00:00:45.380She thinks she's updating the material, right?
00:00:47.520It's not your mom and pop's, you know, Wuthering Heights.0.98
00:00:49.840Like the original Wuthering Heights is far more fucked up than this.1.00
00:00:52.920Oh, if you want to be a freak, like reveling in your own gross horniness and emphasizing the darkness of desire, bring back the necrophilia, you coward.1.00
00:02:13.760So Emerald Fennell is a filmmaker who makes these soap opera-y, like kind of trashy, but with a lot of pretensions, films that dramatize sexual politics, right?
00:02:27.360So she's a really interesting filmmaker for our purposes, not because she's an especially good one.
00:02:34.460This reminded me of an insight you had, Adrienne, about the horror genre back when we did our Powers of Horror film episodes for Halloween.
00:02:42.700It's like the horror director is operating often kind of based on instinct.
00:02:47.520And in so doing with the sort of like unconscious or like slippages in their filmmaking often sort of reveals something interesting that they maybe didn't intend to.
00:02:55.900I think Emerald Fennell works a little bit of a similar way.
00:02:59.580She sort of thinks she's doing one project and in the process reveals something different about contemporary gender relations and sexual politics than she perhaps expected to.
00:03:10.740And I'm really interested in discussing Wuthering Heights with you from that perspective.
00:03:16.300Yeah. So a little bit more about Fennell.
00:03:29.980And otherwise, and this is kind of interesting, I think, for the purposes of this movie,
00:03:33.560she sort of cut her teeth as an actor, I would say, in period pieces.
00:03:37.280And then when she started directing, she moved away from that.
00:03:41.760At least the two movies that she's directed, they have a period piece feel to them in moments.
00:03:46.760They're not set necessarily in the here and now recognizably.
00:03:50.360But, like, people have cell phones, I guess is what it is.
00:03:52.920Those two movies would be Promising Young Woman from 2020 and Saltburn from 2023.
00:04:00.440Promising Young Woman being sort of like a post-Me Too rape revenge fantasy with Carey Mulligan, I believe, as the central character.
00:04:09.720And then Saltburn is sort of a riff on the talented Mr. Ripley about sort of like class envy and sexual desire sort of mixing together in this country estate where a bunch of characters have gathered for a holiday.0.96
00:04:23.440Saltburn is basically, as I recall, the talented Mr. Ripley reimagined, and I use that term very, very broadly, as a eeling comedy about a screwy, rich, degenerate family and with more dongs.0.51
00:04:39.080And that's sort of similar to the way that Fennell treated her source material in this latest venture, Wuthering Heights, right? It is Wuthering Heights, the 1847 Emily Bronte novel that is about class and race and domestic violence and the commodification of women and like authenticity. And my pet theory is that Wuthering Heights is actually a book about real estate.
00:05:04.560Yeah. And Emerald Fennell reimagines it as a story about the transgressive power of sexual desire and the force of sexual desire and makes it a very, very different story.
00:05:18.380And the sort of looseness of the approach to the source material is something that she like ultimately seems to embrace and then sort of disavow a little bit over the course of this adaptation.
00:05:29.680And so I think the relationship between Emerald Feminine's Wuthering Heights and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which are very different texts, is something that we're going to have to dig into and explore a little bit.
00:05:39.980Because what she thinks she's doing with this book or to this book is something I'm really interested in discussing with you, Adrian.
00:05:48.260Yeah, and so that does mean that we have to give a little bit of synopsis of a book.
00:05:53.380I'm guessing a lot of you will have read, so bear with us.
00:05:55.680I have never taught this book, I come to it entirely as a person who's read it, I think, three times in my life, and I've really loved it each time. There are people who are much more devoted to this book and who obviously will know a lot more than me.
00:06:07.360But I do think it's important to sort of keep in mind, A, that what Fennell is doing is an interpretation of Withering Heights, and B, that any adaptation of Withering Heights kind of has to be an interpretation of Withering Heights, because that book resists filmic adaptation, I think, in a pretty interesting set of ways.
00:06:29.680Like, to adapt Withering Heights is to kind of give it a twist, because you have to.
00:06:34.740So, Wuthering Heights was published by Emily Bonte in 1847 under the pseudonym Alice Bell, under which I think she published all her work.
00:06:44.040Which was just some poems and then this novel.
00:06:47.840She died very young at, I believe, 31 years old.
00:06:51.340Yeah, she was born in 1818, died in 1848.
