Bluesky

Iwent to Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” expecting a vibe—and in this aspect, at the very least, it does not disappoint. The film lacks a lot of things (chief among them, a faithful rendering of the book), but one thing it does succeed in is feeling like the times.

Over the course of the film’s 137-minute runtime, I found myself thinking longingly of another, shorter, more effective vibe-based cultural product, Charli xcx and comedian Rachel Sennott’s Poppi Super Bowl commercial—a tongue-in-cheek spot that achieves in 30 seconds what Fennell’s film, another Charli collab, attempts to stretch into a two-hour-plus film. In it, Charli and Sennott burst in and bring a wild, very 2020s party to a staid college lecture when a can of Poppi is opened. In her “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell tries to bring something like that party to Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, but to shockingly little effect.

In Fennell’s selective interpretation, Wuthering Heights is reduced to a love story, in which the more complicated elements of Brontë’s weird, brutal, lurid novel are ironed out or elided completely, leaving us with what critic Alison Willmore rightly calls “a smooth-brained Wuthering Heights.” It is a simplification and a cliché to say that every generation gets the Wuthering Heights it deserves, but it may just be true in this case—our newest Wuthering Heights is tailored to our short attention spans, our brain-rotted need for constant stimulation, and nothing like Andrea Arnold’s 2011 take, which for all its flaws was a thorny, realistically muddy but earnest attempt to reckon with Brontë’s wrestling with the racial and economic dynamics of her time. Where Arnold struggled to present a Wuthering Heights stripped of any romantic illusions that presented the world of windswept Yorkshire as cruelly as Brontë does, Fennell gives us a shallow vision of romance as sex with next to nothing else.

Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is attuned to our present moment, in which shock and awe undermine history, fashion prevails over depth, and Charli xcx’s and Anthony Willis’s moody score threatens to overwhelm the foreground, rather than providing a fitting backdrop. It’s not exactly the novel cut down to a music video—Kate Bush achieved that better with her kookily earnest, teenaged vision of Brontë’s novel in 1977—but it is a film made for the age of TikTok and Instagram, a movie composed for the algorithm, with flashy and catchy images, from the indelible visions of Margot Robbie, looking amazing in so many outfits, to an swoon-worthy Jacob Elordi, riding off into a Harlequin-cover sunset.

This is not to totally deride Fennell, consistently a canny reader of the zeitgeist. It’s just that, in comparing the Wuthering Heights of the past with the “Wuthering Heights” of the present, it is hard not to miss how this latest rendering of the Brontë novel might have made a pitch-perfect Instagram reel. By demanding that we don’t to think too hard about what the novel is really asking us to think pretty hard about and instead focus on Fennell’s generous reframing of Heathcliff and Cathy, Fennell reduces the agency that Heathcliff and Cathy do have and makes them victims of their own inexplicable passion. Gone are all the reasons why Heathcliff and Cathy are terrible—their selfishness, their cruel, destructive and unafraid determination to ruin other lives with their obsessive desire for each other.

Fennell instead shifts the blame for various ruinations to the secondary characters—poor Mr. Earnshaw and Isabella Linton (a charmingly batty Alison Oliver, downgraded from sister to ward) are made out to be the architects of their own ruin, and the unsettling burden of generational trauma borne by the novel’s younger characters is cut out of the film entirely. Cathy and Heathcliff’s cruelty and disregard are also softened here; rather than a selfish and vindictive wildcat, Cathy is made out to be a tragic heroine doing what she can to save her family; while Heathcliff, rather than being “a devil,” is a diabolical but consent-obsessed dom whose bad deeds are enabled by Isabella, his willing sub. Also excised is the novel’s framing narrative, which gives readers a hint of both its ghastly Gothic qualities (an actual ghost shows up in the novel’s third chapter!) and its necessarily comic remove from real life—we should obviously not take Cathy and Heathcliff as exemplars of romance.

Perhaps most interestingly, much of the blame that Brontë places on Cathy and Heathcliff is shunted onto Edgar Linton and Nelly Dean, again showing Fennell’s apparent disdain for the middle class. Though her last film, Saltburn, is an ostensible eat-the-rich satire and came out in 2023 amid a sea of other class-warfare porn (like The Menu, The White Lotus, and Triangle of Sadness), it’s really about the threat of the hardworking bourgeois striver, exemplified by Barry Keoghan’s weird little schemer. Whether intentionally or not, we end up feeling bad for the outdated, clueless aristocrats, played with unfortunately magnetic charm by Elordi, Oliver, Rosamund Pike, and Richard E. Grant (revisiting his landed gentry schtick from the brilliant Posh Nosh web series).

This classist attitude is further compounded by the questions of race in Wuthering Heights. The two main characters played by actors of color, Shahad Lazif’s Edgar, and Hong Chau’s Nelly, are made out to be the villains of the piece, standing in the way of the unstoppable love of the film’s two very white protagonists, Robbie’s beautiful but unconvincing Cathy, and Elordi’s suitably brooding Heathcliff. It is made abundantly clear that Lazif’s Edgar knows well that Cathy and Heathcliff are conducting a passionate and star-crossed affair under his nose and simply won’t get out of the way while Nelly is changed from a middle-aged servant to a would-be competitor for Cathy, a lady’s companion driven by jealousy and bitterness.

It’s hard to see the colorblind casting here as anything but a cynical ploy to distract from Elordi’s controversial and much-discussed casting as the non-white Heathcliff. Time also acts oddly on characters here; though they start out peers, by the time they become grownups, Heathcliff, Cathy, and Nelly are all played by actors of visibly different ages—Elordi (28), Robbie (35), and Chau (46). This is in keeping with the tradition of aging up Heathcliff and Cathy (nobody ever thought Sir Laurence Olivier was a convincing teen in the 1939 version) but puts Chau’s Nelly in a strange position of being older, ostensibly wiser, and therefore more knowing than her would-be coevals.

Much is also made of the fact that the Wuthering Heights family, the Earnshaws, are old money, who belong in the moors—the highly stylized house is even apparently built into the rock that adjoins it (giving the Heights’s exterior aspect something of a confusing look, a baffling mash-up of abattoir, space ship, and coal mine that is supposed to be imposing, but comes off like a Star Trek set). The Lintons are, in comparison, new money who made their tremendous fortune through the textile trade, who live in a dollhouse-like confection of a house.