***Spoiler alert for the plot of ‘Wuthering Heights’ movie and book***
As a sex positive, pro-hoe person, I hate using the word “porn” negatively, in the way a phrase like “trauma porn” has inherently negative connotations. Sex work is valid work and I won’t single it out for degradation. For that reason, when speaking of films and filmmakers who seem to metaphorically get off on exploiting pain and depicting gratuitous violence as entertainment, I coined the phrase “eroticized trauma,” instead. But, I’m so sorry, it must be said: Emerald Fennell’s latest film “Wuthering Heights” is literal trauma porn.
It begins with an L-Cut over a black screen. We hear squeaking and creaking like the sound of a wooden bed in motion. Then, of course, comes the heavy breathing. Fennell wants us to believe that we’re overhearing a sex scene. But when the camera fades into the scene, we learn, instead, that Fennell is simply trolling the audience by offering up the last thing we would expect: a man with a sackcloth over his head, struggling to breathe while being hanged from a noose in the public square. He dies violently, with an erection, as if his public execution were an autoerotic asphyxiation kink gone wrong. It makes the grotesque onlookers horny and some literally have sex or masturbate while the now-dead man swings and children laugh.
Of course, this scene never appears in Emily Brönte’s classic 1847 novel Wuthering Heights—Fennell just wants us all to applaud her cleverness and ascribe some depth and edginess to her flaccid, rich white woman’s imagination of the debaucherous poor. Yet it’s among the least egregious changes in Fennell’s adaptation, if it can even be called that when she completely ignores or fundamentally misunderstands the source material. Fennell says she’s put the title in quotation marks to stave off the ire of readers of the book who can tell that Fennell didn’t. It hasn’t worked.
Though the scene doesn’t connect at all to the rest of the plot, it introduces young Cathy, the main character as a child, who witnesses the hanging with Nelly, who, in this version isn’t a maid like in the book, but an unpaid “companion” for Cathy. Beyond that, the scene reveals something insidious about Fennell and her ideas about sex, violence and kink. Unlike violence, the underlying requirement of sex and kink is consent—something she’ll fail to responsibly distinguish throughout the film. Perhaps the bait-and-switch scene was simply confirmation that this entire film will run contrary to its marketing.
“Inspired by the greatest love story of all time,” the trailer lies, as anyone who has ever read Wuthering Heights knows that, though it is a great book, it is most decidedly not some great romantic love story. Instead, Brönte’s novel tells the story of how abuse, racism, and classism thwart love and breed obsession and how real love and self-acceptance can heal generational trauma.
Fennell has no interest in any of this, or perhaps no awareness. She wants to make a bodice-ripping period piece where revenge is a non-consensual kink that turns deadly. In Fennell’s mind, dying of grief because the man you didn’t choose married someone else isn’t selfishness, but the ultimate sign of “great love.” Fennell turns this idea of Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi)’s deadly cruelty and obsession with each other as some Romeo & Juliet, star-crossed lovers tale to be imitated by the impressionable audience. “Come undone,” the tagline of the film encourages, further solidifying for audiences that having a mental breakdown and dying as Cathy does or living in misery forever after as Heathcliff does is the evidence of great love and a great movie.
I expected such irresponsible filmmaking from Fennell. She is also the disaster-mind behind Promising Young Woman, where ***spoiler alert*** a young woman seeks revenge on the male rapist of her friend, but only actually harms women who contributed to her friend’s pain and then gets murdered herself by her friend’s rapist. It’s no wonder Hollywood continues to prop up its favorite patriarchal princess; the women in her films somehow always manage to get back in their place or suffer.
She’s also the born-wealthy woman behind Saltburn, which dares to ask, “What if the poors are obsessed with us and plotting to steal our money out from under us?” And, “What if The Talented Mr. Ripley kept the great cinematography but lost all nuance and depth, and had nothing to say about the perversions of whiteness, maleness, class, and obsession?” In this context, Fennell’s illiterate adaptation of Wuthering Heights makes total sense.
White Australian actor Jacob Elordi accepted the role of Heathcliff despite the fact that, in the book, Heathcliff is described multiple times as “dark-skinned,” and is often degraded by white characters with the old slur for Romani people. “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!” Heathcliff says in the book when he realizes that Cathy is going to choose the extremely wealthy, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Edgar Linton over him. “I must wish for Edgar Linton’s great blue eyes and even forehead…I do and that won’t help me to them.”
This is Heathcliff’s racial and class anguish colliding, and his singular motivation in the book: to become wealthy and whiten his bloodline as both revenge for Cathy choosing Linton and a way to validate himself and become worthy of the kind of man Cathy would love and choose. Fennell strips this crucial racial element out of Heathcliff’s character because Elordi is what she imagined Heathcliff to look like when she read the book as a 14-year-old. Unless this R-rated, BDSM, Harlequin “romance” was made for other 14-year-olds who imagine all characters as white despite their descriptions, I’m not sure why the version of Fennell before her prefrontal cortex fully developed is the one that’s running this show. When there are so few non-white movie leads, it’s simply outrageous to whitewash a POC character.