00:06:55.020And then her sister edited a second edition of the novel.
00:06:59.840So, there's an 1847 version and then there's an 1850 version of the novel.
00:07:04.740Emily Bronte is the sister to Anne Bronte, famous for Agnes Grey and the tenant of Wildfell Hall.
00:07:12.120Anne Charlotte Bronte, famous for Jane Eyre.
00:07:14.260And also her brother, Branwell Bronte, famous for Jack Squat.
00:07:19.160So I might just like briefly gloss the Brontes, who are these famous three sisters
00:07:24.820who grew up really kind of in the middle of nowhere in this parsonage in Yorkshire,
00:07:31.000sort of northern rural England, which is a very beautiful and very like sparse and severe part of the UK.
00:07:38.880Have you been to High Worth, Parsonage?
00:07:40.560I know. I wanted to. I want to really, really ballet, but I've never made it.
00:07:46.380It's the middle of nowhere. It's absolutely, it's remote, it's isolated.
00:07:50.140And it's not like whatever Treadwife fantasy of a rural life is like.
00:07:55.420It's a really severe landscape. It's rocky. It's difficult to farm there.
00:08:00.240And it's really, really very windy. Right. So there's also not a lot of trees. It is a sparse, craggly, remote and like empty landscape where these girls grew up and they had a father who was pretty severe.
00:08:16.720Their mother died after having like, you know, seven children in 10 years, quite young.
00:08:22.040They had two older sisters who also died very young.
00:08:25.800They got sick at boarding school and died.
00:08:27.800And all of the family's hopes were put in their one brother, Branwell, who was supposed to take all their savings and go to London and enroll in art school and become this famous painter.
00:08:39.400And Branwell very famously took all that money, went to London, realized immediately that his ambitions were not matched by his talents, that he was not going to make it as an artist.
00:08:51.800He has this great sort of denial breakdown period where he gambles a lot of the family's money away and drinks it.
00:08:59.780And then he comes home in shame, completely having tarnished all the hopes of the family and sets about, you know, dying very young, I believe, at 31 of, I believe, an infection like tuberculosis.
00:09:14.240Or is he the one who died burning in his bed because he was smoking in bed?
00:11:10.840She was kind of more allied with Branwell. She took his death really hard. She has this sort of Hardwick calls it a hardness that amounts ultimately to withdrawal. Right.0.80
00:11:23.640So like Charlotte and Anne are like daydreaming about, you know, getting rescued by a man and married. Right. This is not to depict them as silly women who are not intellectually serious because they were.
00:11:35.020But they had this sort of recourse to more conventional feminine desires.0.99
00:11:42.700It's impossible to think the way we think about, like, with Emily Dickinson, of Emily Bronte, like, having a boyfriend, you know?
00:11:50.000It's impossible to imagine Emily ever doing what Charlotte did, which was, like, going off to be a governess to this family in Belgium and, like, immediately becoming so, like, horny and psychologically obsessed with the father that she, like, has to get sent home, right?
00:12:03.880Like, Emily is sort of outside of heterosexuality because she's outside of womanhood.0.99
00:12:17.780And so what Charlotte says in her introduction to that 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights is that, like, look, my sister made a portrait of herself in Heathcliff.
00:12:28.620And she's also like, I'm not really sure that that was a wise thing to create.
00:12:34.880She almost doesn't recommend the book.
00:12:37.180She's like, I don't think you can like say that it is advisable to invent a character like Keith Cliff, one half of the central dyad of Wuthering Heights.
00:12:48.920But it is something that only my sister could have made.0.66
00:12:52.500And she compares it to one of these like rocky outcroppings on the moors where they grew up.
00:12:56.800that's just sort of like weathered and giant and hard and unloving, you know, sort of like
00:13:02.580unforgiving. So why don't you take us briefly, Adrian, through the insane plot of Emily Bronte's
00:13:11.600Wuthering Heights, and then maybe we can get into the quite different plot of Emerald Fennell's
00:13:15.840Wuthering Heights. Yeah, and maybe I'll talk briefly about different ways in which different
00:13:19.840adaptations have wrangled with the plot, because I think that sort of throws a spotlight on the
00:13:24.000choices that Fennell makes here. So, Wuthering Heights. And my apologies to all my colleagues
00:13:30.540in English departments who are now having to listen to this. I'm doing the best I can.
