we (unfortunately) need to discuss 'wuthering heights'
"EDGAR!!! EDGAR!! OH THE MOST HORRIBLE THING! I SAW IT! A GHOST! UP THERE! NO, OVER THERE! TERRIBLE, HATEFUL EYES AND A HORRID FACE!" shrieks Alison Oliver's Isabella Linton in the jewel-box, manicured garden of Thrushcross Grange, wearing eight thousand layers of frilly, lacy yellow and white Vaguely Victorian Gown and reading glasses. And that is as close as we get to the Gothic, haunting themes of the classic 1847 novel that this shambling, paper-thin adaptation pretends to be based on.
Don't get me wrong. I love to catch a good Vibe. I like pretty costumes and interesting adaptations of classic literature and swelling scores and cinematography as much as anyone else. But when the adaptation has nothing new to say, there is no vibe to catch apart from dreamy visuals, montages, and scenes that seem curated to be cut into a TikTok fancam in the next couple of months until the general audience loses interest and moves on to the next new thing.
I have read Wuthering Heights. I read it first as a kid of maybe 12, then again at 15, then again in college several times, then again when it was announced that Emerald Fennell, wannabe provocatuer and British nepo baby probably best known for a film where Barry Keoghan licks semen out of a bathtub drain and fucks a grave, was making a film based on Wuthering Heights. Delightful visuals, I said to myself after watching Saltburn, a film that had odd undertones of something like reverse-classism, in which the message seems to be that middle class people will invade your wealthy estate, murdering and stealing all for themselves like a vampire desperate to feed off money and class. Perhaps she will get some things right in this one. Perhaps we will get an unhinged, thwarted Heathcliff not only exhuming Cathy's corpse, but also fucking it. Perhaps Cathy and Heathcliff will be confirmed to be half-siblings, a popular reading on the book in the literary world, and still embark on their doomed, obsessive romance with each other. Perhaps we will at last break the barely-deviated cycle of white men who do not appear to be racially ambiguous to modern audiences whatsoever playing a character whose entire arc is based on the fact that he is abused due to his racial ambiguity by the white, isolated English people who make up his whole social circle. Perhaps we might even get a decent arc concerning puritanical religious oppression of the mind and soul, which is a main theme of the novel.
None of this happened, of course. Instead, we got served a hot mess of a film that completely mishandled several character's arcs and motivations. I could allow merging Hindley (Heathcliff's main abuser, along with his wife Frances, who becomes an alcoholic after her death in childbirth) and Mr Earnshaw (who insists on kindness and an education for Heathcliff from the whole household, including his very much alive wife, and punishes Hindley for his cruelty to his adopted son) into a version of Mr Earnshaw who possesses all the faults of the now-nonexistent Hindley for a more streamlined story, especially if the filmmaker has no interest in making the second half of the book (in which Hindley's son Hareton plays a major role), even though it somewhat defangs Heathcliff's motivations and desire for revenge. The motivations still exist: they are just not as clear. But making Nelly Dean an East Asian bastard daughter of some random lord who is kept out of sight from "decent company" at the Heights as a companion for Cathy and making Edgar Linton a Southeast Asian man in his forties who "made his fortune in textiles" seems to be the film's only dabble into the racial politics of the area and time period. None of it is ever thematically touched on again past a remark or two when the characters are introduced. More on the race issue later, because I have a lot to say about this.
The first half of the film is fairly okay. Fairly. Apart from excising out Hindley, making Mr Earnshaw a widower who gambles away all their money and drinks like a fish and abuses the whole household, and cutting Zillah out of the end of the book's timeline as if with scissors to paste her back into Heathcliff and Cathy's childhood for the sole purpose of pairing her with an inexplicably young, attractive Joseph (who, of course, is no longer the puritanically religious man he was in the book) for a horse-bridle BDSM scene in the stables that Cathy witnesses, it's okay. The actors playing young Heathcliff and Cathy are fantastic and nail the roles they were given. However, Cathy's characterization suffers from the choice to make her father an abusive drunk: she is no longer a spoiled, passionate, wild, defiant semi-brat who misbehaves and over time forms a deep bond with Heathcliff due to their shared personalities and similarities. Instead, she is constantly trying to mollify her father through his drunk rages. This is an effective tool for condensing the story a little, but without more time devoted to the childhoods of both characters, their adult characterization becomes a lesson in why you Show and Don't Tell.
