The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Why is Everyone Talking About 'Saltburn'?
Everyone is talking and memeing about 'Saltburn,' but what IS IT??
This week, the kids are suffering through the long winter by watching Saltburn, bidding farewell to a very popular YouTuber, and getting themselves stuck in urns. Plus, tunnels somehow remain newsworthy.
What’s the story with Saltburn?
The entertainment landscape is different than it was pre-internet. Technology lets us hone in on our personal interests with such intensity that shared cultural experiences are rare. That’s why Saltburn is cool. It's one of those “everyone is talking about it” movies that don’t come around too often these days. And it’s actually good! If you’re not in the know, Saltburn was released in theaters in November, where it made a modest $21.3 million, but it found a second life on Prime Video.
Drawing inspiration from A Clockwork Orange, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and late-stage capitalism, Saltburn is a dark comedy about a debauched young man obsessed with wealth and excess who is willing to do anything to get it. It's intentionally confrontational, leading to controversy over its graphic sex and violence, summed up best by this quote/stealth advertisement from the professional hand-wringers at ParentPreviews.com: "This film contains so much negative content that we do not expect our reviewers to watch it." (That's some fearless journalism, guys.) Saltburn was directed by Emerald Fennell and stars Barry Keoghan as anti-hero Oliver Quick. The movie’s ending inspired copycat memes, leading to charges that rich people proudly dancing around in their expensive houses have entirely missed the point of the film. It’s a classic class-war battle: rich people being callow and poor people being bitter that rich people really don’t care what they think. Another ripple from the film: a semi-obscure retro-disco track from 2001, “Murder on the Dance Floor” from Sophie Ellis-Bextor, has resurfaced and been enjoyed by many more people than it was upon its release.
Urn Guy is 2024’s first Guy!
Guy Stuck In Vase, or Urn Guy, is the first internet-guy of 2024! He joins past guys like Blinking White Guy, Ancient Aliens Guy, and Ridiculously Photogenic Guy in the internet's Guy Hall of Fame. Urn Guy earned his spot when a video of him trapped in an urn went viral in early 2024. His name is supposedly Connor, and his getting-stuck antics reportedly happened at a house party in Mountain Brook, Alabama. His fame began with a post on X (formerly Twitter) describing the situation. “He was laughing at first but now he’s starting to get upset. The women are trying to comfort him. There is talk of attempting to break the urn,” reported @CasualThursday on X. Then the video was posted. The rest is internet history. Connor (if that’s actually his name) was uninjured and was eventually broken free of his prison via sledgehammer. @CasualThursday reports, “Urn guy is up and moving around, but now without his pants, which were apparently lost or damaged in the incident.”
Rumors of the Nintendo Switch 2
Nintendo has created such a rabid and loyal fanbase over its long life (the company was founded in 1889) that any move it makes sends waves of speculation through the gaming community. This week, Nintendo quietly discontinued physical copies of many of its top-tier titles like Super Mario Odyssey and Splatoon 2, leading to speculation that the company might be planning to release the Switch 2. Really? Ya think? There’s a definite generational gap between people who get excited that Nintendo might release a new console and people like me who think, “The Nintendo Switch made a lot of money, and Nintendo has released new consoles regularly since the 1980s; so, yeah, it's petty likely that they’re planning to repeat the cycle.”
The tunnel craze continues
Tunnels are having a cultural moment. We learned about the intriguing tunnel girl last week (she's an amateur engineer who built an underground lair beneath her suburban home). This week, tunnel girl is out; tunneling Jews are in. Hassidic members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement were discovered to have been digging an extensive tunnel under their Brooklyn headquarters recently. Unlike Tunnel Girl’s seemingly solid construction, their mole-like antics drew the attention of authorities and fears that they caused structural damage to their historic synagogue. The purpose of their tunnel isn’t entirely clear, but it has split the congregation into pro- and anti-tunneling camps. Because we live in a depressing world, antisemite conspiracy theorists immediately seized on the story and added it to their long-running historical fan fiction about “elites” doing unspeakable acts to children underground, instead of just enjoying the oddness of the situation.
Viral video of the week: MatPat's goodbye video
This week’s viral video, Goodbye Internet, is a so-long-and-farewell message from greatly-beloved-by-kids YouTuber MatPat, whose channel, The Game Theorists, has over 18 million subscribers. The 25-minute video has been viewed over 14 million times since it was posted a couple days ago. According to MatPat, he’s throwing in the towel because he’s getting old—he’s 37, which is ancient in YouTube years—and basically because he wants to have more time and more fun in his life. His last Game Theorist video will be posted in March, after which the channel will be taken over by a person or people unknown.
This is, no doubt, a generational thing, but I don’t get the appeal of this dude and this entire subgenre of gaming videos. MatPat’s stock-in-traded is crafting elaborate fan theories about popular video game franchises like Five Nights at Freddys, Minecraft, and Legend of Zelda. Charitably, his popularity is kids enjoying content analysis of the media they love, but I find it insufferable. MatPat’s amped-up delivery is exhausting to listen to, and his theories inevitably leave me thinking “yeah, maybe, but who cares?” It’s the online equivalent of smoking weed with your dumb friends and talking about whether Darth Vader actually had a point, or what’s really going on with Scooby Doo, but without the weed and connection to other people.