00:13:34.140If you haven't read Wuthering Heights, by the way, if you haven't had the pleasure of actually
00:13:37.700reading Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, like, don't listen to us. Go read that book because
00:13:42.100it's fucking amazing. Like, it's a pleasure and it's propulsive and it's weird and you won't be0.99
00:13:48.640able to put it down. Yeah. So although it is a novel of the early Victorian era, it's not set
00:13:54.360in the Victorian era. I believe the opening takes place in 1801 with our first narrator,
00:14:01.280a Mr. Lockwood, becoming a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, which is somewhere in the Yorkshire
00:14:06.820Moors. And his landlord is Heathcliff, who is just off-putting as shit. The entire place is just0.99
00:14:13.840weird in ways that sort of feel borrowed from gothic fiction like all the servants are
00:14:20.120maniacal everyone's emoting all over the place it's just it's a messy place in ways that feel
00:14:26.640very gothic and basically he's trying to figure out what the hell is happening over there what
00:14:32.100kind of ship are they running long story short his servant Nellie Dean turns out to have a
00:14:39.160connection to that story. Lockwood goes to meet his landlord and then has a real weird time
00:14:46.400and then goes back across the moor to the house that he's rented. And it's like, God, it's fucked0.99
00:14:52.440up over there. And Nellie is like, oh, I know these people. I used to work for them. Let me0.99
00:14:57.460give you all of the gossip. Yeah. Most of the novel is basically her gossip. It takes place
00:15:04.000about 30 years, I think, sometime in the 1770s. There's a family. It used to be wealthier than
00:15:10.960it is now. It has fallen on hard times. It's living in this estate called Wuthering Heights,
00:15:17.120and it's a daughter and a son. And one day, the head of the household brings in this boy that
00:15:27.140he's picked up in Liverpool, or where is he? In Liverpool, which is a port town. Yeah.
00:15:32.420Yeah. So there's this boy who is described throughout the novel as, and this is something we're going to have to come back to when we talk about Fennell's version of this story, as somehow less than white. There's a great book I read a couple of years ago about Shakespeare's white others. It's not clear whether he's not white or he's just not white in the way that like a mid-18th century Briton would recognize, but there's something a little different about him.
00:15:58.400The concept of whiteness as we understand it is not exactly applicable to the early 19th century, right?
00:16:03.760This is something that like is getting mediated through different historical conditions.0.52
00:16:08.160So white is a capacious category to us and would have been perhaps a little less so to them.
00:16:15.740But they refer to him as like kind of Asian, right?
00:16:20.200They're like you're a gypsy is a lot of what they say.0.99
00:16:22.880Yeah. So like indicating that he is some sort of, you know, maybe Roma extraction. There's one conversation that Nellie has with him at one point that she recounts to Lockwood where she was like, I mean, you're obviously Chinese or Indian or something, which is not precise enough to give you a lot of confidence in what this like Yorkshire maid understands about the Orient.
00:16:48.560but there's also you know like people have made scholarly cases that he was actually just like
00:16:53.100Irish there's there's a lot of debate over this question but one of the big questions that
00:16:58.860everybody who has to make an adaptation of Wuthering Heights has to answer is how are you
00:17:04.080going to cast Heathcliff right yeah because he has to be an avatar of this sort of hard
00:17:10.220kind of wild, violent force in the character's lives.
00:17:16.120And that is in the Emily Bronte version
00:17:39.360Yeah. And so Mr. Earnshaw brings this kid back. Initially, Catherine Earnshaw is horrified by this creature that he brings in. And her brother Hindley is immediately antagonistic towards him.
00:17:55.320Well, Earnshaw sort of, as he grows older, becomes more and more distant from his own children and starts making Heathcliff, the boy he picked up, sort of his favorite, which has disastrous consequences.
00:18:06.920Because basically, Kathy really sort of starts liking him and they sort of form this very codependent dyad, I guess, while Hindley is angry at this interloper.
00:18:17.960And once his father fades away and dies, becomes absolutely sadistic in treating Heathcliff.
00:18:24.180Really, really difficult descriptions of that.
00:18:26.880Heathcliff, like, has a status in this family where he's an outsider but treated as an equal.
00:18:32.040And then after the father dies, he's very much not treated as an equal.
00:19:26.080seems to be less than this capable of, right?
00:19:28.000It's almost a sitcom setup of like the Addams family
00:19:31.860and then next door, the all-American family.0.94
00:19:34.540The Lintons just seem like totally decent people who have no idea about the freight train of gothic fucked upness that is about to collide with them.0.93
00:19:42.480Yeah, they're these like well-adjusted, unsuspecting normies.0.88
00:21:13.860It's about, what is it, it feels like halfway.