This brings us to Catherine's encounter with the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange. In the book, Cathy and Heathcliff are about twelve years old, together on the moors one Sunday, running wild after escaping from being locked in the wash-house as a punishment by Joseph for misbehaving on Sunday afternoon. Specifically, they go there because they want to see if the Linton children (because yes, in the books, Edgar and Isabella are children Heathcliff and Cathy's age, not fully grown adults who just move in one day) are expected to act the same as they are on Sunday afternoons: in dead silence reading sermons exiled to the coldest parts of the house while the adults sit by the fire and have a good time. They want to see how these rich, more upper-class kids live, and once they sneak up to the window, they are appalled to see that the Linton children are fighting over a dog and crying in a beautiful room that they have all to themselves in a warm house. They start laughing. The Linton kids freak out and start hysterically screaming. Heathcliff and Cathy make spooky noises to taunt them and then the dogs are set on them. Cathy's bitten at the ankle and taken in by the aristocratic Lintons. Heathcliff cusses them out after Mrs Linton calls him unfit for a decent house, and they shove him out into the dark with a lantern and demand he go home. There is a distinct element of sexism: Heathcliff notes that because Catherine is a girl, they treat her better than they did he. She stays at the Linton's for five weeks and comes home transformed into a "little lady".
This is changed massively in the film. Instead, Catherine is described as "past spinster age" (extremely funny and meta, frankly: why the fuck is Margot Robbie playing Cathy again?) and desperate to make connections with her new neighbors whose wealth she envies. She flops all over the house whining about how the Linton's haven't come to call for weeks and weeks in costumes that look like someone's fever dream of an Oktoberfest barmaid, waxing at length about how much she wants to escape Wuthering Heights, marry Edgar, become rich, and maybe also bring Heathcliff up in society. Heathcliff does not approve this plan whatsoever. Cathy marches off of her own accord to the Grange, climbs the vine of the garden wall, peeks over the top, scares the shit out of Isabella, and, offscreen, it is assumed she charms Edgar somehow, because he immediately proposes marriage. As a result, the slow build that eventually leads to the deepening rift between Cathy and Heathcliff and results in his leaving is put on something like a cocaine-fueled speedrun. The class difference element is delivered like a cannonball to the head as we are introduced to the Grange, which suddenly immerses us in delirious, unhinged, tacky style vividly different from the set design at Wuthering Heights, which is solidly Low-Class Landowner Couture, 1700s-1800s: at the Grange plastic curtains hang in a dressing room, plaster hands decorate a huge fireplace, Catherine wears iridescent tulle on her wedding night that looks like it came off a modern runway, floors are glossy and scarlet or covered in furry shag carpeting. The events in childhood and at the Heights are 1780s, the men's costumes past that point are mostly 1810s, the rest is Just Whatever, Man. SEE HOW NEW MONEY PEOPLE ARE TACKY AND CRAZY? shouts every artistic choice in this movie. EDGAR THE TACKY NOVEAU RICHE TEXTILE GUY MADE A ROOM FOR CATHY THE SAME COLOR AS HER SKIN BECAUSE HE THINKS HER SKIN IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD! So ROMANTIC! AND WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T DISCUSS THE RACIAL IMPLICATIONS OF A BROWN MAN SAYING THAT! IT'S DEFINITELY NOT THAT DEEP! JUST TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN OMG THIS WOULD BE SO FUN IF YOU JUST DIDN'T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING EVER!!
