Why Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Is Nothing Like Emily Brontë’s Book
Spoilers below.
The quotation marks in the title of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights—stylized as “Wuthering Heights”—are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Fennell, who directed the big-starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, added the punctuation as a kind of disclaimer, as if to warn lovers of Emily Brontë’s beloved book (and there are many) that this is not a ripped-from-the-page rendition. Indeed, instead of an intergenerational, supernatural drama, Fennell’s take is a saturated visual feast and erotic affair, complete with kinky barn sex; walls made to look like skin; and a gold tooth for Heathcliff.
“The thing for me is that you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book,” Fennell told Fandango in January. “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it. There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so [this film] is Wuthering Heights and it isn’t.”
We’ve seen many loose retellings on screen, whether it’s One Battle After Another (based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland) or Clueless (based on Jane Austen’s Emma). So the question, perhaps, isn’t “did the film deviate from the book?” It’s: “Do the changes work?”
Here, two ELLE editors—one who has reread Wuthering Heights many times and one who has only seen the movie—discuss the steamy new film.
Erica Gonzales, deputy digital editor: What did you think of Wuthering Heights, as someone who hasn’t read the book?
Lauren Puckett-Pope, senior culture editor: I found it an easy, pleasurable viewing experience—no pun intended—but I did not find it a particularly enriching one. And I think that’s fascinating, given that Wuthering Heights, the novel, is the subject of such intense and lasting study. There’s a reason the book has the reputation it does both in and outside literary circles. So, even as someone who hasn’t read the whole thing—I’ve started Wuthering Heights many times, and I’ve just never made the commitment all the way to the end, forgive me—I came away from this adaptation thinking, There’s no way this is even close to what the book was going for.
But Emerald Fennell, to her credit, has made it clear she’s not trying to directly translate the book to the screen. What did you think? You’ve read the book and love it.
EG: This is one book I love and have reread many times. I tried going into the film not being too attached and being open-minded. I have nothing against anachronistic visuals or fashion; I loved Marie Antoinette, and I also saw parallels here to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. And even though I appreciated those anachronisms in this film, I was kind of waiting to be grabbed by them.
There are a number of significant changes between the book and this movie. First, let’s address the elephant in the room, which is Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff. In the book, Brontë describes Heathcliff as having dark skin. And part of Heathcliff’s jealousy of Edgar Linton has to do with the latter’s light hair and fair skin. That informs a lot of Heathcliff’s actions later in the book—and really emphasizes the class system that his and Catherine’s love is rebelling against. So without that nuance, and by casting Heathcliff as a white man, I guess it’s just a hot-and-heavy tragic love story?
LPP: I’m not a literalist when it comes to translation. I believe adaptations should be different, in core ways, from their source material. But here it feels as if so much of the tension of Brontë’s story has been blurred and smoothed over. And the tension is what makes the story so iconic!
EG: A second major difference between the book and the film is this: The book covers two and a half generations of the Heathcliff-Earnshaw-Linton family. The interconnectedness of their relationships says something about their environment, and about how they’re shaped by the way people treat them. Heathcliff being abused as a kid and treated like a servant by Catherine’s older brother—not her father; the film combined those two characters—and then Catherine choosing Edgar over him, that forms a lot of resentment, and Heathcliff takes it out on all of their kids. And at the end of the book—spoiler alert—as he reaches the end of his life, Heathcliff kind of learns to let go of that resentment. That was a critical part of his arc. So when I reached the end of this movie, I was like, “What is it saying?”
Also! In the movie, there were these overt references to Romeo and Juliet. Alison Oliver’s Isabella is overheard retelling the synopsis to her brother, and at the very, very end, when Heathcliff is lying next to Catherine’s corpse, that of course mirrors Romeo and Juliet. But even that story, which people similarly romanticize and smooth over, was a commentary on the impulsiveness of youth, as well as the social expectations and biases thrust upon the main characters. And I don’t know what this version of Wuthering Heights is trying to say, if anything at all.
