Before we get into it, yes: this is probably not the first time you are seeing someone on your feed tearing apart Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights” adaptation, and it definitely won’t be the last. But some of you might even ask a very logical question: What the hell is Wuthering Heights?
Well, if you only heard the Kate Bush song about a cruel man named Heathcliff, who loves a woman named Cathy (Catherine), who’s so cold and wants to be let in through the window, then you might know some stuff, but there’s much more to it than that.
Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic novel is one of the most celebrated, multigenerational, and psychologically complex masterworks in the English canon, whose power is rooted in moral ambiguity, class, cruelty, and persistent empathy for deeply, and I repeat, very deeply flawed characters. It is also, famously, a very difficult book to adapt, which would take a rather brilliant director to capture the true genius of — and unfortunately, Emerald Fennel was the
one who picked up the phone that day.
Emerald Fennel, occupies a peculiar position in contemporary cinema. Her last two films, “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” were met with significant commercial success and critical enthusiasm, yet to me were overrated during their respective years. At her core, she is undeniably skilled and very talented in portraying stunning and beautiful visuals designed to go viral on Pinterest, yet her films are almost offensively hollow in terms of story, character, or thematic depth. So when her adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” was released, it wasn’t surprising that her interpretation would end up as little more than a butchering of Brontë’s novel.
Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, disregards the novel’s essential architecture entirely and completely ignores the themes of race, class and power that make “Wuthering Heights”… well, “Wuthering Heights.”
In the novel, Heathcliff — a man of unknown ethnicity, but hinted at to be a person of color – is defined by, and essentially is, his trauma; he is abused, humiliated and driven to madness by omission. In Fennel’s version, everyone’s complexity and layer is stripped away, leaving us with the whitewashed shells of these historically renowned and acclaimed characters. Heathcliff becomes another handsome white lead, Catherine becomes a comic relief, and the shifts feel as smooth as getting repeatedly slapped across the face with a pan.
What replaces Brontë’s rich psychological horror is something that has been very prominent throughout the last couple of years: the process of sexualizing classic literature into a spectacle. Heathcliff and Catherine’s destructive, codependent bond built from pain, pride, psychological torment and shared trauma become a straightforwardly eroticized romance. Their yearning, which Brontë made powerful precisely because it could never be fulfilled, is literalized here through repetitive sex scenes, which make you feel nothing but boredom.
Meanwhile, instead of brooding Gothic tension, we get something some people might classify as comedy, lurid color palettes, and costumes that look ripped from a discount Tim Burton catalog.
None of this is to say sexuality has no place in art — eros has very famously, successfully and beautifully been a tool used to explore power, repression, and longing in a number of cases throughout history, but for Brontë, passion and punishment were inseparable. It existed at the edge of death, class and madness.
Fennel’s version seems unaware that this is what the book is about. She has defended the inexplicable choices she made by describing her film as a personal interpretation — one rooted in how she read the book as a 14-year-old. The problem is that it shows. Her interpretation is very juvenile, and it refuses all of the complexity of the book. Her Catherine and Heathcliff are not tormented souls or societal outcasts — they’re reduced to archetypal lustful embodiments, stuck, or some might say trapped, in an adolescent fantasy of doomed romance.
What makes Wuthering Heights timeless is its refusal of consolation or closure. It explores so many important themes, which are especially relevant in this day and age, like class, race, inherited trauma, environmental isolation, cruelty, revenge, obsession, and the cycles of pain we inherit and perpetuate, but Fennel left us wrapped candy with nothing in it.
What really bothers me is that Emerald Fennel’s assassination of a book so close to so many hearts — one that somehow secured a major budget and two of Hollywood’s biggest stars — which says a lot about where we are as a film-going public today — yes, may inspire some people, as it did for me, to go pick up the novel, but many will watch it and never want to open the book. And that’s a shame because what they’ll miss is not just a great story, but one of literature’s most honest and devastating portrayals of what it means to be human.
