Chels

Way back when we started this blog, I said that I didn’t really class myself as an expert on anything (and I still don’t), but my special interest is in adaptation studies. So as you can imagine, I’ve been very interested in the “Wuthering Heights” discourse.

The thing that gets drilled into you when studying adaptations is that a faithful adaptation is not the marker of a good adaptation, and an unfaithful adaptation does not mean a bad adaptation. Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare adaptations are usually pretty faithful to the source material; whereas his Poirot films often alter some reveals. In both cases, I think they’re good adaptations. Amy Heckerling’s Clueless is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, and in my opinion, it’s a film that is successful on its own, and a great adaptation. There’s not much of Emma in the film, in terms of accurate details, but it captures the tone of the novel – Cher Horowitz is Emma Woodhouse. For my personal tastes, a film adaptation doesn’t have to follow the source material to the letter, but it should capture the themes, the tone, and ideally a similar plot structure (but that’s not always necessary). 

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is both unfaithful to the source material and a bad adaptation. I don’t have anything specific to critique about the film that hasn’t been said a million times online by now, but for me, this project has brought to the mainstream some of the issues with Fennell’s filmmaking that I have had for a while now. If you haven’t seen “Wuthering Heights” or any of the discourse surrounding the film, I’ll still sum up the main issues.

Most crucially, Heathcliff is played by Jacob Elordi, an it-boy of the last few years. The whole premise of the novel, and the main factor impacting Heathcliff’s upbringing and treatment, is that he is not white. People have argued, and will continue to argue, that Brontë wasn’t intending for Heathcliff to be read as a man of colour in the novel, suggesting that some of the descriptions of him could imply Irish or Italian descent, but I personally disagree. I definitely think his race is intentionally ambiguous, and the character was most likely to be mixed race. Nelly Dean says to Heathcliff, at one point, ‘Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen’. That doesn’t particularly read as Irish or Italian to me. But the issue goes deeper than the race of the character – the reason that Heathcliff is treated so badly is that characters take issue with him immediately upon seeing him. This is not an issue of his personality, but his visual appearance. Heathcliff is othered and ostracised because of his appearance. I watched a great video from Niya King-Khari on TikTok arguing that even if people wanted Heathcliff to be white, he still should not be conventionally attractive. Heathcliff could have instead been played by an actor with a visible disability or difference. Now, in a faithful adaptation of the novel, I would disagree. There’s a campaign called I am not your villain, which aims to stop visual differences such as burns and scars being used as shorthand for disability. That being said, this is not a faithful adaptation of the novel, and instead of being a complex villainous character, Heathcliff is a romantic lead (albeit a toxic and dark romance). In this scenario, Heathcliff would still be visually othered, thus explaining his ostracisation and mistreatment, and an actor who may have previously been typecast otherwise would have the opportunity to play a romantic lead, and it would certainly change the way actors with visible differences are treated and cast in the industry. All of this is a long way of saying that Jacob Elordi was perhaps not the best choice of actor. I also take personal offence to Emerald Fennell having Heathcliff be the only character who keeps his Yorkshire accent as a way of othering him by class, compared to the other characters speaking in RP. I hate the way that privately educated upper class creatives view regional accents and working class people. 

And that leads me onto my criticisms of Fennell’s work as a whole. She views the Yorkshire accent as something other, that’s the extent of the otherness in the film. Wuthering Heights is an incredibly transgressive novel, and “Wuthering Heights” went so far to try to be transgressive that it fell flat. Turning a complex novel about race and othering and trauma into a steamy romance between two pretty actors is not transgressive. Reducing Isabella from a tragic victim to a BDSM submissive is not transgressive. That’s just surface level shock value that takes away all the genuinely complex interpretations of these characters and their actions. There are actual transgressions in Wuthering Heights, and Fennell removes them from the story to make the film. It’s a pattern we see often in Fennell’s work – attempts at edgy, transgressive cinema end up reading as try-hard shock value. When Saltburn came out, so many people hyped it up as a really shocking, really controversial film, and then you’d speak to any queer person and they’d say it was a bit boring, and nothing like it had been hyped up to be. These films have good premises, but they fall flat, because what Fennell wants to be controversial isn’t all that shocking or offensive. 

When I studied film, we had to watch some truly transgressive films. From filmmakers under dictatorships to those shunned by the film industry or their own country, so many of these directors risked their careers and their lives to tell stories. Films don’t need gratuitous sex scenes or violence to be transgressive – in fact, most of them were perfectly acceptable films by modern UK standards, but within the context that they were made, they were truly brave. And, of course, there’s Lars Von Trier, who genuinely did make shocking and disturbing films – the kind of thing that Fennell thinks her films are doing. The less said about his work, the better, though. I also happened to be a film student when Promising Young Woman came out.

I was really excited by that film’s premise, especially based on the trailers. One thing I will give Fennell credit for is that she has a great ear for music that will draw in an audience, because I still maintain that the string composition of Britney Spears’ Toxic is the highlight of the film for me. At the time, I didn’t like the ending of the film, and I didn’t really ‘get’ it. I thought the film had been building up to something different, although I’m not sure what I’d expected. But of course, everyone I knew really enjoyed it, and as is often the case when studying certain subjects, my issues with the film ended up being framed as me just not getting it, not being as knowledgeable as others, and not engaging ‘correctly’ with the film. It was probably the catalyst for me realising that film is not the academic discipline for me. Still now, I don’t know how I would have preferred Promising Young Woman to end, I just feel that it fell flat compared to how the film was portrayed in promotional content, and I still maintain that the ending was done for shock value. I won’t spoil what actually happens, but it was quite a bleak end to the story. I watched a lot of video essays on the film to try and make sense of it, and the general consensus was that the bleakness was intentional – and I do feel like a hypocrite, because in the case of The Stepford Wives, I do prefer the bleak ending of the novel when compared to the ‘feminist twist’ ending of the 2002 film.

While I do agree that a positive ending for Promising Young Woman would feel too Hollywood and unrealistic, and I’m not opposed to being made to feel uncomfortable by a film, there’s just something about the ending that doesn’t sit right with me. Again, I think it has a lot to do with the brutality of it all, intended to be shocking and transgressive, as if it’s not a very real thing that happens. That, and the uncomfortable messaging of the police coming to the rescue.

I think the way we talk about films has an impact too. I’ve heard plenty of interviews with Fennell about the film, and the book, and I really do disagree that Wuthering Heights is impossible to adapt. But a lot of the issue comes with the way people have responded to Fennell – she gives quite surface level analysis which is received by a lot of commenters as much deeper than it really is; most likely affected by her Oxford education and her very posh accent. There’s a double standard – Fennell’s takes are held up by her education, but fans of the film look down on critics as boring English graduates who can’t enjoy something lighthearted (though, as I loathe to have to say, Wuthering Heights should not be lighthearted). I think if Fennell wanted to adapt a piece of classic literature into a steamy 50 Shades inspired romance, she should have gone with Lady Chatterley’s Lover instead. It would have been much better suited to the tonal shift she made, and less egregious I think.

All in all, I don’t care if I sound like a boring English graduate or a snobby film graduate; there are a lot of things I don’t like about Emerald Fennell’s films, and about how we treat media literacy, and literacy in general, these days. If Wuthering Heights is so hard to adapt into a feature film because of its density, how did Kate Bush manage to perfectly capture it in one song?