Wuthering Shite
This Barbie’s grave was disturbed!
In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw, ill, despairing and full of regrets, wishes that she were, “A girl again, half savage and hardy, and free.”
Much like Catherine, I wish I could go back to my carefree days of twenty-four hours ago when Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights remained the worst cast in history.
So you might have guessed, I have not responded well to the news that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, straight from the moors of Bondi Beach, have been cast in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation.
My expectations for Emerald ‘my 18th birthday party was featured in Tatler’ Fennell’s version were never particularly high. Wuthering Heights is a beast of a book that, I would argue, has never been adapted into film or television wholly successfully. A story within a story that takes place over many years, most adaptations either stick to the first part, and those that attempt the second have never done it justice, including Coky Giedroyc’s 2009 miniseries and Peter Kosminsky’s 105-minute film version in which, for expediency’s sake, three characters die offscreen.
There is a genuine question to be had as to whether Wuthering Heights is even filmable. It’s a book both claustrophobic and vast, deeply unsettling in its presentations of love, power and torment. There is no ‘Reader I married him,’ the only resolution seems to come in death, that is, until Heathcliff pays the sexton to dig up your grave so he can get a look at you.
I recently saw a tweet which read, “At age 14 you must choose whether you’re a Jane Eyre person or a Wuthering Heights person. That choice will decide everything to come.”
I don’t think Emerald Fennell is a Wuthering Heights person. I think she thinks she is, a bit like how Taylor Swift thinks she’s a Shoshanna, and it’s like…hun, you’re a Marnie, but of all our directors working today, Fennell is simply not weird enough for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights to flourish.
Fennell doesn’t do transgressive well, and as much as I loathe to hold her privilege against her, it is very clear in her presentations of power, such as that given to the police in Promising Young Woman, that she fully trusts the status quo and the establishments that exist to uphold it, with no question as to whether their intentions are good because Fennell has either a. never had reason to engage with them or b. being white and upper-class, they would always seek to protect her.
As a filmmaker, Fennell’s attempts at provocation reek of a blithe insincerity, that it’s easy to imagine her on the set of Saltburn, watching Barry Keoghan dry humping soil, for a scene that would add nothing of value to her film, her cheeks colouring with glee as she neighs out a Sloaney laugh, “Yah, isn’t it just so deliciously naughty?”
I mean, I think it was pretty naughty to go to the Oscars without getting your hair styled, but what do I know?
When it came to casting for Wuthering Heights, I predicted that Fennell would be lazy and use actors she had already worked with. I was certain she would cast Archie Madekwe as Heathcliff and possibly Alison Oliver as Cathy, which was fine, if not revolutionary. Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie feel revolutionary, specifically the 1917 Russian Revolution and its impact on the Romanov family.
Starting with Catherine Earnshaw, a windswept, raggedy teenager from the Yorkshire Moors, I genuinely cannot understand why Margot Robbie has been chosen when Jodie Comer, who has also worked with Fennell, was right there.
Why will Cathy, who dies at nineteen (possibly even eighteen), be played by a thirty-four-year-old woman who has had an upper blepharoplasty? Mia McKenna-Bruce was right there.
I hate to sound too Sunset Boulevard, but Robbie is too old. She would honestly make a better Nelly Dean and, still woefully miscast, could have gone bare-faced and probably would have secured a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (she got two in 2020 alone!).
However, luckily for Robbie, her casting as Cathy feels less like a hate crime than Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.
Heathcliff is a role that has previously been played by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy, all of whom are white, but in Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film adaptation, he was played by James Howson, who is Afro-Caribbean.
Heathcliff’s ethnicity is vague; he is described as both ‘a Lascar,’ a slang word for Indian sailors, and a ‘dark-skinned gipsy in aspect.’ Wherever he does come from, he is obviously not white.
In Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 film, this was addressed by drenching Ralph Fiennes in St Tropez, and maybe I was naive, but I had really hoped that thirty-two years later, Arnold’s film had been a watershed moment for how Heathcliff would go on to be depicted.
I do think Jacob Elordi is talented, but given the numerous ways Fennell could have interpreted Heathcliff's ethnicity and the UK’s considerable wealth of diverse acting talent with actors like Daniel Kaluuya, Dev Patel and Jacob Anderson, casting Elordi as Heathcliff when he would have made an excellent Hindley, speaks not only to a staggering lack of imagination on Fennell’s part but immeasurably demonstrates that she is wholly incapable of being what she prides herself most of all, transgressive.
I think this adaptation is as dead on arrival as any woman in Wuthering Heights attempting to give birth. I have a sneaking suspicion (or hope) that Robbie will drop out but carry on within her role as Producer, but I remain certain that Fennell’s film will probably receive the biggest budget of any Wuthering Heights adaptation and will have awards buzz before a single frame is shot. None of it will be deserved.
Wuthering Heights is a story of torment and oppression, of an unprivileged outsider cast out into exile only to return, bent on revenge. Heathcliff’s means of making his fortune are never revealed in the book, but in the hands of Fennell, he was probably, like Barry Keoghan in Saltburn, comfortably middle-class the entire time.
A transgressive book requires a transgressive director, and it’s hard not to wonder how the story would be better served in the hands of a director like Steve McQueen, Daniel Kokotajlo or Molly Manning Walker.
And yet, Wuthering Heights is a book that hasn’t gone out of print for over 175 years. My Mum studied it for English A-Level, and thirty years later, I did too. It’s not a book that is easy to adapt, but it is a book that is reliable to adapt, having been the subject of four feature-length films and multiple miniseries, including one made in 2003 by MTV in which 'Heath' was a surfer.
I don’t think any of these adaptations have ever really excelled, but another attempt to try not only speaks to a lack of boldness on Fennell’s part but of the film industry in general. Fewer films are being made, purse strings are being tightened, and fewer risks are being taken. This film will be seen as bankable, but I do not think it will be regarded as good.
There will be nothing new, or transgressive, or bold, which are all buzzwords applied to bolster the career of a vacuous woman whose films are as devoid of transgression as the Yorkshire moors are barren. Nothing will have changed, and Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 film, which starred a noticeably French Juliette Binoche as both Cathys and Sinead O’Connor as Emily Brontë, will remain supreme.
May Fennell rest in torment!
we should just all boycott this, and also stop trying to put HUGE books into movies - it pretty much never works. (i have very strong feeling about Joe Wright's Anna Karenina)