LPP: A comparison that comes to mind is this idea of “Gatsby parties.” There’s nothing wrong with a Gatsby-themed party in and of itself. I have, myself, had a great time dressing up in my little flapper dress with a flute of champagne. But there is an obvious irony in smoothing that story over, in reducing The Great Gatsby to the parties that are central to Gatsby’s ultimate doom. And this adaptation feels of a kind reducing the nuance of Wuthering Heights to a kinky couple that can’t keep their hands off each other. Nothing wrong with that! But it’s not really Wuthering Heights, is it?
I do want to say, I think this is an aesthetically gorgeous movie. You can’t tear your eyes away from it.
EG: The shimmery, sheer wedding-night boudoir-like dress was really cool. The sparkled freckles were fun. It was Alice in Wonderland-like to me.
LPP: But there’s also no time to linger on those images before you’re onto the next bauble. I felt the same way about the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy itself. Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie do their darnedest, but after a while the compounding of these vivid, erotic, vindictive scenes they have together became almost exhausting to watch. At one point I could feel myself thinking, Y’all need to break up! Did you ever feel that in reading the book?
EG: Not so much, because it doesn’t focus on just their romance. And this leads me to another point, which is: In the book, when Catherine dies and Heathcliff begs her to haunt him and “take any form,” he does eventually see her ghost. Perhaps I’m just romanticizing this toxic, dark gothic romance, but I loved that supernatural element. Even the original narrator of the book, who’s not in the movie, sees her ghost. Call me crazy for thinking we were going to get some ghost romance in this film, especially considering how provocative and out-of-the-box the movie was marketed to be. In the book, it’s not just that Cathy and Heathcliff can’t stay away from each other; it’s that they can’t stay away from each other even in death. It feels less messy and more intriguing.
In the film, I feel there was a lot of telling and not showing. There are some great, great lines from the book, like when Catherine says, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” which is also in the movie. And, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff”—that’s how similar they are. But I feel like that could have really been driven home better. And if we’re going to talk about the sex of it all: Ghost sex? We didn’t go there??
LPP: And why not?
EG: And why not! I don’t know if Fennell was like, “I already did the grave scene in Saltburn,” or if she felt that it would have been compared to the movie Ghost, but I feel it could have gone places.
LPP: The critic Allison Willmore wrote this Vulture review that mentioned how, in the film, it feels as though Hong Chau’s character, Nelly, plays an audience stand-in role. The one scene I’m thinking of is when she walks in on Heathcliff with Isabella in chains, and then she comes back home, and she’s literally like… [Clutches her forehead and stares into the distance.] As an audience member, you can’t help but relate to her feeling of, These people are crazy! Not only crazy because of their obsession for each other, but they’re crazy because they’re so privileged. They’re so blind.
EG: And they’re mean!
LPP: They’re so mean. And Nelly makes some mean choices.
EG: She’s also mean back to them in the book.
LPP: What did you think about Nelly?
EG: Well, in the book, the story is told by a narrator, who’s narrating to another narrator, who’s narrating to the reader. So, from a storytelling standpoint, it was helpful that we eliminated some of those walls in the film. I didn’t really have a problem with Nelly here, and I love being able to watch Chau. Having the flashback where Nelly was rejected by Catherine as a kid added some interesting backstory to their relationship, because you don’t really get that in the book.
LPP: What did you think about the ending of the movie? It didn’t land for me, but it did land for some people. There were these two girls absolutely sobbing next to me in the theater. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that there’s no emotional catharsis in this adaptation. But you could probably make the argument that the entire film is just an emotional deluge without much emotional processing. I also don’t think that every story needs to have some inherent moral takeaway, necessarily, but there are stories that would benefit from that, and this might be one of them.
EG: I was just DMing Katie Behron, one of ELLE’s beauty editor, because she also loves the book. And she said, “I feel like it shouldn’t even be called Wuthering Heights.” I agree. I think the quotation marks in the title can only do so much.