Revolted or Riveted? Dirt, Desire, and Disgust in the Online Reception of Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

From its titular portmanteau, connoting distaste, danger, and disquiet, Saltburn strives to shock and confront. Its slow-burn, “sleeper-hit” release strategy, provocative media reception, and well-publicized audience discomfort, have amplified its most aversive moments. Engineered to become a “bona fide viral hit” (Wilkinson 2024), not least through online reaction videos (e.g. TikTok), the film courts divisive, visceral reactions. Capitalizing upon interdisciplinary insights, this chapter explores why – in a death-and-sex-saturated media and entertainment landscape (Penfold-Mounce 2016, Scarcelli 2021, Coleclough et al. 2024) – Saltburn has shocked so successfully. In this chapter, Hilborn and Riley analyze the representation of close, carnal “haptic visuality” (Marks 2004, Sobchack 2000) in four “disgusting” sequences, and their concomitant stimulation of user-generated reaction content. The authors read this viral prurience as “inter-media”, operating in-between text and reception, narrative and sensation, and authenticity and performativity (Bliss and Nansen 2023). Through participatory reactions, entailing increasing cultural currency and creator labour (McDaniel 2021), Saltburn’s preoccupation with watching and being watched is repackaged and remediated online, shaping patterns of witnessing, empathy and engagement. By turn, revulsion and grotesquerie are refashioned as cozy, intimate, caregiving “cuteness” (cf. Dale et al. 2017), e.g. bath bombs, candles, and greetings cards. The authors propose that Mary Douglas’ abiding theorizing concerning social constructions of, and responses to, “dirt” illuminates this pattern. Saltburn shocks via somatic and social transgressions, engaging viscerally and repeatedly with “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966). Disgust is then mobilized, mitigated and moderated through the vicarious experience of “watching people watching people watching” (Anderson 2011), pivotal to crafting Saltburn’s digital identity. Akin to a “sociology of disgust”, Saltburn’s abominable abundance therefore ultimately reinforces social constructions of “dirt” and shock. More broadly, the chapter proposes that this Douglasian lens represents a valuable interdisciplinary tool for examining shocking cinema, virality and haptic visuality beyond the boundaries of Saltburn.