00:21:15.560Like you're definitely nowhere near the end when she dies.
00:21:18.300The novel is shaped like the letter A.
00:21:20.420You ascend in action up until the death of Kathy.
00:21:24.620everything is leading up until Kathy's death and then the second half of the novel everything is
00:21:29.280consequence of Kathy's death right so the relationship between Heathcliff and Kathy
00:21:34.280is really only the first half of the book and they're never exactly a couple although like
00:21:39.380Emily Bronte does imply pretty strongly that they're doing it but they never like really
00:21:44.380managed to be together in a fulsome way because Kathy is drawn by the allure of maturity and
00:21:51.440functionality and class away from what Heathcliff understands as the more authentic sort of like
00:21:57.760force of their attraction yeah but also like not just their attraction like their attraction is a
00:22:04.020byproduct of their like allergy to convention right their connection with each other is about
00:22:11.480rejecting the civilized world and sort of like the outside world and so she transcends into
00:22:16.940you know civilized public life and abandons him and he sort of like takes his vengeance on her
00:22:25.260and she gives birth to Edgar Lynn's child a daughter who is called very confusingly also
00:22:31.780Kathy little Kathy and then probably dies from complications of childbirth yeah well you said
00:22:37.580their relationship doesn't last but of course the rest of the book is taken up with their posthumous
00:22:42.040relationship, right? Basically, her haunting of him. Well, you forget that he fucking digs up her
00:22:49.780corpse. And her actual corpse. And Mr. Lockwood sees in his first stay at Wuthering Heights,0.99
00:22:58.440Heathcliff is rushing out onto the moor, screaming for something only he can see.
00:23:03.040Then it turns out that Heathcliff is feeling quite literally haunted by his dead soulmate.
00:23:08.200And as the sort of second generation takes over the narrative, basically Heathcliff becomes this kind of terror that completely dominates everything.
00:23:19.720But through him, sort of, Kathy does too.
00:24:35.900She is pounding at the window asking to be let in in Kate Bush's famous song.
00:24:56.520That is dramatizing, that scene where Kathy is like banging on the window of Wuthering Heights, asking Heathcliff to let her back in, but he cannot do so because she is dead.
00:25:05.880And this sort of like irreconcilable loss is visited not just on the central couple, but like becomes the defining tragedy of all these other people's lives, even though they're just like merely collateral damage to these like damaged people who have been very cruel to each other.
00:25:21.000And so the second half of the novel really is just a constellation of tensions, basically, of people sort of grinding each other down. And like, it's just, yeah, hell is other people or hell is family, basically. But then we do have sort of this coda where we get back to Mr. Lockwood. Mr. Lockwood goes away for a while and then comes back and then gets updated on everything having resolved, which has the effect that Nellie's narration really never gets resolved.
00:25:46.520So at the center of Wuthering Heights,
00:25:48.400there really is this kind of long stretch
00:25:51.700where people are being awful to each other,
00:25:55.100mostly Heathcliff, but not just Heathcliff,
00:26:31.140And as people have been adapting this book, and they have been for a while, that second
00:26:36.600generation, I think, becomes the real problem in terms of adaptation.
00:26:40.160I looked through a bunch of adaptations because I was interested in how they resolve this because I wasn't satisfied with Fennell, who, spoiler alert, cuts off at Kathy's death. It ends on Kathy's deathbed. And we'll talk about why we think that that's probably a bad idea. But I was like, well, how have others done this?
00:26:58.120So there appears to be a 1920 version of Withering Heights, but I wasn't able to find that. There's a very famous and Oscar-winning 1939 American adaptation starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, directed by William Wyler. I watched it. It's on YouTube. It keeps most of the frame narrative, though its luck would, is just a traveler who happens by Withering Heights.
00:28:05.180There's a 1970 version with Timothy Dalton, later James Bond,
00:28:09.980and with Julian Glover as Hindley Earnshaw,
00:28:12.400who has a very different role in this version, much more positive.
00:28:15.740Then there's a version with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.
00:28:19.300That one's pretty fun. But that adds a framing story where, and this is kind of like my favorite, they actually have a character on screen representing Emily Bronte. And guess who it is?
00:28:34.160It's Sinead O'Connor. I've seen this one.
