It is a truth – universally depressing – that directors who hate period novels always seem to end up adapting them.
In recent years we’ve had Steven Knight’s degradation of Dickens’s Great Expectations which saw Mrs Havisham recast as a prostitute-hiring smackhead; the injection of a wildly unnecessary handjob into Jane Austen’s unfinished Sanditon; and Netflix’s Persuasion which replaces meditations on “perpetual estrangement” with the line: “we’re worse than exes. We’re friends.”
But these adaptory travesties look set to soon be topped. Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights has been shown to its first test audience. Emily Brontë’s masterpiece has, according to attendees, been transformed into a shockingly depraved, sex-obsessed, masturbatory romp.
The film apparently opens with a public hanging in which the “condemned man ejaculates mid-execution” before a nun “fondles the corpse’s visible erection.” Later, it features light bondage as a woman is strapped into a horse’s reins. Masturbation scenes are frequent and the camera repeatedly lingers on provocative shots of egg yolks running through outstretched fingers or dough being kneaded suggestively.
What else should we expect from the director of Saltburn – her bath-water-orientated soft core Brideshead reworking of two years ago? Wuthering Heights is hardly vanilla story to begin with, featuring scenes of domestic abuse, unimaginable cruelty, and moments of genuine terror. Did Fennell really read one of the greatest English novels and conclude it needed a bit more kink?
The casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, has already made clear her total disdain for both the work and its author. At the Sands film festival she mused that there is no need to be accurate as it is “just a book.” Continuing, she admitted “there’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy,” especially with the “shocking” set design, which may or may not feature a dog collar in some new offshoot of performative depravity.
It’s hard not to imagine the production team salivating over this opportunity to send Brontë’s work up in flames. The decision to launch the film in theatres on Valentines Day – as though as though they are dealing with a love story – is an obvious sign that Fennell has grasped the wrong end of the stick.
Her confusion was clear from her casting of Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw. No one can deny the erstwhile Barbie is a brilliant actor. But is a thirty-five-year-old blond Aussie the right woman to play a boyish, wild-eyed, teen brunette from Yorkshire? Cathy is fifteen years younger than Robbie is now when she dies at the end of the novel. If you were going to ignore her age, Kate Bush could at least have been lured out of her semi-retirement.
Photographs from the set show Robbie in costume for Cathy’s marriage to Linton. She is dressed in a white off-the-shoulder dress with puffed sleeves, a hoop skirt, and a sweeping veil anchored by a rather tacky tiara. Forget the fact that Queen Victoria would not popularise the white dress for several more decades. Maybe we can even overlook the question of where Cathy got such a statement outfit given that she’s spent the prior five days locked up in Wuthering Heights resisting the forced marriage. But dressing her in such a hideous 1980s themed number suggests that Fennell’s costume team have been more inspired by the action figure Robbie is used to playing rather than the book they have been set to adapt.
Maybe I shouldn’t care so much. But Wuthering Heights isn’t “just a book”, and it certainly didn’t need sexing up. It is an act of great hubris to think that you know better than Brontë. Believing you can improve her storytelling with a bit of masturbation and some equestrian themed BDSM is an act of supreme arrogance. No one forced Fennell to adapt it. If she wanted to make a kinky nineteenth-century bodice ripper that would have been fine. But why did she have to take a chainsaw to the English Canon in the process?
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