calls his ex-wife hoping to speak to his children. She denies him. And for a moment we see him at his most unbridled, the ever-fastened mask of cheeky-chappiness washing away into a distant gaze of profound despair at the banishment from his own progeny… Then he snaps out of it and gets back to fornicating with a random hottie we never see again.

Later in the episode, when Rupert is being seduced by Maud O’hara (Taggie’s mum–yep, pure uncut drama) they have a classic symmetrical misunderstanding, where Maud thinks he’s confessing his desire for her but he’s actually talking about her daughter.

“There’s just something different about Taggie.”

Yeah bro, the “something different” is that you want to be her dad because you’ve had your visitation rights revoked from your own lineage so severely that you can’t even catch them kids on the phone. Now you’re yearning to sublimate that pent-up fatherhood into your age-mate’s daughter.

Later, in one of the more tender scenes between them, Rupert tucks Taggie into bed after a long night and gazes at her gently drifting into sleep as the sun rises… LIKE A DAD. Taggie almost collides with Rupert’s car and he leaps out and hugs her in this frantic yet reassuring embrace… LIKE A FATHER. Declan forces Rupert to promise that he won’t touch Taggie and it ends up being the forbidden fuel to accelerate Rupert’s yearning but honestly, he’s been muff-deep in a perpetual state of fucking for so long that I don’t think he’s even capable of differentiating his own biological desire to be parental from his biological urge to bump uglies. Taggie is supposed to represent this fresh shot at genuine love, her innocence being his salvation, and in the series finale, when they finally kiss, it does not feel like some triumphant climax of gratification-delayed romance. It felt like I was watching an Electran tragedy of a man so chaffeured by his lustful whims that he cannot register emotions outside of care without assigning sex to them. I’ve never seen the daddy issues trope subverted in this way… How positively Freudian.

But this essay ain’t about none of that.

This essay is about the fact that they’re trying to make us wanna fuck tories.

For the 70% of my captive audience in the USA and other non-British countries who are confused as to why this is a bad thing; “tory” is basically the nickname for conservatives who, without going into too much of a history lesson on how they ideologically persist in British society, have a tendency to be quite mean-spirited to anyone who isn’t rich, white and a man. However, because the vulgarity of Fox-News Republicans is fundamentally at odds with traditional British etiquette, your typical Tory is epitomised by a relatively well-groomed, politely mannered, hoity-toity posho that probably thinks refugees fleeing war on boats should be gunned down by Royal Artillery snipers from the top of the white cliffs of Dover.

I first noticed that the hot tory propaganda in Saltburn. The witty repartées in received pronunciation, Jacob Elordi’s further ascent into his white boy crush era, the decadent manor dwellings, the libertine parties… I know a handkerchief drop when I see one.

However Saltburn falls prey to the same woes that Raquel S. Benedict articulates in her essay regarding superhero films:

Even when they have sex, no one is horny. No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.

Saltburn wants us to believe that making hot people do freaky things is horny. Nuh-uh. I know yearning. The utter urgency of it. The syrup of intensity between two people so desperate to feel each other’s skin that they rip through a house like a hurricane, leaving a trail of wrecked decor and ravaged clothes in their wake. Saltburn don’t capture none of that shit. Just confusingly motivated grave-soil-humping.

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What makes us feel better than desire? What makes us act against our better judgements or interests more than being lip-bitingly seduced? Despite its attempts, Saltburn lacks the animal magnetism needed to make upper crust Britain seem desirable. Still… I clocked the intention.

But Inigo, as a lowly pauper who doesn't do summers in a countryside manor, aren’t all shows about rich people engineered to seduce us? Think again, brokey. One of the biggest television phenomenons of the modern age is a Shakespearean drama about an Anglo-American billionaire family dynasty and it is profoundly unsexy—just a bunch of badly-adjusted, vaguely off-putting weirdos clamouring over one another for power and none of them get your engines revving because they’re not supposed to. It’s not the point. Succession wants us to know these characters are fascinating pieces of shit who are only horny for the iron throne of Waystar.

Rivals, however, has done what Saltburn could only dream of achieving: perfecting the horny tory agenda.

boo! 🍅🍅🍅

There’s been such an austerity of eroticism in cinema—a profound absence of people getting frisky who actually look like people and not out-of-reach dreamscapes stuffed into human skin that know how to look hot but don’t know how to be hot—that its created the perfect conditions for a show like Rivals to swoop in and get us hooked. And there’s something admirable about the chaotic sordidness of the Rutshire residents, this village of despicables who are at least brave enough to hunt their innermost wants (but are definitely too cowardly to bear the consequences of their truths. It is the pre-accountability 80’s, of course). The show is such a buffet of horniness that you’re not supposed to care that they’re all a bunch of terrible, adulterous toffs prostrating at the blood-sacrifice altar of Margaret Thatcher. And at its centre, dispensing the bulk of Rivals’ raw, sexual energy is our boy Rupert Campbell-Black—a literal conservative cabinet minister who trespasses marriages, weaponises sex for personal gain, breaks various laws and engages with an ethically questionable age-gap relationship.

But look… I’m not saying you should pre-chill your loins in an ice-bath and avoid getting the hots for ol’ Ruppie. I’m also not saying that you’re doomed to transmogrify into some fox-killing twat if you whack on Rivals and have the common sense to enjoy it. I might be your Favourite Woke Friend™ but despite my sardonic tone, I try my best to walk this world without being too much of a yum-yucker. What I am saying is…

They ain’t gonna get me.