WOW! The 'Wuthering Heights' movie is very, very bad!

And was there a secret scrapped sequel?

I came into this year, as many do, with a list of resolutions. Here were two of them:

1. I will not watch Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation.

2. I will not write about Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights adaptation.

I didn’t want to write about it because I figured everyone else would be writing about it and I didn’t want to see it because why would I subject myself to that? I’d seen the trailer (through a furrowed brow) and tapped out around the time I saw Isabella Linton doing the ahegao face.

Yes, thank you, that’s enough for me. I mean, hot, yes, but that’s enough.

Or so I thought. For you see, I had neglected to remember that I had married a lit chick, and they are by their nature drawn, inevitably, to the Brontë sisters,¹ and so off we went on Valentine’s Day to go see a movie we both knew would suck ass—so there goes resolution #1. On the subway home I realized #2 would have to be broken next, and I wrote this as soon as I got home (sorry that it’s going to be very sloppy as a result of the turnaround). Because WOWOWOWOWOW. Watching the trailer, I was initially concerned when it seemed like the movie wasn’t going to include Lockwood or Linton Heathcliff or Hareton or Cathy Jr. or even fucking Hindley. Watching the film I realized that that was the least of their problems, because there’s actually no Nelly, Edgar, Isabella, Cathy, or Heathcliff in there either. No one in this film is recognizable as their original character. Listen: I’m not an adaptation purist, I think that anything about a work can be changed in adaptation. However, when every decision you make is markedly worse then it begs for evaluation next to its original, because it is often at these points of divergence where the problems of the adaptation are most obvious.

There was a fan concern about how Fennell’s choice of casting had downplayed the “swarthiness” of Heathcliff (a character who is dark enough that other characters in the book speculate him to be a Moor or a Gypsy or an Indian etc.), to which Fennell responded with the following:

“You can only ever make the movie you imagined yourself when you read it.” Yeah, okay, I get it. I mean, we produce meaning in our heads while we read, we all have different experiences of the work, sure. The “movie” you might imagine in your head will always be different from the “movie” I imagine in my own head after we’ve both read the same book. But the movie I watched made me question whether myself and Fennell—who claims Wuthering Heights is her all-time favourite book and that she’s obsessed with it—were even reading the same book. When I saw the trailer I thought, in jest, “Has Emerald Fennell read Wuthering Heights?” but while I was watching the movie that became an urgently serious “…Has Emerald Fennell read Wuthering Heights?!?!” and by the end “Can Emerald Fennel read?” I don’t know if what she made can even be reasonably called “Wuthering Heights.” The decisions Fennell made are fucking bizarre and, in a pleasingly dramatic manner, they only get more and more strange as the movie goes on, and so I will simply re-cap the major ones below in chronological order. So enjoy. I broke my resolutions for you people.

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We came into the theater, fifteen minutes late, and sat down behind a couple with Down Syndrome as they grappled amorously. I had actually re-read Wuthering Heights rather recently so it was about as fresh in my mind as it can be, although—and here’s one of my great weaknesses as a critic—I have a very shitty memory for plot in fiction and find that things I don’t take down as notes can sometimes get lost. Right away, Baby Catherine was giving Baby Heathcliff a speech about blue skies and optimism, and it seemed to be a very important character exchange, and there I was scratching my head like “have I forgotten something important?” I turned to my wife and she couldn’t remember it either. The characters then go home to Catherine’s father, Mr. Earnshaw, who has also adopted Heathcliff, a boy he met on the street. In the book, Mr. Earnshaw dotes on Heathcliff, but Heathcliff is abused by his adoptive older brother, Hindley, whereas, in the film, Mr. Earnshaw is the one who abuses Heathcliff, and Hindley doesn’t exist. On the face of it, this change isn’t something I think would necessarily kill a film, except that Hindley is something of a “load-bearing” character and this is going to very much fuck with the structure of the film going on, so as soon as this became apparent, my mind was spinning trying to think of how exactly they’d get around this. Spoiler: they do not.