Anyway, then we come to Heathcliff's return from Mysterious Doings Abroad That Made Him Rich, which follows the book in mood, mostly: Heathcliff buys the Heights and comes to dinner, Isabella is taken by him, Cathy is jealous, Heathcliff knows it, and he decides to flirt with Isabella solely to piss her off. But without the background of the full extent of the rift between them and only the misunderstanding of the overheard "it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff" scene acting as a motivator for this behavior, the whole thing falls flatter than a two week old party balloon. Mr Earnshaw dies. Zillah just kinda vanishes from the narrative: her job was, it seems, to rail Joseph.
This is how the book goes: Cathy and Heathcliff have a fight because their seething hatred of each other comes to a head over him kissing Isabella in the garden of the Grange, Cathy locks herself in her room and throws a fit in an attempt to manipulate Edgar and Heathcliff, Heathcliff elopes with Isabella, Cathy gets Brain Fever and also Pregnant, and Isabella writes Nelly a letter describing how terrible Wuthering Heights is now that Heathcliff is running the place, with old Joseph hollering about God, boozed-up Hindley threatening to kill everybody every day, young neglected Hareton cussing up a blue streak and spitting in the food, filth everywhere, and none of the comforts of wealth she's used to. She expresses fascination with Hindley's gun-knife:
"A hideous notion struck me: how powerful I should be possessing such an instrument! I took it from his hand, and touched the blade. He looked astonished at the expression my face assumed during a brief second: it was not horror, it was covetousness."
Heathcliff treats her horribly as a proxy to Edgar, and this is how he speaks of her to Nelly in Isabella's own presence when Nelly visits the Heights to call on them:
"The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog; and when she pleaded for it, the first words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one: possibly she took that exception for herself. But no brutality disgusted her: I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now, was it not the depth of absurdity—of genuine idiocy, for that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach to dream that I could love her? Tell your master, Nelly, that I never, in all my life, met with such an abject thing as she is. She even disgraces the name of Linton; and I’ve sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure, and still creep shamefully cringing back! But tell him, also, to set his fraternal and magisterial heart at ease: that I keep strictly within the limits of the law. I have avoided, up to this period, giving her the slightest right to claim a separation; and, what’s more, she’d thank nobody for dividing us. If she desired to go, she might: the nuisance of her presence outweighs the gratification to be derived from tormenting her!""
This is very clear. Heathcliff is only having sex with Isabella so that their marriage could not be annulled due to nonconsummation. Meanwhile, he's yearning for Cathy, who is still sick at the Grange and who he cannot get access to at ALL because he's been banned from the house: he demands that Nelly get him in the room with her or at least carry a letter, which she ends up doing, because she feels so bad for him and for Catherine. The film, conversely, decides to turn a complex and dark dynamic where Isabella's abuse is due to Heathcliff taking out his hatred for Edgar on her despite her genuine initial attraction and emotional attachment to him into the world's most vanilla consensual BDSM relationship. Shreds of this dynamic ARE vaguely there in the text, but absolutely not in the way in which Fennell has chosen to go with it. Instead of Isabella being subjected to miserable treatment until she finally escapes, pregnant with Heathcliff's child, we get "isn't it CRAZY and SUBVERSIVE and KINKY that FREAKY ISABELLA is acting like a DOGGY and LIKES IT?"
Which brings us to the second most egregious part of the film: the timeline being oddly stretched out and the created space between Heathcliff flirting with Isabella and the elopement being completely plugged up with a long montage of Cathy and Heathcliff carrying on a full-blown affair behind Edgar's back, all over the moors, all over Thrushcross Grange, and all over Wuthering Heights. One understands suddenly why the first half of the movie had to be condensed: there absolutely needed to be an extra twenty minutes found, apparently, for Jacob Elordi to wuther Margot Robbie's heights in the rain, and in the sun, and on the moors, and in dark rooms with blowing curtains meant to evoke a Robert Eggers-esque vibe, and in his childhood bed, and in her bed at the Grange, and in carriages. Instead of Heathcliff's elopement with Isabella as a calculated action designed to make Edgar and Cathy miserable, the catalyst for this is now the fact that Heathcliff offers to kill Edgar for Cathy mid-coitus, to which she responds in horror and tells him they can't have sex anymore. (As if Book!Cathy would have ever shown horror: Book!Heathcliff threatens/offers to kill Edgar every other chapter and Book!Cathy herself shows no reluctance even as Heathcliff waxes on about wrenching Isabella's fingers off and beating the shit out of her.)