00:28:36.100It's Sinead O'Connor. Like, I think that's just perfect casting. It's like, who is the most intense woman we can possibly find?1.00
00:28:44.280Like, make her represent Emily Bronte. It's perfect.
00:28:47.720And that movie also is rare among these, that it really leans into the second half and has the, I think, pretty elegant solution of just having its famous leading lady, Juliette Binoche, play both Cathy's.
00:29:05.980And it's really interesting in that it doesn't avoid the framing narrative, but actually adds another, which I always like when movies go for this.
00:29:17.720It wasn't very successful at the time, and I don't think the reviews were all that kind.
00:29:21.180What I wanted to draw people's attention to is Richard Burton, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes are some of the finest and also widest actress you can find.
00:29:31.720And they're kind of heartthrobs, right?
00:29:34.340These are people who would play like romantic leads.
00:29:38.160Dalton is 10 years away from being James Bond.
00:29:43.320These are cast as romantic leads in a role that, frankly, doesn't really warrant that, right?
00:29:51.780This is the other structural problem with this book, that if you cast a famous dude in this role, you're kind of going to romanticize what Emily Bronte doesn't really romanticize, right?
00:30:02.500Well, most adaptations of this book treat it as a love story.
00:30:09.080And, you know, the most successful ones don't shy away from Heathcliff as the abuser.
00:30:15.900I think that's pretty potent in the Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes adaptation.
00:30:23.560Kathy and Heathcliff, but particularly Heathcliff, are really, really bad people.
00:30:32.500They're inflicting a lot of pain on the people around them.
00:30:36.400And so the effort to cast their relationship with each other as like sort of aspirational or sort of enduring or like hot is something that you find happening, I think, partly with the casting choices, right?
00:30:59.080One thing that happens a lot is that Heathcliff is cast not just as a white guy, but kind of like a pretty white guy.
00:31:05.740You know, like a guy with a kind of, I think we should talk about this when we get to the Fennell version and her choice to cast Jacob Elordi.
00:31:12.380It's like they're cast as these sort of like feline guys.
00:31:18.340They're like desirable, but they're not like physically imposing, right?
00:31:21.540They're not guys whose bodies indicate a capacity for violence, right?
00:31:25.620It's like, it's actually kind of hard.
00:31:26.620It was hard for me watching Jacob Elordi to, like, believe him as the author of violence.
00:31:31.360I was like, most of these chicks could snap you in half like a twig, you know?
00:31:36.300The body of Heathcliff has to be cast in a very different way that sort of minimizes his violence for these screen adaptations.
00:31:44.060And I think that there's sort of a reflex to making a Wuthering Heights movie fit into a romance genre convention that the source material doesn't really fit with.
00:31:55.360And there's also some like dangerous political impulses there to sort of make abuse seem either not very serious or like kind of sexy.
00:33:39.420And then expect, we're like, oh, we'll keep it at arm's length and we just don't know what they're up to each other and what they are to each other.
00:33:44.720You also don't cast Margot Robbie, a woman so stereotypically hot that she literally played Barbie, you know?
00:33:52.100The casting choices go both ways, right?
00:33:55.600Even though, like, Keith Cliff is almost an avatar of evil and Kathy is sort of more ambivalent, but they're both bad people who wreak havoc.
00:34:05.800This is a story about, like, villains, not victims, right?
00:34:09.420People who are actively and repeatedly choosing to harm others.
00:34:13.240yeah it's just a poor fit for the screen which doesn't mean that you can't make a movie out of
00:34:18.640it but it doesn't mean that there are these challenges right right the fact that it's about
00:34:22.140the central couple that is not ever really a couple where one member dies halfway through
00:34:26.480that is very perspectival that we really don't know whom to trust right there's a chance that0.93
00:34:31.100like they are fine people it's just that Nellie fucking hates them possible unlikely but possible0.94
00:36:33.280It might be more filtered through, like, some of her stylistic choices, but the fact that I have to, like, venture that as a possible guess in, like, the most generous possible reading of Emerald Fennell's aesthetic and design choices, which I think are really weird in this adaptation, might not be, like, a great endorsement of the movie.
00:36:51.140Yeah. Well, let's maybe talk about the aesthetic of the movie a little bit. Because the movie, as you say, and I hadn't thought of it this way before, but yes, it replaces the multi-perspectival aspects of the narrative with tonal and or stylistic clashes.