Cut to: Catherine and Heathcliff are now sexy adults. In spite of the fact that Cathy dies as a teenager, Margot Robbie is clearly Margot Robbie, a woman in her mid 30s. Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff comes up to her and tells her about how their seventy-year-old drunken father has beaten him again. He being a character played by a 29-year-old actor with a beard and a body like Hugh Jackman. It is extremely unclear how old they are actually supposed to be even though I’m pretty sure the movie told me exactly how many years had passed. Then they witness Joseph, who in the book is a religious maniac so zealous that he abhors music—even Christmas carols—fuck a woman in the stables with a horse bridle on.

I was so annoyed at this point that, venturing for a brief piss, when a man in our aisle didn’t notice me trying to pass him I kicked him as hard as I could in the shin.

Returning to the film, there is excitement over the imminent move of the wealthy Linton family into the neighbouring grange, Cathy intrudes and, after hurting herself, winds up spending time recovering there, which is technically something that happens in the book but there is basically no other detail about the circumstances which is similar. Edgar Linton, no longer a little boy as he first appears in the book but in fact a full-grown (and self-made) man, falls in love with Cathy, who is now a spinster, and Edgar eventually proposes and Cathy says yes. In one of the only scenes in the movie with dialogue that I remember from the book, Cathy tells her servant Nelly Dean that she is conflicted because she loves Heathcliff, but cannot marry Heathcliff because they’d be destitute and it would lower her. Like in the novel, Heathcliff overhears but only really the latter part, and it makes him run away. Heathcliff runs away and Cathy gets married.² Heathcliff comes back, but now he is suddenly (and mysteriously) very wealthy. In the book, after returning, he mopes and broods over his loss of Cathy (someone he is destined to never fuck) to Edgar, while at the same time he slowly exacts his revenge on his childhood enemy, Hindley. Well, there is no Hindley now, so that part is absent. As for Cathy? He FUCKS THE SHIT OUT OF HER.

The movie has a like twenty minute HOT FUCK MONTAGE of all the FUCKING Heathcliff and Catherine do. Heathcliff EATS CATHERINE’S BOX in the GARDEN in the fucking RAIN—in fact it is almost ALWAYS RAINING on their HOT FUCK SESSIONS (I suspect our old friend Atticus would cum in his pants watching this). Everyone in this movie is WET all the time, as WET as CATHERINE’S PUSSY is whenever she thinks of Heathcliff’s HOT CHILD-ABUSE-SCARRED BACK—she is such a compulsive gooner to him that she once even has to run away from the house into the moors just so she can violently schlick bean in peace! Having Heathcliff and Cathy fuck is basically a change so radical that it cannot be considered the same story, even remotely. It is at this point where we have passed from merely something with a very… tangential relationship to its source material, to something almost completely alien to it. By removing Hindley and consummating Cathy and Heathcliff’s irreconcilable love, the foundation of the plot is now completely distinct from anything to do with its source material.

In this version of the story, Cathy gets mad at Nelly and tries to fire her because Cathy blames Nelly for Nelly having known Heathcliff overheard their aforementioned talk, and in retaliation Nelly tells Edgar that Cathy is cheating on him. Edgar forbids Cathy from seeing Heathcliff, and so Heathcliff, as he does in the book, marries Edgar’s sister Isabella (who in this version of the story is not Edgar’s sister but his ward?³). In the book, the naive Isabella is taken advantage of by Heathcliff, who abuses her and implicitly rapes her. In the movie, Isabella and Heathcliff start a 24/7 dom-sub BDSM relationship at Wuthering Heights, which they turn into a fuck dungeon, and Heathcliff chains Isabella up and they do pup play. Not an exaggeration, that literally happens. As in the book, Nelly learns that Isabella is being horrendously abused, but in the movie that’s all just a ploy of Isabella (who is very happy and very sexually-satisfied) and Heathcliff to get Edgar and Cathy’s attention. Let me reiterate that another way: the director of Promising Young Woman changed Wuthering Heights so that Isabella Linton was only lying about being raped to get attention.