Don't worry, though, it gets worse. In my own opinion the most egregious part of the film is the absolute butchering of the character of Nelly Dean in a way only Emerald Fennell is capable of doing. Nelly tattles on Edgar concerning the affair, slyly signals to Heathcliff during the "it would degrade me" scene in order to ensure he's listening, burns the letters Isabella sends to Catherine during her illness, and ends up being accidentally responsible for Catherine's death -- all because she's jealous of Catherine. Book!Nelly, in contrast, smuggled in many letters from Isabella, cared for baby Hareton, went behind Edgar's back to ensure Heathcliff got to see Cathy on her deathbed, and is the one who goes out to the woods in tears to tell a waiting Heathcliff that Catherine is dead because she still has empathy for him. No longer is the driving force that ruins two families lives the natures of Catherine and Heathcliff themselves as vindictive, vengeful, star-crossed jerks: it's all fuckin' Nelly Dean's fault, who pulls the strings of the poor innocent lovers from behind the scenes in her Victorian day dresses.
Film!Heathcliff also has absolutely no hint of violence or anger about him. The most violence he enacts in the film is against a chair, which he smashes to pieces to burn so Cathy has a fire despite her father's commands to not waste money on burning wood in the middle of winter while he's away. This makes it all the funnier when someone cries, "Heathcliff, you brute! You wicked fiend!" which happens about every other scene. How is this man a brute in any way? He's a six foot five dude in a bad wig and glued on beard with one missing tooth who grumpily throws a shoe at Cathy after she throws one at him to wake him up. He pops her up into a tree one time and walks off. Oh, the humanity. The fiendish behavior doesn't really kick off until he climbs into Isabella's bedroom window. Even then, he walks her through consent in a way that feels like it's been ripped off 2016 tumblr: "I'm never going to actually love you and I'll only think about Cathy. Want me to stop? I'm going to be rough. Want me to stop?" You have the sense he's about to look into the camera and recite the rules of a kink club. Nothing bad happens to her dog. Nothing bad happens to Isabella. He never lays a hand on Edgar and I don't think Edgar ever lays a hand on him. Even in the 1939 movie Lawrence Olivier was killing baby birds. Jacob Elordi, under Fennell's direction, spends most of his time grunting, brooding, and aiming Dark Sexyman Looks at people when he's not crawling around licking Robbie's hands in slavish devotion and aiming his nuclear-powered doe eyes at the set lights so they catch the maximum amount of glistening pathos. This may be the least threatening Heathcliff we have ever had, custom-designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the target demographic, who have never read anything more morally challenging or complex than YA novels and only listen to, like, one singer.
Robbie's Cathy is no better. She simply cannot carry over the near-perfect balance between bratty and eager to please that Charlotte Mellington nailed during the first quarter of the film. It's insane that Alison Oliver didn't get the role of Cathy: she has the chops, she played unhinged extremely well as Isabella, she looks great as a brunette. Instead, you get the... let's say uneasy sense that Margot's Cathy is a self-insert for the writer/director, a la any Dan Brown novel, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, David Leitch's Fall Guy, or Diana Gabaldon's Outlander. She's FeistyTM, but not in a way that could possibly make her unlikable to the audience or to any other character. She's set in a tree about six feet off the ground and throws a fit because she can't get down in skirts, but climbs up a vine just fine in a long gown when it's time to look over the garden walls of Thrushcross Grange. Edgar falls in love with her because the plot demands it, not for any real reason explained on screen beyond her physical attractiveness. She is the victim, ultimately, of other people instead of herself, and with her dying breath angelically extends grace and forgiveness to Nelly for not realizing her illness was serious quickly enough in one of the most mawkish scenes of the whole film. Since this script demands that Evil Nelly keep Heathcliff from Catherine until she's dying, Heathcliff shows up when she's already dead, and Elordi admittedly performs an excellent dramatic monologue from the book, beautifully done as he cradles her dead body in desperation and sobs his eyes out. But it loses some of the tragedy in the writing choices: there is no last conversation between him and Cathy, and in this film Cathy miscarries Cathy Junior, and there is no Hindley, therefore there is no Hareton, so there is no setup for the second half of the book whatsoever, which I think is the real meat of Heathcliff's vindictive unhingedness toward the Lintons and Earnshaws, and which you can see in Elordi's acting choices as the movie wraps up, veering toward mad grief. What a waste.
