“Wuthering Heights” fails as a story
The reviews are in and they are not great. The Independent judges it 'astonishingly bad' and the Times gives it two stars and calls Margot Robbie a 'Brontë Barbie'.
They're right. "Wuthering Heights", complete with kooky quotes inserted by the director Emerald Fennell, is really, really awful. Saltburn, her previous film, was also awful, but it had a few redeeming features. Among them was its recognisable story shape.
Saltburn is essentially a parasite story, told from the parasite's point of view. A young anti-hero sees some hot wealthy people and wants what they've got so he moves in and makes them love him and then kills them.
Perhaps Barry Keoghan's character is more of a virus than a parasite in the end, as he is able to survive without a host, naked, frolicking around to Sophie Ellis-Bexter's forgotten banger.
Saltburn works, nearly, as a dark rags-to-riches tale, an almost-tragedy that alas doesn't hold up under scrutiny. The container is there, but what about the content? What is it saying to rich viewers who might be wondering whether to bring a deprived person into their midst? (The answer is the same as in the more obviously titled film Parasite: don't employ poor people because they will want what you've got and thus kill you.) Saltburn has a serviceable enough hook (albeit borrowed from Brideshead Revisited). What if the povvo goes and hangs out with the rich? Who will change and why? Clashing of cultures is a classic coming-of-age manoeuvre. We instantly sense that over a summer (it's usually either summer or Christmas in coming-of-age narratives) we are going to see a character grow and change. Other stories that work like this include Dirty Dancing, although here the trope is inverted so it is a rich girl who must be changed by the povvos. That Fennell has Oliver Quick licking cum out of a plughole and shagging a grave in Saltburn at the time showed her to be daring and inventive, even if the whole thing ultimately felt like a piece of spirited first-year creative writing to which you would give an encouraging 72.
Fennell's adaptation of Wuthering Heights also suggests that having servants and foundlings are Bad Ideas. It too reads as an earnest first year's very best work - this time a well-meaning essay on one of the best novels of all time, which, like Murder on the Dancefloor, was not just an absolute banger but also completely ahead of its own time.
What a novel it is. And what a film this could have been. Why, given the times in which we live, didn't Fennell lean into Heathcliff's complex ethnicity and the novel's sophisticated exploration of trauma and PTSD? The adaptation already reads as a long-winded Instagram post - why couldn't it have been a good one?
The novel has something the film obviously lacks, and this is the key to its enduring power as story. The novel has a redemptive ending. As I tried to explain to my boyfriend as we emerged, baffled, out of the Curzon and into the night, the original book is not like the film at all. Catherine's baby does not die in a pool of hyperreal Disneyesque blood (I'd apologise for the spoiler if there was anything to spoil). Indeed, in the book the baby, Catherine Linton, lives, and she eventually falls in love with Hareton Earnshaw, Heathcliff's mistreated ward - and this allows the novel to resolve, in a dirty, uninhibited way, its cycle of inherited trauma. It's been a bit of a wild ride - but we feel good at the end.
The novel shows that abuse is horrific, yet can contain genuine love and indeed moments of dark humour. Emerald Fennell certainly does attempt to replicate this. But she fails. The film has been compared to 1970s Mills and Boon romances for a good reason: Heathcliff has been diluted by Fennell into a sort of strippergram Darcy. Here is a bad man who can be tamed only by one woman, his Only Soul Mate. Take Christian (or whatever his name was) from Fifty Shades of Grey, plonk him on a moor that looks nothing like anywhere in Yorkshire, spray him with water, and wait for all the single ladies in the audience (there were many) to swoon. As someone much cleverer than me wrote about a 1990s Take That concert, there was not a dry seat in the house. Yet one suspects this ridiculous trope still props up real-life abusive relationships. Dark and dangerous men aren't really like the attractively neutered Heathcliff in this film. Emily Brontë certainly had the balls to acknowledge this. That she also showed her Heathcliff’s flaws to be deeply human is only one of the things that makes Wuthering Heights such a great novel.
Yes, books are usually more complex than films, and adaptations rarely keep all the nuances of originals. But brilliant adaptations are still possible. Clueless, for example, brings something new and wonderful to Jane Austen's Emma. It cleverly keeps the original structure but changes the signifiers in such a way that shines light on both the Victorian world and our own.
Original underpinnings - oh, what an incredible gift to the storyteller. Especially if they are Victorian, they are likely to be of high quality. This “Wuthering Heights” is as if someone tore down the St Pancras Hotel and put a pop up coffee kiosk in its place.
Emily Brontë understood how storytelling works. The principles she used go back to Aristotle. You can have darkness, even a lot of it, but only as long as you balance it with light. Every great story will have a moment where all hope is lost. The 'dark night of the soul' is a classic moment where it seems nothing will be resolved. But after that must always come the dawn. Not always in real life of course - but in the great stories we use to understand ourselves, and make sense of things.
We are given no dawn, or even "dawn", in "Wuthering Heights", just an endless claustrophobic night with the kind of simmering and needy boy you can only really fancy when you are fifteen.
I'd imagined that opening night would have a cinema full of cool people who follow Charli XCX on Instagram. In fact, my cinema was full of women, each one clutching her own bottle of white wine, clearly longing for the impossible fantasy this Heathcliff provides: a man who loves you so much he will gallop across the moors to embrace your cold dead body. But this is ultimately a cold dead film. It's fun enough to watch for a while, but will probably leave you with a strange unfinished feeling. This is because it breaks some of the most sacred rules of storytelling. No one changes in it - not the characters; not the audience.
It is a shame, because it does actually have a hook, and stakes. Here are two people who love each other so much they are in danger of losing everything because of it. Great! We're in! In the original novel the stakes mean the lovers never fully consummate their passion. Having Heathcliff and Cathy shagging their way across the moors, as this film does, is indeed a way of leaning into a potential tragic structure. But it bizarrely falters even here. 'Is it mine?' Heathcliff asks hopefully of Cathy's baby, with which she is pregnant (but not showing) the whole time they are getting it on. Maybe he is the only one who has read Aristotle. As it stands, the story primarily fails because if it is indeed now a tragic love story, Cathy should not die in childbirth having been impregnated by another man. She should die because of her love for Heathcliff. Fennell's strangely re-wrought ending in fact turns one of the greatest novels of all time into something from the Jeremy Kyle show, or a documentary about over-sexed field-mice.
Scarlett Thomas is a Writer and Storytelling Consultant. Read more about her here.