Rather than the drawn out manipulative game Heathcliff plays with Hindley to eventually secure control over Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff just outright buys Wuthering Heights and Mr. Earnshaw drinks himself to death soon afterwards. Nelly is burning all of Isabellas letters where she pretends she’s being abused, and then begins burning all of the pleading letters Heathcliff starts to send to Cathy as well. Cathy, who is pregnant, is clearly becoming more and more ill simply from heartbreak at having not heard from Heathcliff, and even though Nelly can see that Cathy is very, VERY unwell and that not hearing from Heathcliff might even be KILLING her, she says nothing, because Nelly Dean is a huge bitch now! Earlier Cathy told Nelly that no one would ever love her so I guess she’s now content to just watch Cathy die.

Eventually the baby that would have been Cathy Jr. dies inside Catherine and Catherine miscarries and then dies as well. Heathcliff comes over to Edgar’s house and runs upstairs and embraces Catherine’s corpse and I have no idea what happens to Edgar or Isabella and the movie then very abruptly ends.

It felt like watching a bad erotic fanfic. At times I wondered if Fennell believed she was “improving” the plot of her “favourite novel,” or at least “repairing” it in her mind, like what the novel was supposed to be had been lost and she was “restoring” it. Sort of like this:

I highly suspect the movie was supposed to have a sequel that would tell the story of Catherine Jr. and Linton Heathcliff, because of two things:

1. They take great pains to make it clear that in this version of the story, Edgar and Isabella are NOT SIBLINGS. That means that, hypothetically, if someone were trying to get Edgar’s daughter and Isabella’s son to get married, IT WOULD NOT BE INCEST (because there is no Hindley there is no Hareton, and so I suspect that such a sequel would be about as liberal with its source material as this one was and have Cathy Jr. and Linton wind up together at the end rather than Linton dying and Cathy Jr. going off with Hareton).

2. I’m no expert, but this movie screamed to me of drastic last minute edits, and maybe a couple re-shoots to cap the ending off with Cathy Jr. being miscarried. A lot of the movie feels like it was edited by a trailer house (very short punchy shots, lots of cutting back and forth, lots of montages, feels like one giant commercial for itself) so I’m wondering whether this was something similar to what happened to Margot Robbie’s other gargantuan disaster, Suicide Squad, where the movie was chopped up in post by some trashy/flashy trailer producers.

This was a very, very bad, not good movie. Also Margot Robbie was extremely bad in this, I’m talking community theater bad, confirms a suspicion I’ve had for a while now that she is simply Not A Good Actress, but it could just be the fault of the very inept filmmaker.

Anyways, popping this out before I go to bed, but writing this made me nostalgic of my earlier, less-polished blog days. Good times! Maybe I’ll start spitting out more quickies again.

1. This is even the case with my wife, whose favourite literature is more in the vein of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, and who wrote her PhD thesis on 20th-century American fiction.

2. EDIT: I have returned to mention something I completely forgot, which is that, for whatever reason, Edgar makes Catherine a bedroom where the walls are giant blown up reproductions of human skin (kind of reminiscent of the skin billboards from The Atrocity Exhibition). Yeah idk.

3. She is also one of the most unrecognizable characters, personality-wise. Whereas the Isabella in the book is just sort of an innocent girl who cries a lot (and who sort of feels like a stand-in for all the later fangirls who seem to think Heathcliff is boyfriend material, and who they still nevertheless seem to overlook), the new Isabella is basically mentally-challenged. Possibly very autistic. Hard to say. Not a bad idea to try to add something to Isabella to make her a bit more of a character than she is, so I’m not necessarily knocking this decision actually, it’s just a bit “odd” is all.