Emerald Fennell continues her soft-core feminism.
Lewd-looking Margot Robbie spoils the joke in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights. As the heroine from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, 36-year-old Robbie plays the landowner’s maidenly daughter, Catherine Earnshaw. Merle Oberon was 28 when she played the role in William Wyler’s 1939 version, but Robbie seems to have already traveled far beyond the moors; her appearance of experienced sex-pot aggression obliterates Brontë’s notion of innocent passion.
Fennell takes a progressive attitude toward Brontë’s classic by depicting Cathy’s romance with Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), the foundling her father brings to the estate, as a radical tale of sexuality overcoming patriarchal tradition and social repression. Brontë’s genius, once so fundamental, now seems so hoary that this modern approach might as well be satirical.
Robbie embodies Fennell’s idea of Cathy as a liberated feminist. (She “walks in her power,” as a man-hungry divorcée was described in the TV soap opera Beyond the Gates.) And Elordi essentially repeats another heartthrob role, just as in Fennell’s noxious Saltburn, complete with a sadomasochist striptease that features the welts across his back, in one of the overheated “erotic” love scenes.
Fennell’s filmmaking seeks to be controversial, taking an outré approach that limits characters to sexual identity. This vulgarizes the romanticism that made the title Wuthering Heights synonymous with emotional intensity. Cathy’s passion for Heathcliff contradicts her allegiance to social rules (the class barriers that outsider Heathcliff can never overcome). In Brontë’s brilliantly felt conceit, a girl’s adolescent feelings — her hormonal confusion and shifting hypocrisy — create a puzzling, overwhelming spiritual conflict that eventually leads to her death and the story’s gothic, ghost-story fascination.
But this isn’t a movie about the supernatural or doomed romance; it is itself an example of our doomed, hypersexualized cultural perversions — in period drag. By heightening — or diminishing — Brontë’s tale into scenes of intellectual inanity and visual hyperbole, Fennell turns sexual politics into near-camp. (Cathy and Heathcliff become voyeurs of rough sex between servants in a stable while subsidiary characters such as Cathy’s companion Nelly and the wealthy suitor Edgar Linton are filled by diversity-hires, respectively Hong Chau and Shazad Latif.)
It is Robbie’s misfortunate to personify high-strung notions of female agency, remote from the adolescent fears that Brontë imagined. Robbie’s jaded demeanor (so right for Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad yet so wrong for Barbie) sometimes makes Cathy, her décolletage exposed and heaving, resemble an animated blow-up doll conjured from Fennell’s feminist-activist spank-bank.
Fennell capitalizes on feminist cynicism but possesses a sham sensibility, borrowing art-movie effects from Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard, and Derek Jarman’s The Last of England, mixing styles so erratically that the result suggests soft-core Baz Luhrmann smut. Fennell’s fetishes ignore that Brontë’s vision was provocative enough to inspire Kate Bush’s neo-romanticism, Camille Paglia’s androgyne thesis in Sexual Personae, Morrissey’s “Heaven doesn’t seem to be my home” lyric, and the Twilight vampire series.
The genius of Kate Bush’s 1978 hit single “Wuthering Heights” is beyond Fennell and Robbie (who is also the film’s producer). This period film’s anachronistic music score (by Charlie XCX) cheapens the wonder that Kate Bush found by embodying Cathy’s unsettled spirit. She paid tribute to English lit’s high romanticism in a style that was so eccentric yet personal that it broke through the sociological turmoil of the era’s punk-rock revolution. Kate Bush’s girlish soprano and banshee keening were so thoroughly original and unexpected that they connected to longings beyond faddish politics; her pop aria was both uncanny and timeless.
Fennell’s misinterpretation of Brontë’s mythic love story also betrays Kate Bush’s traditionalist, non-feminist genius and deliberately assaults the novel’s status, implying, as in Saltburn, a critique of the British Empire’s toxic, colonialist dysfunction. It’s an apt tribute to Millennial decadence.