"We don’t in general take to foreigners here, Mr. Lockwood, unless they take to us first."
I have to talk about the racial component. Wuthering Heights is one of those rare books in which the whiteness of the main cast is vital to the plot, and the racial ambiguity/foreignness of Heathcliff is also paramount. The Lintons have to be white blondes with blue eyes. The Earnshaws have to be white brunettes with dark eyes. Bronte was making a point about English society and racialization within it when she wrote this book. The Lintons have weak constitutions and are aristocratic and fearful and spoiled: the Earnshaws are "hardy" and "savage" and "healthy". Catherine's hands noticeably become "wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying indoors" after her five-week visit to the Lintons. Heathcliff is variously described as "sallow" (an archaic-ish word meaning a yellowish or pale brown complexion) and also "dark-skinned", (in Victorian lit, darker in complexion in comparison to the white people around him). He has thick, straight black hair and dark low brows and a constantly angry expression. What is his ethnicity? Nobody knows. That's the whole point. Whether he's what a modern audience would view as a "man of color", or whether Emily Bronte thought of him perhaps as belonging to an ethnicity that we today would consider 'white' but back then was not considered white, because "whiteness" is an ever-shifting category by time and place dependent on proximity to power, society, empire, and wealth, everyone projects what they want to see onto Heathcliff, the ultimate outsider and Other (including people on the Internet to this day who insist that he must be x, y, or z.) The Lintons want to believe he is a criminal after he and Cathy scare their kids, so they label him with a common slur for Romani people and cast him out. Lockwood, too, subscribes to this slur for him, albeit in a more romantic sense. Nelly, conversely, engages in a sort of positively-intended exotification of him when he's a child to cheer him up, saying that even if he was a "regular black" (used in Victorian literature as a descriptor for both African people and Indian people) he would still be handsome if he just had a better attitude, and how he could be a prince in disguise, and that he looks so ambiguous that for all they know his father was the Emperor of China and his mother was an Indian queen, so he should pretend he had a noble and exotic birth to give himself more pleasant thoughts and then overcome his hatred for Edgar. Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that Heathcliff is Mr Earnshaw's natural son and the half-brother of the Earnshaws, it is still vital to the characterization of Cathy, Heathcliff, and Hindley that they bear a passing resemblance in some coloration to him. He calls her dark curly hair beautiful. He feels kinship with Cathy, and Cathy feels kinship with him. She expresses her own personal physical contrast with Isabella in almost the same way Heathcliff expresses contrast between himself and Linton: the difference is that she insists she isn't jealous, while Heathcliff openly admits to it to Nelly:
"I never feel hurt at the brightness of Isabella’s yellow hair and the whiteness of her skin, at her dainty elegance, and the fondness all the family exhibit for her."
"I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!"
This casting was a hot fucking mess, simply put. You cannot accurately engage with the themes of racialization and how it intertwines with the class division present in the story that are Heathcliff's whole character foundation by casting a Pakistani man as Edgar Linton and a Vietnamese woman as Nelly and calling it a day, as if it's a Get Out Of Racism Free Token you put into the Press Release Slot so you can happily skip off into the technicolor red sunset with blonde Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. It completely fucks the dynamic, even without the addition of the affair. We now have a rich Asian man being cuckolded by his white wife and her white boyfriend, who is presented as more sexually desirable in all ways except, arguably, when a pregnant Cathy is breathlessly engaging in roleplaying with Heathcliff about how sexually insatiable Edgar is and how much he loves her. And don't forget Nelly Dean, whose actions and characterization now put a foot into the Dragon Lady stereotype due to the absolutely incomprehensible choices made with Nelly's arc. There was literally no need for any of that to change at all. Even Heathcliff's revenge on Edgar via Isabella is numbed down when Isabella is changed to Edgar's ward and not his sister and also looks nothing like him -- which is, again a huge part of why Heathcliff makes her a target of his ire.
