Emerald Fennell’s characters are often found kneeling. Some call themselves dogs. They lap at the hands of a generous patron, all the while eyeing that generosity with suspicion, wondering how their benefactor came to possess anything at all, least of all a fortunate station. In Wuthering Heights, the bastard Nelly, Catherine’s paid companion, is reminded she will never be a lady. In Saltburn, the bourgeois Oliver, Felix’s latest amusement, is told he is only “almost passing” as posh, which is to say he will never. In Promising Young Woman, the dolorous Cassie, an adult stalled in adolescence, is warned that she must move on, as everyone else has. In any other world, these characters might be poised to accept their lot. In Fennell’s, they curdle into ruinous objects that undo her unsuspecting, darling fat cats.

The pathological centre of a Fennell film is a socially peripheral figure, or at least someone we’re meant to take for one. In truth, they are tricksters. They manipulate their social betters into viewing them as supplicants, bereft of agency, resigned to the way things are. Just as that characterization of Nelly, Oliver, or even Cassie begins to harden, Fennell’s authorial voice heckles, assuring us these characters were only biding their time, that the opportune rug-pull moment has arrived.

In conservative dogma, the presence of excess ordinarily means the absence of virtue. But in Fennell’s films, those who might otherwise be derided for their capital – the petulant Cathy, the aristocratic Felix, the penitent Jordan – are celebrated for the virtues they manage to retain in spite of it. Some are cruel, though never on purpose, their barbs dressed up as charity. They swap companions like toys. Many are slovenly, but only in service of their singularity. They call their less fortunate cronies “pets.” You could say they are unfazed by the grotesque, even if they remain sensitive to beauty. They are worldly, but the world does not concern them, for they still live in enclosures. They abhor ugliness, turning it over in witty platitudes. None of their excesses are tactless or tasteless, since they’re inherited, never acquired. Their duplicity is always beholden to what is proprietary. When luck turns against them, it is a fluke. Their intellect is never a stand-in for intelligence. Cunning, in Fennell’s worlds, is reserved for the belittled. Indeed it is the strivers who are after such pitiable pursuits as status, subsistence, or revenge. Perhaps that is why, in her adaptation of Wuthering Heights, it is Nelly who dispenses one mischance after another.

The well-heeled, whether by pedigree or money, are much the same in Fennell’s films. In the early-2000s series Gossip Girl, the eponymous columnist narrates, “The Upper East Side was like something from Fitzgerald or Thackeray. Teenagers acting like adults. Adults acting like teenagers. Guarding secrets. Spreading gossip. With the trappings of truly opulent wealth.” What Gossip Girl confessed was that the rich are not, in fact, Pyrrhic leaders. The series set the tone for popular imaginings of virtue and class, and its point was that luxuriance is proof of moral vacancy. Fennell’s moral compass mirrors this imagination. Like the show, she concurs that dignity cannot be possessed by the socially advantaged. It seems, in fact, that her films show the capacity for the greatest virtue – the virtue of love – belongs more securely to the elite cabal. The grotesque, socially maladjusted excess is displaced downward.

In Wuthering Heights, the novel, Nelly knows that Heathcliff is listening when Catherine confesses she cannot marry him, even if she wanted to, because he is beggarly. In the film, it seems Nelly makes sure Heathcliff hears, goading Catherine to say so. When Catherine finds out, she rebukes Nelly, saying she thinks Nelly “likes to see [her] cry,” to which Nelly counters, “Not as much as you like crying.” It is through this elusive difference between knowing and ensuring that Fennell couches Nelly’s intent to further her own means. Nelly, here, is the heartless pragmatic and Catherine, the earnest romantic, even though it was Catherine herself who wanted Edgar Linton to court her. When Catherine airs discontent at a usually garrulous Nelly not decrying their new house, Thrushcross Grange, the Linton family’s estate, she retorts, “What could there be to complain about? That we are too comfortable? Too warm? That your necklace is too big? That the dog is too small?” Here, excess is good. Nelly even says, “This is good, Cathy.” It is also virtuously good, since Edgar, the subject and source of excess, has nothing short of saved Catherine (and Nelly) from what he calls “that wretched place” and mewls that Catherine is “brave” for “survi[ving]” it. Even so, it is not Nelly’s place to desire the excess in question.

Fennell’s adaptation portrays Edgar as the giver, a credulous lover, and Nelly as the taker, a wily plotter. It is Nelly’s indulgences – which amount to only a comfortable life, in which she still has to work for someone else – that are made repulsive and ill-willed. They come at the cost of her dragooning others to forsake real love. As Catherine dies, Edgar calls Nelly a “torturer.” Her death could have been prevented if Nelly had believed her when she said her baby had died, or had told her that Heathcliff had written, or that Edgar had not been speaking to her only because Nelly had compelled him not to. As he dismisses Nelly, Edgar bawls, “I cannot imagine what hatred you’ve had in your heart to allow this.” But Catherine isn’t angry. Instead, Fennell has her say that Nelly didn’t mean for her death. Here again, it is the virtues of the gentry that are fortified.

Why does Fennell reimagine the social right to material, even carnal, excess? The Romans used to equate decadence with decay. Dionysian Bacchanals, however, are inverted in the Fennell universe as sites of petit-bourgeois corruption. In his essay “The Epstein Files and Elite Moral Collapse,” Pratap Banu Mehta quotes the theorist J.G.A. Pocock, who, he writes, compels us to consider that even if virtue does not have “explanatory force” for why wealthy coteries get away with coloring outside moral lines, “we cannot entirely abandon the language of virtue, or the sneaking suspicion that, even if sexual decadence is not causal of other issues, it is revealing.” But indulgence as an index of morality, or even power, seems to bore Fennell. It will do, as long as it might look beautiful as a still, or provocative and jarring enough as a meme.

For Fennell, the decadence of the rich is simply the rich acquiescing to what is expected of them. Perhaps we should even pity them. Her aestheticization of elite indulgence hesitates to make any further assertion about its subjects. But it is the outsider’s – the interloper’s – desire for excess that undoes their virtue. Oliver and Nelly are monstrous, and their indulgence repugnant, not merely garish. At the end of Saltburn, Oliver traipses naked across the mansion he has acquired after securing the death of his friend’s family. His other expressions of material lust prior to this triumphant climax, as it were, are all too literal: he laps up ejaculate-infused bathwater; he dry-humps his friend’s open grave after killing him. As Richard Brody writes in his review of the movie, “…Saltburn isn’t a whodunnit – that’s obvious – but a whydunnit, and that’s where it falls apart.” So common, Oliver becomes a stand-in for a crusading middle class, whose very psyche is infected with a paraphilic obsession with status and luxury.

Considering Fennell's knack for stirring the pot, where does that leave us? Across the animated revenge tableaux of Promising Young Woman, the narcotized fever dream of Saltburn, and the lacquered Gothicism of her Wuthering Heights, she demonstrates an undeniable command of making everything look pretty – but it’s just that. In her hands, excess becomes solely an aesthetic condition, which is how she relieves elite indulgence from critique. Its consequences are resolved narratively, through death or humiliation. In this way, her oeuvre risks collapsing into a hall of mirrors, fascinated by its own provocations. What you get is a moodboard of vibes. And perhaps that will do?