00:37:06.280The movie seems to have three visual modes, I would say. One is kind of discount Tim Burton, which is Wuthering Heights with like real sort of hammer horror energy. It is always foggy with some sort of German expressionist design thrown in.
00:37:21.880Yeah, it's, like, very black. There's, like, these large, stark silhouettes of a background. It's a little, like, crooked and, you know, black and white checkered floors. It reminds me a lot of, like, a cheap play in a black box theater, you know, like the community college theater department is putting on.
00:37:41.740You know, like a music video made by somebody who works at Hot Topic.
00:37:47.620There's a lot of like cheese and it's cheesy on purpose, I think, to give like maximum credit to her.
00:39:21.760And when she enters that walled garden of the Lintons, beautiful, functional, high class, like much more brightly lit world, Isabella is literally talking about Romeo and Juliet.
00:39:35.160Like this, like, implicit comparison of these two characters to this kind of, like, paradigmatic love story was, I thought, like, really heavy-handed and dark.
00:39:47.600And then the third mode is just, there are scenes, especially in the Dales, clearly shot on location, that just seem to say, hey, these are the beautiful locations that we're thinking Bronte was thinking of when she wrote this book.
00:40:02.940and there's kind of no stylization whatsoever.
00:40:06.220And you're like, okay, what does that mean?
00:40:30.660The moments where she chooses to break with historical accuracy and convention, which are pretty consistent, but sometimes she draws more attention to it than others.
00:40:40.660I will say like one interesting thing is she did like this, like almost all Maldivar homage where she gives each character a color.
00:40:48.320So like Kathy is red and pink. Heathcliff is black. Edgar Linton is green and Isabella Linton is yellow. And these like kind of recurring colors sort of like laces you through the different stylistic modes. But I found it like a little incoherent.
00:41:06.360I asked one of my friends who is a like big, you know, Bronte head.
00:41:10.760I was like, Jessica, I know that the bedroom that Edgar Linton makes for Kathy at Thurcross Grange that he says is painted the color of her face.0.93
00:41:23.240Like, does that have any purpose beyond like setting up this shot where Jacob Elordi licks the wall?
00:41:32.060And she's like, no, I don't think so.0.93
00:41:33.140I mean, but then like, then you're also like, okay, it's like, it's a literal prison of her body because we're living in a world where women's bodies are commodities, right?0.76
00:41:43.000So the other thing that's very different about this Fennell version of Wuthering Heights is that Kathy sort of like dutifully goes and marries Edgar Linton, right?0.60
00:41:52.960She's like, oh, my dad is this, like, dissolute alcoholic.
00:41:57.020The Wuthering Heights is falling into disrepair.0.98
00:41:59.600To save the family, I need to take this sacrifice and marry this rich, boring guy.
00:42:04.020It's not really what happens in the book.
00:42:05.380In the book, she's kind of, like, genuinely drawn to the glamour and the pretty dresses
00:42:09.580and the sort of, like, promise of a conventional, upper-class life, right?
00:42:14.260Yeah, although I guess I wonder whether Fennell would say it comes out to the same thing,
00:42:18.200which is Kathy leaves because she grows up.
00:42:20.940as you say, this is a book about real estate,
00:46:46.800It's not that these people made choices that hurt each other out of, like, narcissism or pridefulness or, like, selfishness or cowardice, right?
00:46:57.180It's that there was just a miscommunication and, like, but for this agent, you know, like, either, like, the stalled male in Romeo and Juliet or, like, the destroyed male by an evil, like, jealous sort of nefarious figure in the Fennell Wuthering Heights.
00:47:12.080It's like, but for this interference with the attempt to communicate the truth, the past would be restored and we'd all be okay.
00:47:18.660Like, that's where I think, like, Fennell kind of pulls her punches.
00:47:21.220She makes this a much less dark version of the story in several ways.
00:47:26.240And, you know, one of them is in making the central couple sort of, like, less responsible for their own unhappiness.
00:48:01.960This Nellie is much more of an active participant.1.00
00:48:06.240She is an active manipulator in some ways.
00:48:08.660We're given to understand right away that it's not the Nellie of the novel.
00:48:11.600The Nellie of the novel is a salt of the earth, as you say, sort of proletarian North Yorkshire type.
00:48:16.780Whereas the Nellie of the Fennell adaptation is a sort of illegitimate daughter of a nobleman who has this claim on elite status that she's been denied, like a little parallel Heathcliff.
00:48:30.040and she's also crucially played by a woman of color, right?
