Misunderstanding Wuthering Heights

Was this the really “greatest love story ever told,” or are you just remembering it wrong?

By: Alana Lopez 

Photo by Mia Bianco

I read Wuthering Heights for the first time when I was 15. Back then, I wanted that quote—the quote—tattooed across both my arms and across my two hands so that when I put my palms flat in front of me, across my body would read “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” I, like Emerald Fennell, did not understand Wuthering Heights when I first read it, though I, like Emerald Fennell, thought I did. 

I watched the movie this past weekend in a laughter-soaked theater at the Coolidge with my best friend, Isabella. We were situated in the very last row, deep in the right corner, and every seat was filled. Emerald Fennell in her interviews for the film had stated that this was a “version” of Wuthering Heights for her younger self who had grossly misunderstood it, so I did not think this would be a necessarily faithful adaptation of Emily Brontë’s famed gothic novel, but still the changes were more disruptive than expected: Catherine Earnshaw’s brother, Hindley, is subsumed into Father Earnshaw, and her mother is killed off before the start of the movie. Edgar Linton does not live with his parents; there is no frame story of a visitor to Wuthering Heights; everyone is older, and the list goes on. As I watched the film, I began to ask myself: do the changes made for this adaptation even serve Fennell’s supposed intent for making this film? Most importantly, did these changes even work? I admire the artistic determination in Emerald Fennell’s thought that this version was somehow in service to her younger self and the love story she thought she had been reading, but this intention was obscured. Was this supposed homage simply a way to erase the aspects of Wuthering Heights that are contradictory to the claim that it is “the greatest love story ever told”? 

Overall, it is visually stunning, and the only way to do the costume design justice is to blow it up on twenty-foot projections. Charli XCX’s take on Wuthering Heights is engaging, though the abrupt insertions of the music easily take you out of the film’s intensity (“I think I’m gonna die in this house” is going triple platinum in my apartment this week). When the movie started (unceremoniously) with a ceremonious hanging of a man, it was immediately clear that the audience was completely lucid because, from the start, they were laughing. At moments that certainly deserved the laugh and ones that didn’t, there was always laughter. I thought of something I read about laughter a few weeks ago that declared the inherently communal nature of laughter. Simply put, when others laugh around you, you laugh harder.

Isabella and I discussed this afterward, and she said (wisely) that hearing all the laughter had, at times, turned her reaction from a scoff to a laugh. Parts that were so utterly ridiculous or cruel or awkward were received as comedic, and in this way, the film privileges the communal watching experience because it is fun. The creative direction is admirable, and for that alone, I enjoyed seeing it; however, this film seems persistently uninterested in communicating something meaningful when it can instead show us something beautiful. 

I’m not a book purist, but I do think there is deception in even calling this a “version” of Wuthering Heights. It can be said that her adaptation was some form of wish fulfillment for a younger version of herself. I can imagine that girl because I was just like her: holed up, reading books, and scrawling quotes all over the pages of my notebooks, always busy subsuming real life into fantasy to appease my desire to feel something real instead of just something I’ve read. However, the emotions explored in Wuthering Heights — love, grief, and cruelty — are universal to humanity and absolutely central to the novel. When these emotions are put up on a screen far removed from authorial intent, they become superficial. The film was obstinately gorgeous to look at with gorgeous people and full of Emerald Fennell’s own cinematic impressionism, but it was not Wuthering Heights.