Speaking of the sex in the film, I was... disappointed. Fennell makes a lot of buzz for attempting to be a provocateur in her films: I had heard much about The Bathtub Scene in Saltburn and was a little disappointed when I actually watched it. That wasn't even close to what I expect when I hear about Some Wildly Freaky Shit, and this film followed in the same vein. We open with a gag where the audience hears groaning and squeaking that gets faster and faster before it's revealed we're listening to a man be hanged. His boner is outlined in his pants. A nun is really into it. The crowd, adrenaline rushing from the savagery of it all, starts making out with each other. Cathy and Nelly cheer viciously and run home. This, I guess, is supposed to symbolize Cathy's understanding of sex being entwined with death, but that theme is just never really touched on again. And speaking of touching, there is an enormous focus on tactility. Fingers go into aspic, in fish mouths, in other mouths, in grass, on bread dough, into egg yolks. There is no mention of religion, let alone the pervasive aura of religious repression and mystical, almost otherworldly spirituality that pervades the book. Instead we get the only really repressed person, Isabella, embroidering ejaculating penises in her samplers and gifting Cathy a scrapbook of folded paper shapes that evoke genitals without realizing it.
I was particularly disappointed in the aftermath of the BDSM voyeur scene: Cathy, accidentally witnessing Joseph and Zillah engage in some whippy, bridley horseplay from the floor above the stables where Heathcliff lives, is protected from seeing too much by the helpful intercession of Heathcliff, who rolls on top of her and covers her mouth and eyes for the duration of the scene below. This inadvertently makes it more titillating for Cathy. Afterward, he slips off her, and she flees the scene, embarrassed by her own physical reaction. He sighs, lies on his back, and absently touches his own groin, where it's obvious he's also aroused. And then... the scene cuts to the next morning. Fennell, if you're going to proudly tell us all over and over how fucking freaky you are, you could at least have put in a scene of Heathcliff frantically jerking off in the stable to thoughts of Cathy. We are treated to a scene of Cathy the next day rubbing one out under her skirts before being interrupted by Heathcliff finding her-- we are shown that Cathy's psychosexual structure is pretty much constructed around Heathcliff-- but there is no similar motivation or any real character development on an equal level for Heathcliff. He isn't treated like a well-rounded sexual character in the same way that she is. There's not even any nudity in this fucking movie. All the sex scenes are shot from the waist up, tastefully covered. The mutual yearning in the first half without any actual sex (Heathcliff's line about now having her scent like a dog while sucking on the fingers Cathy's been using to flick the bean on the moors is lodged in my brain like a horrible little goathead) was sexier than the actual sex scene montage. I know you could have done it! I don't want a sex scene montage! I want deranged Cathy staggering across the rainy moors in a drenched nightgown screaming for Heathcliff to come back! Give me a tense scene of, I don't know, naked Heathcliff tending to his injuries from a whipping and realizing Cathy is watching! The whole point is that their relationship is never fully consummated! That's why he begs her to haunt him forever!
Man cannot make film on vibes alone, and Fennell is not an exception to the rule. 'Wuthering Heights' puts up a pretense of being a Cool Subversive Film! Not Like Other Films! but falls miserably short because it doesn't fucking do or say anything of note compared to the actual story of Wuthering Heights, with one dismal exception. For, once again, as in Saltburn, Fennell falls prey to her own class anxieties, and through the conduit of Nelly's arc, we are breathlessly informed that Wicked Middle Class Poor People are going to hijack the ultra-privileged life of the Sweet and Good Pure Elites out of jealousy. I wish someone would steal Fennell's life. Maybe then we'd have films that actually meant something.