Wuthering Heights Reaches Wuthering Lows

The film poster for Wuthering Heights, courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Audre Lorde draws a distinction in “Uses of the Erotic” that any adapter of great love stories should keep in mind. The erotic is “the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Real feeling demands something from us. Pornography, for Lorde, is a far cry from that feeling, merely sensation without emotion. The body is engaged while the self stays safely uninvolved. Did Emerald Fennell read Lorde before adapting Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights? Based on the picture itself, probably not.

Instead of a faithful adaptation, Fennell says that she’s after something else, to evoke “the most physical emotional connection” she felt reading Emily Brontë’s novel at 14. Fennell has her signature move: undercutting every earnest moment with the kind of winking self-awareness that worked in Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. The thing is, Wuthering Heights doesn’t survive Fennell’s signature treatment.

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