We break down the scene from Saltburn that has pushed Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 22-year-old pop song “Murder on the Dancefloor” on to the Billboard charts.
Courtesy of MGM and Amazon Studios
Hello NPR Music faithful,
Ann Powers here. In case you don’t know me, I’m a critic and correspondent at NPR Music, and a longtime culture maven who lives to listen, think and talk about music, wherever it travels.
Like many other avid culture consumers, I’m currently obsessed with the movie Saltburn, which stars Method-acting bad boy Barry Keoghan as diabolical social climber Oliver Quick and Jacob Elordi as Felix Cattan, the rich-kid flame to which he’s drawn, as another character says, like a moth.
This movie is one of those derided successes that critics feel endlessly compelled to approach even as most call it trash. It’s a music movie as much as it’s a murder mystery, a gothic romance or anything else. I bobbed my head to its Zune-era soundtrack in a theater packed with 20-something couples whose dates must have gone a little weird after its notorious bathtub-autorerotica scene, then felt compelled to watch it again immediately on Amazon Prime, where it’s been lodged in the most-viewed category for weeks. I was reveling in my mixed feelings. Like a slice of Cheesecake Factory White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle cake, Saltburn is too gaudily rich to resist, though every lick of the fork makes you feel regretful.
Director Emerald Fennell cannot say no to a hot button. Thwarted homoeroticism! Blurrily-defined class conflict! Rueful millennial nostalgia! Furniture porn that morphs into real porn! Detractors say Saltburn’s excessively meme-able imagery only throws its lack of actual substance into relief. I think its stylistic voraciousness is its substance. Fennell’s endless nods to classic movies, literary masterworks, Kate Moss cast-offs and chronology challenging Pulp songs feel carelessly rapacious, like the Cattan family itself, like Oliver’s climbing heart.
I don’t need to go over every cravenly titillating Saltburn moment — check out Pop Culture Happy Hour’s discussion here, and for more on the soundtrack’s context, I recommend Lindsay Zoladz’s New York Timesplaylist. But I want to dwell on the scene that, I think, shows both Fennell and Keoghan at their best, mining both cinematic and musical history for fresh incitements. (Warning: Very light spoilers follow. If you haven’t seen Saltburn, get on it or hold your peace.)
It’s the film’s final scene, coming after Keoghan’s Quick has nefariously installed himself as the lord of the Saltburn manor. Naked but for the cocaine residue on his upper lip, he prances, poses and pirouettes his way through its wood-paneled rooms as a 2001 U.K. club hit that never really crossed the pond blares on the Bowers & Wilkins home stereo. Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor'' is the film’s most obvious easter egg, in Fennell’s words, “jubilant, joyful, wry and camp.” Also irresistibly silly. With its DJ-as-lethal weapon metaphors and Ellis-Bextor belting “hey hey” like a 21st-century Ethel Merman, “Murder on the Dance Floor” is delightfully tacky, dance pop dressed in a ten-dollar sequined dress from H&M. Mechanical fingers snap, the beat lands squarely on the floor; Keoghan’s broad, body-flaunting moves respond to the song’s gloriously basic call.
Listeners agree: As my colleague Stephen Thompson recently explained, they’re pushing the song up the charts, making it this year’s version of the Stranger Things-propelled Kate Bush revenant “Running Up That Hill.”
There’s quite a lineage of dance interrupting or redirecting film narratives the way this one does — Keoghan’s turn recalls favorites like Tom Cruise’s socks-on-hardwood rave-up in Risky Business and Hugh Grant’s Soul Train line through 10 Downing Street in Love Actually. Jon Heder’s winning electric slides to Jamiroquoai’s “Canned Heat” in Napoleon Dynamite also came to mind, as did Joaquin Phoenix’s near-pratfalls to “Rock and Roll Part 1” in Joker. Pondering these connections, I realized that often, men dancing alone in movies are basically spraying their territory — laying claim to a home, a stage, an alley with a heretofore unseen display of grace and fully realized selfhood. Keoghan is definitely spraying in Saltburn.
But his dance also fits the current indie-film moment. In the past few years, men (and rarely, women) dancing alone have signified not power but something else: precarity, isolation, loss. Think of Aftersun, in which Paul Mescal’s depressive father dances away from his child forever to the tune of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” Or Another Round, which ends with Mads Mikkelson’s spiritually defeated teacher trying to shake off the doom with a drink and a leaping Scandi variation on break-dancing. In Saltburn, the dark mood of these dances is played for uncomfortable laughs. There’s no regret in Keoghan’s victory trot. Yet it is such a lonely moment, and a precarious one. Having dispatched anyone who might share in his victory, Oliver claims the dance floor’s freedom, but finds it devoid of life.
For me, these scenes all recall one high point in late 20th century cinema: the finale of Clair Denis’s great film about conquest and toxic masculinity, Beau Travail. In it, the disgraced military captain Galoup, contemplating suicide, enters a dream sequence that takes place in the local nightclub of his Djibouti outpost. There he executes a perfectly elegant dance to the chrome-polished “Rhythm of the Night '' by the Italian Eurodance group Corona. Just as Oliver’s florid role-playing as a dance-floor kingpin telegraphs his delusions about truly earning the inheritance of Saltburn, Galoup’s startling grace under the disco lights (all hail Denis Lavant in the role) shows what his failures have extinguished.
The same is true of Oliver’s dance, though Fennell and Keoghan play it for bitter laughs. The scene says something about how we experience culture now: alone, caught up in our own heads, able to access the feeling of freedom but not carrying it forward and connecting with others. It’s an all too relatable reflection of 21st-century solipsism. I was fascinated to discover that while Saltburn’s choreographer, Polly Bennett, suggested Keoghan study Phoenix in Joker, his favorite reference point was Fred Astaire — the embodiment of elegant attentiveness, of the appropriate response. That’s not how many who’ve viewed Saltburn would describe Oliver Quick. Yet the worst death Oliver orchestrates is his own — mistaking gestures for connections, and possession for love, he empties himself out. He’s the one without a partner to embrace, or choreography of his own, still moving but murdered on the dancefloor.
Beyond thinking about Barry Keoghan naked in a doorway, here are a few other things that caught my ear or eye this week — reads, sounds, images.
Every singer-songwriter-leaning music critic I know went nuts for Waxahatchee’s new single, and I did too. (Hi MJ Lenderman!)
If you’re into reggae like me, and you don’t have Criterion, now’s the time to sign up. The streaming service’s Roots & Revolution: Reggae on Film collection has some unsung stunners, like 1980’s Babylon, which screenwriter Martin Stellman accurately calls “a British reggae version of Mean Streets,” next to classics like The Harder They Come.
Speaking of movies, I’m so excited that Nancy Savoca’s magical Household Saints has been restored. Truly the film that lives inside my mind rent-free.
Sophie Lewis, one of my favorite radical thinkers, will make you think differently about mermaids.
If you missed this conversation between Brittany Luse and Alabama’s musical sage Lonnie Holley, listen now. It will heal you.
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In this newsletter, I’ll be sharing more of my thoughts on how music connects to other art forms, politics, history and our daily lives, and recommending other stuff for you to check out across the cultural landscape. I’m glad this is a weekend newsletter — though I know not everybody’s free time starts on Fridays at 5 p.m., I’m hoping to carve out a Saturday morning of the mind here, a space to relax and consider what music means. I’d love to know what you’ve been thinking about along these lines, so drop me a line at nprmusic@npr.org.
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