00:48:33.240So this is an adaptation that casts Heathcliff,
00:48:37.400the ambiguously raced character of the book,
00:48:39.320as Jacob Elordi, I think possibly one of the whitest people on earth,
00:48:46.080the sort of like inserted villain of Nellie into a woman of color
00:48:48.900and makes the sort of like obstacle husband of Edgar Linton.
00:48:52.820He is also played by a South Asian actor.
00:48:55.760So it's an East Asian Nellie and a South Asian Edgar.
00:48:58.860Yeah, Nellie Dean is played by Hong Chao as an adult and by an actress I wasn't familiar with as a child or as a young woman. And it's very interesting that she brings race in sort of on the margins. The movie neither blazes entirely through the racial question, nor does it really tangle with it. It seems to want to sort of acknowledge that it's aware of it, and then that's good enough, right?
00:49:26.100But we have to talk about the racial illusion, which is that one of the scenes that Fennell uses to sort of illustrate Jacob Elordi Heathcliff's abusive childhood is that she has him be whipped by the drunken father, right?
00:49:42.300And as an adult, Heathcliff has whip marks on his back.
00:49:47.360He's got these sort of like scarred over lash markings.
00:49:50.860And this evokes, of course, the famous photograph.
00:49:57.080Yeah, a famous photograph of a survivor of enslavement whose back is covered in some really horrific scarring from a enslaver's whip, right?0.74
00:50:07.920This is a black man's scars in the Fennell version transposed onto a white man's body.0.65
00:50:14.180Yeah, so there is, so to me, I have to be honest that that for me was the worst of both worlds.0.95
00:53:26.940And then I think part of it is also that like,
00:53:28.700She thinks she's updating the material, right?
00:53:31.360It's not your mom and pop's, you know, Wuthering Heights.0.98
00:53:33.680Like, the original Wuthering Heights is far more fucked up than this.1.00
00:53:37.280Oh, if you want to be a freak, like, reveling in your own gross horniness and emphasizing the darkness of desire, like, bring back the necrophilia, you coward.1.00
00:53:57.920And I think part of that is that she's kind of reacting to 170 years of reception to this book.
00:54:07.280And she thinks like, oh, I'm not going to make a period drama.
00:54:09.980So like, yes, if you were to imagine a Merchant Ivory adaptation of this book, like, yes, it would be a lot less squeaky and macaroni-esque than this.
00:54:20.340It would be more like dignified and sensual kind of a bodice ripper than the like gross and horny kind of a bodice ripper that Emerald Fennell has made.
00:54:30.040I think like the 1992 one with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche is like this, you know, like the sex scenes are implied when people sort of like gaze longingly over the moor.
00:54:40.600And that's when, you know, and whereas in Emerald Fennell, the sex scenes are implied like through sex scenes.
00:54:50.340Yeah. But I do think that there is this, this is a headline that I know you love from The Onion of, you know, so Emerald Fennell is just going door to door trying to shock people with fish and aspic. It's like, again, like the book is way more shocking. I don't know why we're doing this.
00:55:05.780Well, I don't think she's just responding to adaptations of Wuthering Heights and receptions of Wuthering Heights.
00:55:12.700I think she's also responding to the like blockbuster movie landscape, which has been over the past decade, like very sexless, like very like, you know, the classic critique of Superman movies.0.97
00:55:25.060Like everybody has these perfect, like almost inhuman bodies that it is impossible to imagine fucking.0.98
00:55:31.200Right. It's like a really like sexless cinema.0.99
00:55:33.700And so she's kind of like going, I think, trying to be very aggressive about the sexuality of the story as a corrective in an attempt as Richard Brody at The New Yorker, who's kind of like this offbeat movie critic who always loves the movies that everybody hates and hates the movies that all the other critics love.
00:55:51.580And he says it like has nothing to do with the book.
00:55:53.700It's not a good adaptation or a successful adaptation of the book, but it is a revival of the romance genre.
00:55:59.240And like that's what she's trying to do.
00:56:00.680And when I was trying to think about what I wanted to say about this movie to our listeners, I honestly thought a lot about our conversation with Abby Klutchen of Ordinary Unhappiness when she came on the podcast to talk about romanticcy, right?
00:56:12.560And clearly Emerald Fennell is taking from some of that genre and taking from some of the conventions that it's reviving.
00:56:20.120Things like The Fated Mate is big in this movie.
