Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights Is Fan Fiction

The new movie smooths out the novel’s difficulties and plays fast and loose with its romantic elements.

In an interview last month with Fandango, writer-director Emerald Fennell explains why the title on the Wuthering Heights poster is in quotations. “I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible,” she says. “There’s a version that I remembered reading that isn’t quite real. And there’s a version that I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.” The movie, marketed as “a film by Emerald Fennell,” might be more aptly called “Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights,” so sharply does the auteur’s vision diverge from that of the book’s author, Emily Brontë.

Fennell’s “This is my Wuthering Heights” defense proves the justification for the gleeful rewriting—some might say butchering—of the 1847 novel. The primary couple is the same: Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (Margot Robbie), the haughty daughter of a landowner, and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the brooding orphan who is raised alongside her like a brother. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Cathy opines before marrying local aristocrat Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), dooming everyone and herself in the process. What this film proceeds to excise could fill a book—a book called Wuthering Heights.

For one, like numerous previous adaptations, Fennell’s version leaves out the second half of the story, in which the next generation of Earnshaws and Heathcliffs (let’s call it Wuthering Heights: The New Class) breaks the cycle of generational trauma in which romantic love and abuse are indistinguishable. Characters are collapsed, erased, granted tidy backstories, while the most Gothic elements, such as the implication that Heathcliff is Catherine’s half-brother, fall away. (Meanwhile, the choice to cast a white actor as the “dark-skinned,” racially indeterminate Heathcliff drew sharp criticism from corners of the internet, suggesting that posh, Oxford-educated Fennell is more interested in bourgeois provocation than critiquing Britain’s race and class hierarchies, then or now.)

Oddly enough, Emerald Fennell’s prior features—mean and stylish, equal parts revenge play and music video—seem more moved by the spirit of Emily Brontë than this one. In Promising Young Woman, a med school dropout (Carey Mulligan) feigns drunkenness to expose the predatory behavior of........

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