Everyone’s talking about Emerald Fennell’s superb Saltburn, and I’m one of them.
The film is serves as the perfect case study to illustrate the concepts of creativity and talent. People erroneously think of creativity as the conjuring of innovation out of thin air to create not only what has never been created before, but also to create something that is delightful and positive; however, the uniqueness and unprecedented nature of innovation is a myth:
Fennell’s Saltburn at face value is a mish mash of so many recognisable films: Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Saul Dibb’s 2006 screen adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Emerald Fennell consciously commandeers all those known works of drama, and produces something incredibly unique, incredibly fresh, incredibly irreverent, incredibly sexy rather than a pastiche or a period drama with Bloc Party as would have easily been the case with someone else. Saltburn is not a film without precedent, without provenance, without cultural affiliations, but no creative feat ever is.
Creating what has never been created before in vacuum is a logical impossibility. The creator belongs to a shared human experience and is influenced by context. Creativity is the ability to stake a claim in a landscape of accumulated cultural experiences, by drawing inspiration from so many precedents to create something unique, albeit with a long lineage and also a sense of familiarity. Creativity is the spark that owns the otherwise derivative and stamps it with innovation.
But this is half the story: Creativity is so often underpinned by talent. Talent is the confidence to produce something that is refined by flirting with what would otherwise be vulgar and tawdry. It’s about the ability to be so understated even with a gaudy birth. It is the ability to cobble together so many ingredients that would almost certainly give one food poising but end up with a Michelin-star dish. It’s the ability to court kitsch and still come out on top. One can be creative without necessarily being talented, but talent is the spark that elevates creativity to the stuff of legends.
Film does it. Music does it. Architecture does it. I think of the intense curiosity of OMA’s architecture which designs buildings and spaces that are so interesting, yet that could easily be a dog’s dinner in other hands. Only with OMA, not only do these buildings work, but they succeed. Unfortunately, so much architecture is beaten senseless into diffident conformity by a toxic work culture and a seriously flawed development landscape that yearns for creativity yet only pays heed to the underwhelming, a development landscape that relies on a USP to thrive but that has been domesticated to accept the generic and the derivative. Far too many architects play it safe, and they mistake aesthetic conservatism for good taste and faithful reproduction as good practice.
But this would be akin to sequels in the film industry. Sequels are made to capitalise on the success of the original production, but regurgitate the same formula to try to curry favour with viewers, especially those who loved the original, but more often than not, sequels are flops. Architecture is a world of failing sequels, increasingly failing to capture consumers. Perhaps the property development world is waiting for an Emerald Fennell-type designer to capitalise on the success and iconic recognition of trailblazing architecture, yet own this fact to produce something so distinctive, so disruptive as to deliver shock to the status quo of property development.
Naked victory dances are optional.