Some have suggested that they don’t mind Heathcliff being white in the film because he’s evil in the book, and who needs an evil POC when there are so few POC characters on screen? To that, Ms. Fennell would like to introduce you to whom she has cast as Edgar Linton and Nelly. Pakistani actor Shazad Latif plays Edgar to shield Fennell and Elordi from criticism for whitewashing Heathcliff. And Hong Chau is Nelly and avoids criticism of Catherine for having an Asian maid by making Nelly into Catherine’s unpaid companion, which Fennell thinks is better. Never mind the optics of Fennell stripping Nelly of her position as the narrator of the story and downgrading her to a one-dimensional villain. Alongside Edgar, Nelly is the main antagonist to Heathcliff and Cathy’s love. Look at these meddlesome POC, getting in the way of Fennell’s fantasies of true love!
As it turns out, 14-year-old Fennell’s dreamboat Heathcliff is actually a violent abuser in the book. His “seduction” of Edgar’s sister Isabella (turned into Edgar’s “ward” in the film to justify casting a white actress in the role after race-swapping Edgar) is not some BDSM kink the way Fennell has rewritten it for the modern audience. Heathcliff is monstrous to Isabella in the book, punishing her for not being Catherine. As soon as they’re married, he hangs her dog (is this where Fennell got the idea for the opening hanging scene?!) to solidify that he does not and will never love her or be kind to her.
Yet Fennell takes that awful hanging of Isabella’s dog and turns Isabella into a dog as a kink between husband and wife. In the film, she’s consensually chained to the wall by a collar around her neck and crawls on the floor on her hands and knees, barking at Heathcliff’s command. When Nelly comes to save Isabella in the film, she doesn’t want to be saved. This is the exact opposite of what happens in the book.
“I’ve sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure, and still creep shamefully cringing back!” Heathcliff confesses to Nelly in the book of the abuse he puts Isabella through, blaming his young wife for his actions.
“He’s a lying fiend! a monster, and not a human being!” Isabella responds to Nelly when Heathcliff says Isabella is free to leave the abuse anytime she wants but she chooses to stay. “I’ve been told I might leave him before; and I’ve made the attempt, but I dare not repeat it!” she says. “The single pleasure I can imagine is to die, or to see him dead!”
Before Isabella winds up giving birth to their son, she manages to escape Heathcliff’s abusive clutches and lives free and far away from him with their son for the rest of her short life. For Fennell to whitewash not only the characters but a woman’s abuse and survival story and reframe it as some consensual kink instead is astounding. But that’s what must be done when you need Heathcliff to be a romantic hero and not the vengeful devil of a man that his character so evidently was.
“She abandoned [her principles] under a delusion,” Heathcliff says of Isabella in the book in what could be a word-for-word, bar-for-bar rebuke of Fennell’s “adaptation.” “Picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished.”
Emily Brönte with the prescient third-degree burn for Fennell from beyond the grave!
The art of adaptation, when done well, is exactly that. They elevate the source material, like Heated Rivalry or The Leftovers; they make space for marginalized actors who were previously shut out of earlier iterations, like Wicked: Part One; they correct some wrong or narrow-minded thinking in the original, like one of the best adaptations of all time, the TV series Interview with the Vampire. Above all, a good adaptation should serve a purpose. And Fennell’s films just have no real sense of depth or urgency or reason for existing beyond gimmick.
Here, Fennell’s anachronistic costuming and Charli XCX soundtrack aren’t used in service of her narrative, but simply because she thinks it looks and sounds cool. Her fully-clothed vanilla sex scenes mixed with licking dirt and grass and oozing raw eggs, are dreadfully unsexy and too vanilla to actually provoke. She’s cast 28-year-old Elordi in a POC role and her producer, (35????-year-old) Robbie as his 17-year-old love interest, not for the chemistry, or the accuracy, but simply for the white romance novel aesthetic. And even as a romance it fails, because their story is simply not romantic. Though their lost-love ending is orchestrated to induce tears, these characters are too decontextualized from their beating hearts to make the desired impression. With these empty adaptation choices, Fennell is the Taylor Swift of film; the cinematic embodiment of Great Gowns, Beautiful Gowns, and Go, Girl, Give Us Nothing.
By only adapting half of Brönte’s novel (as many other adaptations have done) and killing off Cathy’s child at the end of the film, Fennell has killed off the literal hope of the book that made this journey worthwhile. Cathy’s child is the change agent, the generational curse breaker that offers not only Heathcliff but the reader a blueprint for another way of being.
In the book, just hours after Cathy dies of grief at the thought of choosing between Linton and Heathcliff, Cathy and Edgar have a baby girl, also named Cathy. For Heathcliff’s plan of vengeance to work, it’s imperative that he marry the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Linton girl Isabella. It’s not just about revenge against Cathy and Edgar, it’s about him becoming as good and worthy as the Lintons. He and Isabella have a blonde-haired, blue-eyed son, whom Isabella names Linton Heathcliff(!). When Cathy and Linton are teenagers, Heathcliff forces his son—the white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed version of himself—to marry Cathy’s daughter. He also lies in wait until Edgar dies and he takes over both Edgar’s wealth and property as well. By all accounts, he has won. Yet he remains miserable.
