Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” opens with a man being hanged and becoming erect as he slowly dies. The surrounding townspeople watch with varying reactions of excitement and arousal. The scene encapsulates the new “Wuthering Heights” movie perfectly: a sexualized carcass of Emily Brontë’s brilliant source material.
Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” stylized in quotation marks by Fennell because she said it was not possible to adapt a book as “dense and complicated” as Wuthering Heights, centers around the love story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a boy Catherine’s father brought home from the streets of Liverpool.
The movie is undoubtedly a romance, a dark fairytale showing the twisted, yet all-consuming love of Cathy and Heathcliff. The two spend nearly the entirety of the movie pacing through the English Moors, staring through windows, and whispering the others’ names, mourning the fact that they cannot ever be together (except for a brief sex montage where Cathy is delightedly cheating on her husband, Edgar Linton).
However, in comparison to the source material, the movie feels lacking and, at times, overtly disrespectful. I am well aware that my love of the original book prevents me from evaluating the movie from an unbiased perspective, so before I air my grievances with the new adaptation, I feel it is important to acknowledge the (few) things I did like.
Despite rampant online criticism, I loved the costuming. I thought it was beautiful, intricate, and representative of the characters. I thought the setting was gorgeous, the English moors exactly as haunting as I pictured them, and the set design put the contrast of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights on full display, even if it differed at times from the book’s descriptions.
Other than that, I don’t have many nice things to say. The complete erosion of Heathcliff’s character, the absence of Brontë’s most important themes, and the horrendous treatment of every single woman in the film (other than Catherine) are some of the most egregious flaws.
In the book, Heathcliff is a monster. He hangs Isabella’s dog after deceiving her into marrying him, he tortures and manipulates his own son so that he will be able to control Thrushcross Grange, and he holds Catherine’s own daughter hostage and treats her like a servant. The book smooths over the villainy of his character, turning him from a cruel monster into the snarky, sexual version Elordi plays. His miserable treatment of Isabella is turned into a consensual BDSM relationship, and both his and Catherine’s children are conveniently absent from the movie. Heathcliff’s worst flaws, along with his racial background, are wiped from the screen entirely.
In the book, Heathcliff, implied to be a man of color, consistently faces racism from those around him. The movie not only ignores racism but is actively race-blind. Nelly and Edgar Linton, being people of color is never once remarked upon. Yet, despite the Bridgerton-esque race-blind setting, Heathcliff is transformed into a white man for no apparent reason. The tension of race is completely removed from the movie, as it was seemingly too inconvenient and complicated for Fennell to fit into her shiny, dark love story.
Along with race, some of the other most impactful themes of the initial story are wiped away. Generational trauma makes no appearance other than the abuse Heathcliff and Catherine undergo at the hand of their father (Heathcliff’s continuance of the cycle of abuse is conventionally cut with the entire second half of the book), the haunting and complicated nature of death is reduced to nothing more than a tragedy, and Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is instead portrayed to be a good, powerful thing that all the other characters inconveniently keep stepping in the way of, rather than the destructive force of nature Brontë presented it as in her book.
Fennell not only eroded the themes of the original work, but she also swapped out who the villain was. The villain of Brontë’s novel is the monstrous, overpowering Heathcliff, who undergoes a life of abuse and neglect only to come back years later, intent on seeking revenge. He is a fascinating and compelling villain, but a villain nonetheless. Fennell’s movie takes Heathcliff out of this role, filling the void instead with Nelly, Catherine’s companion, who exists only to keep Heathcliff and Catherine out of each other’s arms.
In the novel, Nelly Dean is the narrator, retelling the story of Catherine and Heathcliff to the man unfortunate enough to rent the property of Thrushcross Grange. The question of whether she is well-intentioned and matronly or a biased, prejudiced woman injecting her own thoughts into the story is left ambiguous and unsolvable due to the way the story is told. The movie strips away any of the debate regarding Nelly’s character, replacing her instead with a social-climbing, illegitimate daughter of a noble, who would let Catherine waste away and die before allowing her to see Heathcliff again. Fennell’s uninteresting take on the story seemingly needed an equally uninteresting villain to accompany it.
However, Fennell’s treatment of Nelly is by no means the worst character choice she made, as that title undoubtedly belongs to Isabella Linton. The way Fennell transforms Isabella is the most disrespectful and egregious change from the book.
Isabella Linton is not the hero of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; she is silly and falls for Heathcliff’s tricks, in compelling her to marry him. But she did not consent to being a puppet in Heathcliff’s quest for revenge. In the novel, when he starts treating her horribly, Isabella finds the strength in herself to escape him, leaving Wuthering Heights to go raise her son far away from him until her untimely death a decade later.
She shows strength and courage in the novel; she is someone who looks at Heathcliff’s actions and is rightly horrified. She runs away to protect herself and her son, despite knowing it would mean leaving behind everything she had ever known. The story Isabella tells, of motherly love, recovering from mistakes, and finding courage even when it is difficult, has no place in Fennell’s watered-down romance. The movie erases this character. Instead, Isabella becomes a doll-obsessed, sexually repressed, submissive BDSM sex slave, who willingly allows Heathcliff to sexually degrade her. Instead of Heathcliff hanging her dog, she acts as a pet for him, happily barking while chained up to the mantle.
In both the movie and novel, we witness Catherine say how it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. Her degradation would not have come close to the indignity the source material of Wuthering Heights faced in Fennell’s new adaptation. Characters are mutated to better fit the shape of the whitewashed version of Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance; the most intriguing parts of the novel are replaced with copious amounts of finger sucking, and the themes of Brontë’s original masterpiece are nowhere to be found, or worse, turned on their heads entirely. But, hey, at least Charli XCX sounded great.