Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a story about obsession and vengeance and intergenerational cruelty. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as Heathcliff and Cathy, is a story about two beautiful and lustful people who really, really, really want to have sex with each other, spend all their time thinking about having sex with each other, fail to enter the wedded state that would let them respectably have sex with each other, and then end up having quite a lot of sex with each other anyway, before a wicked and extremely uptight Asian woman makes sure they can’t have sex anymore.
Some other things happen, admittedly. The major characters who are not Cathy and Heathcliff also think about having sex with Cathy and Heathcliff, and they sometimes succeed — though having sex with someone else is mostly another excuse for Cathy and Heathcliff to think about how much more they would like to have sex with each other. A pair of servants have a kind of BDSM encounter in the stables, a scene that mostly exists to help Cathy think about having sex with Heathcliff. There are a couple of sexualized hangings, one observed and one described; there is a sexualized exsanguination of a butchered animal; there are sexualized eggs, sexualized tors and crags, sexualized bread dough, and, yes, sexualized wallpaper as well.
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