He’s become more physically, emotionally and financially abusive to the next generation and everyone around him than his abusers were to him when he was oppressed. He hates his son, both for being sickly and for looking like the Lintons, and being a reminder of who he could never be. He tortures Linton and that only makes Cathy Jr. want to protect him more and love him more. Knowing that Heathcliff has forced them together for his own games and her misery, she’s determined not to let him win.
“I know he loves me, and for that reason I love him. Mr. Heathcliff YOU have NOBODY to love you; however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery,” Cathy Jr. tells Heathcliff. Where Heathcliff uses his hate to fuel his plotting and ease his pain, Cathy Jr.’s love is her weapon and her revenge.
The success of his plans doesn’t heal him or end his pain. His sickly son dies a few months into the marriage to Cathy Jr.—proof to him that there was nothing he could’ve ever done to be good enough for his Cathy in any form.
Heathcliff has also taken Wuthering Heights out from under its owner and his original abuser—not Cathy’s father, like in the film, but Cathy’s brother Hindley, whom Fennell erased and pasted onto the father character for the film. This huge deviation took the sting out of Hindley’s abuse as a peer and brother, competing with Heathcliff for the affection of his father who had adopted Heathcliff and doted on him. Hindley violently retaliated against Heathcliff for his father’s love, and when his father died, he turned Heathcliff into a servant, which devastated Heathcliff’s sense of self. But in his grown-up revenge against his Hindley, Heathcliff accidentally created the conditions for his own redemption.
Hindley had a son named Hareton before he died. To punish Hindley, Heathcliff raises Hareton —who should’ve been raised a gentleman by station— as a lowly brute who can’t read or write or be in polite society. This is the ultimate revenge, that Hindley’s son would be no better than Heathcliff was when he first came to live at Wuthering Heights as a child. But after Heathcliff forces Cathy Jr. to remain at Wuthering Heights after her young husband dies, she winds up falling in love with the rough and gruff Hareton, who is more Heathcliff’s son than Linton ever was, in manner and temperament and devotion.
It’s Cathy Jr. who makes fun of Hareton’s inability to read and write in the book—not Cathy and Heathcliff, as Fennell rewrites it for the film. But Cathy Jr. learns that she doesn’t want to be above Hareton in life; she wants them to be equals, and she teaches him patiently from that point on, how to read. Hareton in his humility, accepts the help and improves, opposing Heathcliff and Cathy who didn’t make those choices in their youth. Hareton also chooses to love Heathcliff as a father, despite his abuse.
“His honest, warm, and intelligent nature shook off rapidly the clouds of ignorance and degradation in which it had been bred,” Brönte writes of how Hareton freed himself of Heathcliff’s boorish upbringing. “And Catherine’s sincere commendations acted as a spur to his industry. His brightening mind brightened his features, and added spirit and nobility to their aspect.” Both Cathy and Hareton were horrifically abused by Heathcliff in different ways, and both chose to love and be loved anyway; to not internalize Heathcliff’s abuse as their own personal failings, as he tried to make it; and to accept themselves and each other.
At first, it angers Heathcliff that Cathy Jr. would love and choose Hareton, because that shatters his idea that Cathy married Edgar because Heathcliff was unlovable and unworthy. Through witnessing the next generation’s choice to love despite abuse, he finds validation that he was always enough as he was, and it was his bitterness and rage that pushed away the love he could’ve had, after all of the games with Cathy, his wife, his son and adopted children. Soon, Nelly catches Heathcliff inexplicably in a good humor for days on end, smiling, staring out at what appears to be nothing. Then, Cathy’s ghost, who’s been haunting him and Wuthering Heights since her death 18 years ago, comes through the window to take him one night. Heathcliff dies, eyes wide open. The book ends with whispers of people witnessing the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff wandering the town together, never to be parted again. That’s how you tell a story!
It mattered to Brönte that her story of survival be healing because her intention in writing it was to heal. Her mother had died when she was 3 years old. Two of her sisters died before adulthood. Like Hindley, her older brother was addicted to alcohol, drugs and gambling. She would also die of tuberculosis at 30 years old, only a year after publishing Wuthering Heights. But to leave tools for a future generation to not only survive these traumas but a path to heal from them must have been medicine for her soul.
That is the biggest gripe about Fennell’s bastardization of the original text: it poisons the medicine. Where Brönte explores how to heal trauma, Fennell wonders how she can get off on it, making that irksome opening scene the perfect encapsulation of Fennell’s purposeless, visionless “Wuthering Heights.”
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
Enjoyed this piece? Tip your writer!
More Brönte’s Wuthering Heights goodies below for paid subscribers:
Leave a Reply