00:56:23.380Things about like enemies to lovers, like the kind of like hostility between Kathy and Heathcliff
00:56:29.180and their sort of ill treatment of each other as being a like vehicle for their desire that like kind of magnifies its intensity.
00:56:37.920I think this is like a movie that has an intent to arouse, but it's also a little bit like, once again, it's like somebody who works at Hot Topic, like doing the Hot Topic version of what S&M is, right? It's a little juvenile and it doesn't quite go there.
00:56:56.600The other thing I took away from our conversation with Abby was exactly that this is also kind of a resurgence of the trauma plots. And to me, that was one of the things that made this movie less than successful in the sense that like, and I want to be careful about this, that as a narrative technique, trauma has this, as opposed to something that happens in people's lives, it has this difficulty that it flattens explanatory modes, right?
00:57:21.540And I think that's kind of what happened here.
00:57:24.720Part of what happens with Catherine and Heathcliff is unknowable.
00:57:30.600And part of what makes them so terrifying is, like, how did you get this way?
00:57:34.500Well, Emerald Fennell has an answer for that.
00:57:38.380It's just all the violence you put into this.
00:57:40.800And she seems super interested in the etiology of how these people get to be this way.
00:57:44.940But the etiology is ultimately, like, super one note, right?0.51
00:57:48.360Which I feel is something that we don't get in the book because, A, we can't know because they never tell us, but B, because there's a sense that the book is really kind of trying to make an anti-Rousseauist point or someone in the book, someone narrating in the book is trying to make an anti-Rousseauist point and just be like, look, maybe it was society, maybe it was capitalism, maybe it was, some people just are kind of fucked up and they shouldn't be friends with each other.
00:58:13.360like not all kids are good they're bad kids like what do you want right and and um like i'm not
00:58:19.520saying that that's ultimately the truth of withering heights but what makes withering heights
00:58:23.660to me such a bracing read is that you are entertaining that possibility and in finnell
00:58:29.200the first five scenes are just basically like watch a guy get hanged watch someone get beaten
00:58:35.140watch a pig get butchered and then you could almost imagine like someone like swiveling around
00:58:39.940their chair and be like and how could you expect these children to grow up to be anything else
00:58:44.380right and you're like no come on but but all of that is also supposed to be sexy it's like look
00:58:49.100at this guy get hanged and then look at this couple that's so aroused by it that they start
00:58:52.720making out so like i think this is a point well taken about the character of heathcliff
00:58:56.360that finnell creates right you're making basically the point that perule sagall made in her 2021
00:59:02.640piece for the new yorker i think it was 2021 against the trauma plot right and she's talking
01:01:05.020Like it shocks the conscience to read this.0.97
01:01:06.940It's part of why you can't retrospectively read the first act of Wuthering Heights as this like bodice-ripping aspirational romance because this guy rapes and beats the shit out of this woman for a big chunk of the book.0.94
01:01:22.360Fennell transforms that into a consensual BDSM relationship.0.84
01:01:25.520And that is where I think you transmission from like this is a bad movie to like this is kind of an evil movie or like this is an anti-feminist movie, right?
01:01:34.420Because the notion that – this is like a problem for partisans of BDSM in general that what they consider sexy looks so much like just like actual gender abuse.
01:01:45.860But that is sort of like taken on as a reading and a presentation of this relationship in a way that I find like really irresponsible and frankly evocative of like other anti-feminist intellectual moves, right?
01:02:00.000Like what was Sigmund Freud doing when he rejected the seduction theory except like taking an account of sexual violence and turning it into an account of sexual fantasy?
01:02:09.580Like what was like, you know, like the sex radicals did this to the anti-violence feminists when they like posited a critique of porn or of BDSM.
01:02:19.720They were like, actually, you just got off on this.
01:02:21.440You know, like Sophie Lewis did that to Andrea Dworkin.0.99
01:02:23.320Like this is like a recurring theme when women try to advance a political critique of rape to like be accused of sort of desiring rape or of desiring sexual violence.
01:02:35.520And I think, like, Emerald Fennell is sort of playing into that with what she did with the Isabella character.
01:02:40.740And that's why I left, like, actually mad.
01:03:00.700She, like, in the book, he very much does kill the dog.
01:03:04.040And in the movie, you get a shot of the dog very much alive after they have departed because she did that on purpose because she knew that her viewers, she was more afraid of what it would evoke in her viewers if she said that he killed the dog than what it would evoke in her viewers if she eroticized rape.