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The Bad Vibes of “Wuthering Heights”

Keeping its distance from the novel, Emerald Fennell’s film ends up offering us a mirror of our own times.

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........

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